Timber!

I’m Paul Russell, and I’m the Operations Manager at West Yorkshire construction company I&G. We had the honour of being asked to build the Rob Burrow Centre for MND, and it’s something we’ve been working on for almost a year – our planning work began well before we could actually start on site.

It may surprise you to know that much of the new Rob Burrow Centre for Motor Neurone Disease won’t actually be built at Seacroft Hospital at Leeds, where the final building will be located.

The building will be built using a method called off-site manufacture, or OSM as it’s more often known.

OSM involves elements of the building – in this case, the timber frame and wall panels – being designed and manufactured at a location away from the final site of the building.?

The biggest advantage of OSM is that it's quick, and it can also lead to higher quality and more sustainable builds.

The MND Centre’s timber frame and wall panels will be constructed by UK-based firm Timber Innovations, using Glulam and timber materials. Glulam is a material that’s a natural alternative to steel and concrete – it’s made by layering laminates of timber into panels, like a big multi-layered wood and glue sandwich! The wood comes from sustainable Scandinavian forests, which makes the whole process more environmentally-friendly than other construction methods.

Once the frame and panels have been created in the factory, they’ll be moved to the Seacroft site, and our team of expert constructors will assemble them to create the structure of the building. It’s a bit like building a huge flat-pack piece of furniture – although everything has to be put together extremely carefully, with massive attention to detail. Everything has to be right, down to millimetres.

Building using OSM methods is much quicker than a traditional build. The panels and frame are being manufactured in a factory while our team is working on site on the foundations, so you save a lot of time. That’s essential for buildings like the MND Centre, where we want to get it up and running as soon as possible so the MND team can start caring for patients in their purpose-built building.

OSM also helps with the quality of a building. All the different components of the building are made in an enclosed, controlled factory environment, rather than on a windswept, rainy building site, so quality is higher, and there’s less waste.

Pieces of the building frame should start arriving on site in the next few weeks, and our team will start getting them assembled into place. The shape of the building should start to appear quite quickly, so this will be a really exciting time.

The on-site team can’t wait until the day they can hand over the keys of the building to the hospital team – it really means a lot to each and every person who’s worked on the site. They all know what’s at stake, they’re all putting in their best work, and it’ll be a project we’ll talk about for the rest of our careers.

Follow our blog on Leeds Hospitals Charity website as in our next update you should be able to see the building coming to life.