INTBAU Timber Talk discusses the future of timber in construction

We attended their London base for the first Timber Talk co-organised by Wood for Good to hear contributions from a diverse range of speakers across the whole spectrum of the timber industry from forestry to construction.

Juliette Butler from INTBAU opened proceedings and handed over to Christiane Lellig, Campain Director of Wood For Good to get the evening under way.

First up was Charley Brentall, Director of Xylotek and founder of Carpenter Oak who demonstrated how knowledge and traditional skills acquired centuries ago were utilised to get the best from available timber stock and likened this to how new digital technologies, 3D scanning and robotics were being studied and developed at Hooke Park in Dorset, run by The Architectural Association School of Architecture to explore the processing of timber.

Richard Oxley: Chartered Surveyor and director of Oxley Conservation, a historic buildings consultancy practice. Presented us with a few examples of historic timber framed properties to demonstrate how some were quite obviously timber-framed while others were definitely not. He went on to describe the issues faced when restoring or conserving these properties.

Antiopi Koronaki, Research Assistant at the Centre of Natural Material Innovation, University of Cambridge, described how, along with industrial partners, they were investigating how timber could be used to improve the construction industry and maximise the benefits for reducing carbon emissions without adding to the problems of deforestation. She described how the use of digitisation was being deployed to create a 3D image of the tree while still growing so that it could be evaluated for specific uses and timber could be harvested on a tree-by-tree level depending on the requirements for the timber.

Jeremy Ralph, Forestry and timber expert and director of Timber strategies, explored the opportunities and challenges facing forestry and architecture and how both industries could benefit each other. But the most enlightening section of his talk demonstrated the effects of climate change on UK forestry. Presenting us with a chart showing each species currently grown commercially he then projected onto that which species would be affected by a mid level climate change 80 years into the future, so not a worst case projection, but not the most optimistic either. Roughly half of the currently grown species were no longer viable. In forestry terms 80 years is not that far off so there would be no point in planting trees now that were not viable just two plant and harvest cycles away. The answer, he suggested, lay in the use of digital technologies and adaptations in supply chains to maximise the use of individual trees or plantations for the intended use, much as the other speakers had demonstrated in their own research.

Andrew Carpenter: CEO, Structural Timber Association, stated that the construction industry had come to a fork in the road. It could either continue the way it had always done or adapt to face a series of new challenges not least of which were around the perceived issue of fire safety in timber framed or modular homes. One plan was to introduce digitisation into the construction process as part of an asset management strategy. This would mean all materials and timber used in a property could be recorded so that Fire Crews would have access to that information before they arrive to tackle a fire.

Rounding off the evening the Q&A session covered a range of topics posed by the sizeable audience. Setting the tone for the debate was the first question posed regarding to how easy will it be to repair and maintain modern timber housing in fifty or so years time if they have been built using a modular, off-site or wall panel construction method? Jeremy Ralph quickly responded by saying “We won’t need to. The way we think about housing will need to change. We will get to a point where we will just rebuild and reuse materials on a 40-50 year cycle.”

On the issue of whether the timber industry could cope if construction embraces the material in the way that the speakers are hoping for they all agreed that there was a general skills and workforce shortage and called for a concerted effort to attract new blood into the industry.