Timber

24 Feb 2006

Timber Reluctance and misunderstanding have dogged the use of timber in the Scottish industry for far too long. However, despite some early teething problems, timber is now a material that is being used in many ways thanks largely to the work of the country’s most creative practices.

Slowly, imperceptibly, increasing amounts of timber are finding their way into and onto buildings in Scotland and nowadays it is even de rigueur for volume house builders – who for so long have concealed their timber-frame structures with brick or render – to apply some timber cladding to their products as a kind of touchy-feely ecological fashion statement. This change in behaviour has been driven neither by public demand nor even clever-dick marketing executives, but can be traced back to a few architects here responding to outside influences such as the oak rainscreen on David Chipperfield’s Henley Rowing Museum. It would be fair to say that the initial results were variable – details suited to the south-east of England were quickly found to be less than effective in the west of Scotland’s horizontally driven rain, and even the material’s natural weathering characteristics were only patchily understood.
Along the way, many of the problems encountered with different species of timber can be attributed to the lack of material science training in architecture schools, the limited experience within architects’ offices of designing with timber, and the decline in traditional skills within the construction industry. Yet, despite this gaping hole in the knowledge base, wood has re-established a presence in Scotland’s architecture, with many different building types now unashamedly sporting their timber credentials. And it is not just at the domestic scale – from multi-storey car parks to commercial buildings on exposed coastal sites, wood is now definitely seen to be good. Or nearly so, for there are still pockets of resistance in some of Scotland’s 32 local authorities that view timber as unsuited to the geographical and historical context and that fundamentally misunderstand that wood is a natural material that weathers in response to local climatic conditions.
Yet despite the country’s timber industry not always being as responsive to modern procurement methods as the construction sector would like, and that many in the architectural profession still believe the home-grown resource to be too poor in quality to be used in building structures, the fact is that it is in the area of timber buildings that we are seeing most innovation and perhaps even the emergence of new forms of building that could only have been created in Scotland. In an ever-more global economy, this is an interesting phenomenon. Far from being a post-devolution search for a national style (for which there is neither an obvious demand nor any professional debate), new architectural solutions are appearing in response to prevailing regional characteristics. The houses built by practices such as Dualchas and Rural Design on Skye are now well known and have evolved in response to local culture and context, as did Andy McAvoy’s Castaway pods on Taransay a few years ago. The Lotte Glob House by Gokay Devici, too, is a client and site-specific solution that seems as natural to its location as the rocks on the shore it sits on.
But it is not only in rural and domestic projects that genuine change and innovation are appearing – the Maggie’s Centres in Dundee and Inverness are highly individual timber design solutions. Indeed, the architects of the latter building, Page and Park, are already pushing the constructional and structural possibilities of locally grown Sitka spruce in their initial design ideas for the new National Park Headquarters at Loch Lomond. The solutions resulting from this kind of applied research and development will certainly be original and more likely to produce mature, distinctive and appropriate forms of contemporary architecture. In a rapidly changing world, context and resource may prove to be more influential and stabilising forces than precedent.