Wood as an alternative. Multiply Pavillion. Andrew Waugh, Andrew Lawrence and David VenablesInterviews by Claudia Cendoya

On the occasion of Multiply’s installation opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum during the London Design Week, METALOCUS has interviewed Andrew Waugh (cofounder of Waugh Thistleton Architects, Multiply’s designers), Andrew Lawrence (ARUP director who has collaborated in the process) and David Venables (European director of the American Hardwood Export Council).

AW.- Yes, Multiply is very much part of the work we are interested in doing in terms of architecture, engineering, materiality and bringing into public attention the possibilities that timber buildings and prefabrication offer.

DV.- We face a lot of challenges. Deforestation, for example, has raised the question these last years whether if we should be using timber. We have seen, particularly in Europe, a contraction of the market due to a migration of furniture industries to Asia. The timber world is so global now that we should look at natural resources globally as well.

 

AL.- It is a revolution. We are genuinely studying the use timber for a huge number of our projects, which is something nobody did five years ago. I don't believe that timber is the answer for everything, but we should definitely consider its use in many projects.

AW.- One of the most constricting points of the project was that we are not building it on a courtyard, but on a roof [the Sackler Courtyard, where Multiply is located, is also the roof of an underground part of the museum], so we had to reduce the amount of material used. The final form is kind of an uncloaked pyramid, as if you had taken the top off the pyramid and you could see the boxes and staircases inside it that make it up.

We also drew a series of flow diagrams which showed the intensity of different areas. The boxes and staircases are all oriented to provide attractive openings and to encourage people to come into the building.

DV.- I believe that the attitude is changing in Europe in different ways. I think that it would be fair to say that this discussion in the UK is more advanced than it is in Spain, since you have a stronger unity to building with concrete. That does not mean that there is not a growing interest in Spain about the opportunities of timber construction.

AL.- What does wood really give you? Yes, it is renewable, a sustainable material but we know that no client would actually pay any more money for it. So, we need to design competitive projects. CLT’s way to compete is its speed of construction.

AW.- What is the ultimate cost really? Climate change, and therefore environmental impact, should be the most important issue right now. Humanity needs to accept that as an actual reality of our existence. Unless we do, our grandchildren are going to be in serious trouble. As a professional, I want to make sure that the buildings I design have a lower carbon impact than concrete buildings. Building in concrete and steel might be cheaper, but only in the short term. This is why we need to increase carbon taxes.

This is not an aesthetic decision, but a geopolitical view. If you are not part of the solution to climate change, then you are part of the problem.

AL.- I do not want to get into a position where through taxation we subsidy timber construction.

AW.- Why not? By not subsidising we are producing concrete and steel. These emissions are exacerbating climate change.

AL.- Sustainability is a much bigger thing that climate change. I think that it is still important to build the most efficient buildings that we can in terms of material. Actually, I do believe that timber buildings can compete with most buildings without the need of a tax imbalance. The only reason that some don't is because architects and engineers in most projects don't understand the material they are working with.

AW.- And this is because timber structure is still not part of the architectural debate. As far as architects are concerned, all they need to do is to put a solar panel on the roof and maybe a blind outside the window, so that then they don't feel guilty for using all that concrete and steel. That's not good enough. This is not a question of keeping calm and going on, it’s a question of getting angry and doing something completely different.

DV: Timber buildings are renewable buildings. Wood is also the only material I know of that it is not only a construction material, but also a fuel. This means that you can reuse it in the afterlife of the building by turning it into biomass.

If you think in terms of future cities, you can build more quickly, use the building as carbon storage during its useful life and then recycle it, which is quite exciting.

We need to spread the message that is safe to use timber. We need to change the way we build, because we cannot build future cities all out of concrete, climate change won't allow that. It is as simple and as serious as that.

AW.- No, I don't. I believe that a lot of the debate and conversations that are going on the architectural field at the moment are fatuous and pointless. They are more an excuse, as architects do not know what they are doing anymore, since they do not have any social or political view of their work. What the really exciting work from the past had, for example, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers or Norman Foster in the 70's or Le Corbusier, Bauhaus and the rest in the 20's, was a real political understanding of the importance of their work. You cannot say that for the contemporary architects that we celebrate now. Their work and their increasingly ridiculous shapes are fairly pointless

AL.- Architecture is not sculpture, architecture is for living. I believe that what Andrew [Waugh] was trying to say before is that nowadays we can build almost anything thanks to computers, but we have a responsibility to build efficient buildings that work for people and, at the same time, are also economic. Architecture ultimately needs to grow out of the material

AW.- In terms of climate change, we don't have any choice at all. I think that kid these days are educated to understand climate change. The coming generation will understand the implications of environmental protection and they will change things.

DV.- The reason of doing Multiply is precisely to learn something with it. We wanted to test the theories about how we could interconnect CLT that could be used many times. We also wanted to push the structural integrity of tulipwood CLT, because within the CLT world, this is probably the ultimate performance. So, even if tulipwood is always going to be a little more expensive that its softwood equivalent, we have learnt many things.

DV.- We have for example worked in Spain with the Hay Festival in Segovia. There are also already CLT factories in Spain, where wood construction is a growing industry. I think that it is time that we become part of this message. But absolutely, it won't be long before we do another creative collaboration in Spain.