TIMBER!

Few high-tech designers

Few high-tech designers would know what to do with a plank of wood. But, as Jeremy Myerson reports, a new generation of architects are rediscovering the potential of this stalwart building material

FOR MANY of us, the idea of wood in buildings immediately evokes the teak panelling of an ancestral home, complete with mounted stag's head. But look beyond the baronial halls and half-timbered houses, and there is a new generation of architects, designers and builders for whom the wooden building is now right at the cutting edge.

As Naomi Stungo says in her handsome book The New Wood Architecture (see reader offer overleaf): "Wood has been one of the most popular building materials ... for thousands of years. Since the 1970s however, architects have, in general, overlooked the use of wood in favour of building with concrete, steel and synthetic materials."

In The New Wood Architecture she selects 30 recent timber-built schemes for consideration. Wood, says Stungo, provides an "intimate connection with the world in which we live, at a time when this world appears to be becoming increasingly virtual in character".

The re-emergence of wood in architecture was brought home to me recently during research for a book on the world's most creative office interiors. I discovered increasing numbers of hard-headed companies choosing to work in soft, wooden offices - Nokia creating giant redwood atria in its new Finnish headquarters, the Design Council in London furnishing its base like a Norwegian chalet, and US media companies like the Discovery Channel in Miami framing their high-tech equipment in rooms of recycled timbers.

You might expect to find spectacular wooden buildings in Austria, Switzerland, Norway or Sweden - and indeed Stungo's selection of buildings includes projects from all of those countries, as well as Tadao Ando's serene Museum of Wood in Japan (yes, that's the same Ando who normally works in bare-faced concrete).

But there is also a surprising number of British schemes, headed by Edward Cullinan's lodge at Hooke Park in Dorset. This is constructed from locally gathered roundwood thinnings, which have no commercial value and are usually discarded, but were found to have considerable tensile strength.

If wooden buildings like Cullinan's sometimes have a fairy-tale feel on account of their structural irregularity, a few buildings, like David Lea's tiny thatched painter's studio in Somerset, seem have stepped right out of Hans Christian Andersen. Made of small saplings, this is a low- cost, self-build alternative to bricks and mortar, with a characterful interior that is light and airy, despite the sloping walls.

Self-constructed, too, is the Diggers self-build housing on the outskirts of Brighton - nine homes (five family houses and four single-person flats) designed and built by a co- operative of people who live there now, none of whom initially had any building skills. The self-build timber-frame system designed by Architype has clearly been simple enough to use, creating elegant and economical results.

At the other end of the scale are more institutional UK schemes such as Fielden Clegg's oak theatre at Bedales School in Hampshire. But for the most part, wooden architecture is marginalised in Britain (here, unlike the US, there is little history of wood-framed housing) - its finest examples belong to an alternative ecological or maverick design culture rather than to the mainstream.

There is nothing, for example, to match the scale and ambition of Kajia Design's Izumo Dome in Japan, which demonstrates the exciting structural possibilities that modern wood technologies offer for large buildings.

One pointer to the future is that the most popular and prolific designer alive today, Philippe Starck, has designed a do-it-yourself kit house available from the French mail- order company 3 Suisses. It comes complete with hammer, video showing construction techniques and a French flag. And, naturally, it's made of wood. !

Previous page: Kajia Design's 143m-diameter Izumo Dome is a deceptively simple-looking structure. However, it could never have been built without advanced computer modelling techniques. The structure, which mimics the mechanism of a Japanese umbrella, houses a sports stadium.

Left: the Olivier Theatre at Bedales School in Hampshire is one of the largest oak-framed structures in the UK.

Above: Deep in a Somerset valley, David Lea has built a painter's studio out of tree thinnings (saplings taken out when their timber is not good enough for use as lumber) which are normally burnt as waste. The studio cost just pounds 3,300.

Above: Edward Cullinan's lodge in Dorset's Hooke Park is the first of five buildings that will create an 'ecological village'. The Park is run by the Parnham Foundation, an organisation that promotes wood craftsmanship both through its school and through sponsorship of wood-related activities.

Left: Philippe Starck has many homes but his favourite is this, a timber- framed house outside Paris. Far from being the one-off architectural showpiece you might expect of a renowned designer, the house is one that anyone with a plot of land and pounds 144,000 could build in around two months. This kit house, created by Starck for 3 Suisses, is built mainly of wood, partly because of its low cost, but also since it allows mistakes to be rectified or rooms to be added at a later stage.

READER BOOK OFFER

Naomi Stungo's The New Wood Architecture (from which these pictures and captions are taken) is published by Laurence King, priced pounds 45. Readers of the Independent on Sunday can purchase The New Wood Architecture at the special price of pounds 40 (including p&p). To place your order, please telephone Laura Willis on 0171 831 6351