Local resources inform design: mid-point results from the Building from England's Woodlands project

Considering the energy consumption and carbon equivalent emission of the construction industry, a massive shift towards more sustainable and less carbon intensive materials and building techniques is desirable. In this regard, wood and timber products will be more utilised within the built environment, posing the question of what can be done to prevent resources from being overused and to ensure it is properly managed. To try to address the issue within the UK, the Woods into Management Forestry Innovation funded project “Building from England’s Woodlands” aims at bringing together England's sustainable forests, manufacturing sector, and construction industry to encourage wider use of homegrown timber and demonstrate that engineered components made from English wood are reliable and feasible, paving the way for innovative and large-scale wood products in the UK construction market. The project is targeting suitable hardwood species for construction and assessing their relative characteristics to inform future strategies for sustainable forest management and creation in England. The paper introduces some of the findings so far, whilst showing the plans for the prototypes to be created within the last part of the project. The prototypes aim to showcase what is feasible when the understanding of the resource informs the design process, as opposed to designing a system and then trying to determine how it can be realised from the available resource.