The Talking Timber webinar series promotes the use of timber in the built environment by engaging with architects, engineers, wood scientists, researchers, builders and designers. Various topics are discussed, including timber properties, moisture content, wood preservation, cross-laminated timber (CLT), fire design, and detailing.

Wood-based building products and design processes come in many forms. In the latest Talking Timber online seminar, three approaches to architecture were discussed. Leon Pienaar explained how Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) students experiment with WikiHouse and the University of Pretoria’s (UP) students, Nicola Smuts and Shannon Govender presented their approaches to in-situ design, materials manufacturing and building.

Africa is out of step with international developments in sustainable and modern building practices, where over 50% of new builds incorporate timber.

Locally, there is a tendency to forget that the roof on most buildings is supported by timber roof trusses. On average, timber constitutes about 1% of the materials in a building, with the majority being bricks, cement, steel and other inorganic materials.

The webinars are part of the South African forestry sector’s timber strategy to educate architects, engineers, developers, builders, designers and sawmillers about the incredible potential of wood.

Universal Plywood sponsored the latest webinar. Brad Anderson launched it with an overview of the company and its range of imported plywood and modified wood products.

Tafadzwa Nyanzunda, director of forest-based industries at the Department of Trade Industry and Competition (DTIC), explained the rationale for the government’s focus on the sector. It includes concern about job losses (over 2000 since 2020) when sawmills close due to lack of markets, technology and skills capacities.

Another reason is the need to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions of the building and construction value chain. Tafadzwa said the initial focus was on influencing government specifiers to increase the use of timber in public buildings. However, a recent feasibility study found that 72% of building activity in SA is built by private residential, tourism and commercial developers.

“We are now focusing on engaging with private sector developers to create a demand for timber construction. This webinar is one of the interventions, as are the annual Growing Timber Connections conference, the timber design competition and the popular Wood App”, she said.

SHANNON GOVENDER
Shannon Govender, a master’s in architecture student at UP, was the first speaker. Her research is on how timber technology and traditional craft can be integrated into architectural design.

“Craft is viewed as a spectacle in the architectural design field, which is looked at more thaninterpreted as art. I think we can learn from indigenous knowledge systems because craftsmanship is important and invokes a hands-on approach to understanding materials, building processes and innovation”, she explained.

Shannon’s thesis project is located in Eshowe, KwaZulu-Natal. She is investigating traditional site-specific craft knowledge like Zulu clay and timber construction and wicker weaving to identify optimal materials, tools and construction techniques that can be extracted and translated into digital fabrication and assembly. She is considering how building professionals can collaborate with different craftspeople like pottery makers, wicker weavers and carpenters.

“Eventually, I hope to have a design that speaks to a syncretic nature of all these cultures coming together that respects professional and craftspeople on a site and combines knowledge, materials and technologies innovatively”.

NICOLA SMUTS
Nicola is an architectural technologist pursuing a Master of Architecture Professional at the University of Pretoria. She spoke about the background and progress of her thesis on making timber architecture regional.

Nicola spent some time working on projects in Japan, which has a strong heritage of building with timber. Through the years, architectural discourse has been about drawing traditional regional knowledge into the construction process and bringing that into contemporary designs.

The Japanese and South African approaches to architecture are different. The architect communicates the architectural intent there, and the technical drawings and specification documents are much less prescriptive.

The detailing and other construction aspects are left to the highly skilled carpenters who executive the plans. It is a collaborative approach.

The three projects she worked on in Japan were designed, detailed and built in 12 months, a timeline almost unheard of in South Africa. Nicola said two things made this happen: prefabrication and the carpenters’ skills.

“We have to remind ourselves that South Africa and Africa have a history of making beautiful, regenerative and expressive architecture, and the materiality of timber has always played an integral role in its development”, she said.

The local construction scene is disjointed because we are moving towards bio-based materials like timber. However, we need to include low-skilled labourers in the process. For Nicola, it means tapping into an architectural form that combines structurally efficient forms in the natural world with energy-efficient manufacturing and assembly.

Her fascination with mathematics and nature led her to look at semi-shell-shaped structures as a possible solution. “What’s interesting about these shapes is that they combine the structural efficiency of curved surfaces and can be parametrically generated using a computer-aided design programme like Grasshopper”.

She generated different shell structures and nested the individual components on the CLT panels available from the two South African manufacturers, XLam and MTT. The results were hexagon-shaped elements that could be carried by one person on site.

For her thesis, Nicola applied her sketching skills with form-finding digital simulation processes to a project to redesign the Germiston train station in Johannesburg. The digital simulation allows her to understand the interplay of light in large, vaulted spaces that are not entirely artificially lit.

She combined computer-generated simulations with physical research using wireframes and soapy water to form bubbles over the frames.The final hyperbolic paraboloid shapes could be optimally nested on the planar segmented mass timber elements.