Timber Development UK – the organisation formed from the merger of TRADA and Timber Trade Federation – is partnering with New Model Institute of Technology and Engineering (NMITE), Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) and the Passivhaus Trust, to challenge built environment students, as well as recent graduates, to form multidisciplinary teams to create a ‘net-zero community centre’ based on timber and timber-hybrid systems.
Students from all built environment courses at UK universities, from first to final year, along with 2021 graduates are invited to enter the competition which launches on the 30 November in person at the Building Centre, Store St, London and online.
The 2022 challenge – is to design an exemplary community building that produces more energy than it consumes, at Southside in Hereford.
Teams must produce designs that sites the community centre within the local context and landscape integrating the clients’ and communities’ interests. The detailed designs must be ‘net zero’, creatively employing sustainable building materials and construction methods, and be energy and resource efficient, focusing on the health and well-being of people, the community, and our planet.
Tabitha Binding, Timber Development UK, University Engagement Programme Manager: “Built environment professionals must prepare for a net zero future, and this must start in the classroom if we are to reach our climate goals. Our curriculum must be strengthened to meet the climate challenge by raising climate literacy.
“For our future architects, engineers, cost consultants, and landscape architects, this means improving their knowledge and capability of working with low-carbon materials such as timber – and being able to use it wisely and well.
“They also need to be able to work efficiently and effectively together. Interdisciplinary design and delivery teams can achieve far more than individual professions working separately on the same project. Where better to learn these skills than at university?”
