Celebrate Your Success

With an exceptional shortlist whittled down from a record number of entries, the timber industry is looking forward to October's Structural Timber Awards to celebrate the best of timber design, construction and engineering.

With 16 categories, nearly 250 entrants and over 70 companies shortlisted, the Structural Timber Awards have not only grown in popularity but also in stature.
Now in their fifth year, over 550 national business leaders and high-profile decision makers from the construction industry will gather in Birmingham to
celebrate the great, the good and the simply outstanding.

The judging panel spent many hours poring over the projects, products and people entered for this year's Awards. To create a shortlist for each category was incredibly difficult with some exceptional entries submitted, it demonstrates the architectural strengths, engineering capabilities and versatility of this renewable and natural material. It also goes to prove how much talent and competitive spirit there is in the timber industry. Timber is wonderfully adaptable and well-suited to a range of construction
projects across all sectors and the Awards work hard to celebrate the diverse ways that timber contributes to the UK built environment. As the UK housebuilding crisis reveals, the pressure to deliver higher numbers of quality homes is unrelenting – but the current explosion of interest in offsite manufacturing techniques and demands for a more sustainable way of living, verify that timber is the perfect material to resolve many construction problems. 

The importance of affordable, high quality housing projects is putting the entire construction industry under the spotlight across the board. To put this into perspective, The Institute of Fiscal Studies recently concluded that 40% of young adults cannot afford to buy one of the lowest-priced homes in their local area and the number of 25-34-year old house owners has dropped by 20% over the last 20 years.

Many answers to these problems will be highlighted at the Structural Timber Awards. Timber is a renewable material that plays a critical role within the wider circular economy and has the lowest embodied carbon of any mainstream construction material. Allied to this, advances in digital design is consistently improving the quality and performance of timber systems and enabling manufacturers to produce high-specification buildings that are taking the engineering capabilities of timber to new heights – literally in some cases – and to extraordinary quality.

As Dave Reay, Professor of Carbon Management and Education, University of Edinburgh has stated in relation to the housing market: "Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller." A sentiment held by many and it's important to remember that the government's aim is not just to generate more affordable homes but to change the mind-set behind the way in which they are built and the quality they contain.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) notes that 18% of UK carbon emissions are currently released from buildings – predominantly homes – with an extra 15% of emissions generated by the electricity consumed in these structures. With 15-28% of UK homes already using timber frame construction and capturing over one million tonnes of carbon each year, many architects and building designers are calling for more timber to be used as a primary construction material. Indeed, all sectors can benefit from the carbon sequestration benefits of wood – especially in standalone structural systems or in hybrid approaches. 

Read the full list of entries here  

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