Timber Archives - Constructivist

Featured on the cover of this month’s Structural Engineer magazine is the new boathouse for Newnham College in Cambridge.

The boathouse is a small timber structure designed to house rowing boats. Faced with conflicting constraints — a short-term lease, high design expectations and nearby tree roots — the team moved away from a more conventional steel solution and instead developed a locally sourced green timber structure designed for disassembly and reuse.

From a regenerative design perspective, what stood out to me was not simply the use of timber, but the wider system of relationships and decision-making around the building.

Here are a few headlines.

Constraints driving creativity

The idea that constraints drive creativity is not new.

What is striking here is how the constraints pushed the design team away from a Horizon One answer — resource-intensive materials, sourced from far away with little relationship to this place — towards a Horizon Two response that begins building local procurement, resource circulation and habitat sensitivity into the process itself.

So often constraints limit experimentation.

Here they helped create the conditions for it.

Sustainability high on the bookcase

Another striking aspect of the project is that sustainability appears to sit relatively high in the system.

The article notes that the idea of an eco-friendly boathouse “captured the imagination” of the college. That matters because once sustainability, experimentation and design quality become institutional goals — rather than bolt-on requirements — different decisions start to become possible lower down the Systems Bookcase.

Material possibilities grow. Procurement appetite shifts. Adaptability and local supply chains become easier to justify.

Change higher in the system changes what can emerge below.

Capacity to change

The building is designed for adaptability within a changing environment.

Screw pile foundations can be removed.

The timber frame can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere.

Connections can be adjusted as the timber seasons and matures.

This is not a building conceived as fixed until redundant.

It is designed to change over time.

Local capability and supply chains

The work also helped build local capability, including visual stress grading of timber at Rougham Estate.

The development of skills, confidence and supply-chain relationships becomes part of the design itself.

Recovering historical practices

Rather than inventing something entirely new, the project revives older forms of local timber construction, stewardship and repair culture that have largely been displaced by industrial standardisation.

Place-responsive design

The form responds to the surrounding boathouses, local materials, nearby trees and conservation setting. Inspiration even emerged from a walk in a local park. A partial move towards Continuous Place-Based Design.

Protective niche

Projects like this often emerge within protective niches in the wider construction system.

Institutions such as university colleges can sometimes sustain different priorities — legacy, experimentation and identity — that allow alternative approaches to be tested before they become commercially normal elsewhere.

These niches matter. Like in ecosystems, protective niches create sheltered conditions in which new operational models, relationships and design approaches can develop enough confidence to spread more widely later on.

A useful H2 transition example

Overall, the project does not transform the wider construction system around it.

But it does prototype alternative ways of sourcing, building and thinking.

This is not simply a low-carbon building.

It is an example of Horizon Two transition-building: developing the operational capability, relationships and confidence needed to make different kinds of projects possible in future.

As I reached the end of my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design I had the feeling I wanted to do more with my hands – I wanted more practice to accompany the theory.

This feeling crystallised last summer, visiting family in western Canada last summer, including my cousin Wayne Wenstob, who inspired me to become a structural engineer in my twenties, and to whom the Pattern Book is dedicated.

It was while staying there that they took delivery of a mobile saw mill. I watched while a group of people assembled the machinery on the beech and used it to process cedar drift wood. The timber was going to be used to renovate a traditional First Nation longhouse.

Something clicked.

Half a planet away, at Hazel Hill Wood — home of the Regenerative Design Lab — we have just been granted our new forestry licence.

After having lapsed for a few years, this gives us permission to fell trees as part of a longer-term shift: from areas of single-species forestry to mixed, resilient woodland.

But here’s the catch.

Timber ‘in the round’ — unsown — has very low value. Often not enough to cover the cost of felling and extraction at small scale.

But as I learnt in Canada, cutting the wood into planks significantly increases the sale value of the timber.

And so an idea was born. What if Constructivist set up a new division, Constructivist Timber, to go into partnership with Hazel Hill to create a small, local timber supply chain?

Nothing large-scale, nor industrial. Just enough to process timber into usable planks, for use on site and then for sale is a modest revenue stream?

In regenerative design we often talk about unlocking stacked, multiple benefits in a system. This ideas seems to do that:

Thinning plantation stands supports the shift to mixed woodland.
Timber becomes both fuel and building material — reconnecting the charity to its own resources.
Skills and craft knowledge could begin to circulate locally.
The Lab gains a way to practise continuous place-based design — not just talk about it.

At Hazel Hill Wood, this approach also reconnects something that had quietly drifted. The earliest buildings on site used timber from the wood itself. More recent construction has relied on commercial supply chains. Re-establishing an on-site timber flow brings that relationship back into view.

How we live with trees becomes part of the lived experience of the place.

So the next logical step was clear: invest in a mobile sawmill.

And then two remarkable things happened

A local natural artist, Zac Newham (natural-art.uk) asked if he could store his mobile sawmill on site in return for us being able to use it.

And the Engineering Club asked if it could book the wood to run its summer school, in which engineers will use timber from the wood to build infrastructure on site.

It feels like by joining the dots we are already starting to unlock something abundant.

The first chapter of Constructivist Timber begins.

Tag: Timber

Newnham College Boathouse