A HIGHLAND TAKE ON THE SEDA TOUR

This year's SEDA AGM tour was a heartening reminder of the step-change that has taken place in sustainable building practice in the Highlands since SEDA's last visit in 2002. Five years ago, Neil Sutherland was one of a small band of radicals pioneering the use of homegrown timber, Nicole Edmund's straw-bale house was trail-blazing in the best Findhorn tradition and the new woodfuel heating system at Highland Birchwoods was pure novelty.   Now there is clear evidence that sustainable design is entering the mainstream.

It is hard to pin down a single driver for this change but there is no doubting the shift in public sector consciousness towards sustainable design. This was borne out by SEDA's visit to SNH's headquarters, which included a comprehensive briefing from project architect, Donald Canavan. One year since it opened, this building has immense significance for Inverness. It is the Highlands only national agency headquarters, accommodating up to 400 people. It scored the highest BREEAM rating to date of any office development, anywhere. And it proves that a corporate headquarters procured under a Private Finance Initiative can enjoy a predominantly timber structure, passive solar design, some locally sourced materials and exemplary standards of air-tightness, insulation and energy efficiency - including the use of natural ventilation as an alternative to air-conditioning.   The result: a building extremely popular with both the public and occupants alike.

Forest Enterprise's new Area Office was built to accommodate 40 staff at Smithton, south of Inverness city centre. Designed by HRI Architects and opened in February 2007, the building features many aspects of low-carbon design: widespread use of low-embodied energy, locally-sourced materials (timber and stone); carbon-neutral heating (wood chip); passive solar, energy efficient design. Whereas it is unlikely that public sector development on the scale of the SNH headquarters will be replicated in the near future, this project is already influencing similar-sized projects elsewhere in the Highlands.  

Neil Sutherland led the last leg of the Highland tour, before SEDA departed for Findhorn, taking in a new community woodland shelter at Strathnairn and two houses under construction by his design-build company, Makar. Many SEDA members are familiar with Neil's design approach, particularly his allegiance to Scottish timber. The tour highlighted Neil's response to the wider Highland context, which takes account of the region's abundant timber resource, the economic benefit of adding value to a local commodity and the challenge of developing uses - and building skills - that suit both the character of Highland timber and the Highland climate.

The SEDA visit presented a satisfying snapshot of current sustainable design activity around Inverness. Elsewhere in the Highlands, two woodfuel district heating schemes are now operating in Aviemore and Wick and The Highland Council has commissioned Gaia Architects to design Scotland's first sustainable school in Lochaber.   From this April the Council requires all large new developments to make use of grey-water recycling and energy efficient design. And Scotland's first Housing Fair will take place in Inverness in 2009 to showcase exemplary standards of sustainable design - as good an occasion as any for SEDA's next Highland visit?

Una Lee

SNH Headquarters at Great Glen House (a leaflet with more photos and information on the features of the building can be downloaded from the SNH website ). The headquarters were procured through a private finance initiative.

Forest Enterprise's new area offices at Smithton

Woodland classroom at Strathnairn Community Woodland, designed and detailed to utilize the specific sizes and characteristics of local timber.

Findhorn Ecovillage

LOCAL TIMBER USE IN THE BUILDINGS VISITED

Ecological sourcing of timber products was a recurrent theme during the SEDA tour. The buildings visited demonstrate a range of approaches to this issue and this article highlights some of the main potential and challenges.

Reused or recycled timber is of course the first choice wherever possible but, in the Scottish Highlands such material is usually unobtainable. Encouraging therefore to see Keppie's SNH Headquarters building employing softwood flooring salvaged from the hospital that previously occupied the site; similarly the round houses at Findhorn made from reused Douglas fir whiskey vats. Although these are isolated examples they do highlight that reuse of timber is possible even away from big cities.

Nowadays public buildings in Scotland have to demonstrate that all new timber comes from legal and sustainable sources - this differs from the rest of the UK where the requirement is only for legal timber sourcing. There are currently four certification schemes that enable timber used in Scottish buildings to be tracked back to the forest of origin. While timber certification is in principle 'a good thing' it adds additional paperwork to a job and can introduce new difficulties because the schemes define sustainability mainly in terms of forest management issues and do not take account of the distance the timber has to be transported. The designers of the SNH building, for example, had difficulty ensuing that local larch cladding was used in preference to Siberian larch transported half way around the world. These pressures were avoided on HRI Architects' Forest Enterprise building because much of the timber used came from FE forests in the Inverness area.

Over 70% of Scottish housing is now constructed using a timber frame structure, however, very little of the sawn timber used is homegrown. Scotland produces around 2.7 million m 3 of sawn softwood timber per annum but virtually all of this is exported to England whilst most Scottish timber frame firms import their sawn timber from Scandinavia or the Baltic. It is thus encouraging to see the timber framed buildings by Neil Sutherland Architects and those at the Findhorn Community being built using locally produced machine graded spruce.  

Although timber frame housing uses little Scottish sawn timber it does employ OSB (made near Inverness) for the sheathing boards and in the I-joists manufactured at Forres which are rapidly gaining a strong market presence. These joists currently use local timber in the OSB web but imported sawn timber flanges.

Scottish timber is also used for large section posts and beams. Douglas fir is the most common choice and several of the buildings we visited employed this material. Neil Sutherland highlighted that obtaining such timber in long lengths is becoming increasingly difficult, however.

All of the buildings we visited used local larch for external cladding. This is no coincidence as the Scottish highlands produce most of the UK larch timber of a size suitable for cladding. Obtaining this in other parts of Scotland is often more difficult. It is therefore encouraging to see new technologies emerging that can increase the durability of timber without the use of the biocides employed in timber preservatives. There are several of these 'wood modification' processes now on the market and a particularly notable feature of the Forest Enterprise building was the use of local Scots pine cladding that had been furfrulated. This process, from Norway, involves pressure impregnating the timber with furfrul alcohol which is then fixed in the timber where it acts to keep the timber relatively dry. This prevents fungal decay and renders the timber quite dimensionally stable. Furfrul alcohol is bi-product of making molasses and the whole process is biocide free.

Most of the buildings we visited used a considerable amount of local timber. Neil Sutherland's woodland classroom & house used the highest proportion - everything except the window frames. To achieve this degree of local sourcing is however very difficult and Neil has had to build his own supply chain including sourcing trees from the forest, sawing and drying the timber in his yard, and then employing a team of experienced joiners. His buildings are designed and detailed to exploit the specific sizes and characteristics of local timber. This degree of commitment to local timber is both exceptional and commendable but beyond reach for a "normal" architectural practice.   One delight of the SEDA tour was a reassurance that architects no longer have to take radical steps to make use of, at least some, home-grown timber.

Ivor Davies, Centre for Timber Engineering, Napier University, Edinburgh

VISIT TO FINDHORN ECOVILLAGE

Following humble beginnings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the perseverance and dedication of Eileen and the late Pater Caddy, and Dorothy Maclean has led to the Findhorn Foundation becoming a household name, both in the eco-fraternity and, increasingly, the public realm.

The community that developed on the outskirts of the small fishing village at Findhorn started as a centre for those seeking and leading the way in spiritual and ecological guidance and living. Over more than 40 years the community has developed and grown and now has an incredibly diverse population of several hundred permanent inhabitants, with an estimated 14,000 visitors annually. The underpinning purpose of the Community is to undertake work based on the values of planetary service, co-creation with nature and attunement to the divinity within all beings.

This mass of people has been housed in a number of various different means of shelter: from temporary structures such as yurts and caravans, to more permanent lodgings, in the form of the famous whisky barrel houses and Bag End, and, more recently, the modern houses on the Field of Dreams. The early development of the buildings at the Foundation was undertaken on a relatively ad-hoc basis, with the Field of Dreams being the first real attempt by the community to pre-define the density of a new set of buildings.

On the Sunday of this year's AGM, a contingent of folk continued to Findhorn as the last visit of the weekend for a tour around the Community led by Mark Jones: long term resident and director of Build One, a building company based on site.

Build One are responsible for the construction of many of the newer individual houses in the Community, as well as the 'Centini' terraced housing development which snakes it's way through the centre of the Field of Dreams.

The tour around the Community provided an opportunity to clearly see the difference in attitude between the older and newer developments. Clusters of buildings dating from the early 1980s such as Bag End (with a density of around 22 houses/ha) were built with a respect for culture, scale, space and careful massing. This has allowed the surrounding to mature over the last quarter of a century, and the buildings have become part of the setting.

By comparison, the masterplan for the Field of Dreams (with the same density) has been seen by many plot owners as an opportunity to build vast new houses, with an array of surfaces and odd forms, which stretch to the edge of the site, squeezing gardens to a minimum and reducing any opportunities for a developing landscape to reduce their visual impact. Whilst many of the houses may have been built using the likes of untreated timber and sheep wool insulation, there is a concise and desperate lack of ecological integrity, and parts of the site have a feeling of constant one-upmanship going on behind the scenes.

On the other hand, the Centini housing provides a mix of 14 individual apartments at a density of around 110 dwellings/ha. The scale, proportion and massing of this development has been carefully thought out and, whilst it may have some minor problems, it fits into the site very well. It provides just enough space to live and the simple plan helps fulfil the most basic premise of ecological design: maximising volume to surface area ratio.

With these developments taking up most of the last remaining free space on the site within the current area of development, it is understood that the Foundation has been looking recently at possible areas to expand. This is, perhaps, a timely opportunity to evaluate the successes and failures of the built stock in the Community and introduce an increased level of structured thinking, community planning and consultation to ensure that the Community regains its position at the forefront of ecological design, thinking, innovation and integrity.

Sam Foster, Gaia Architects