This piece is an extract from this week's Forestry Latest News newsletter, which is emailed out at 4PM every Friday with a round-up of the week's top stories.
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A QUIET week as far as forestry news is concerned usually means one thing – finding the right topic for your Friday round-up can be a challenge. But it also means we get the chance to shine a light on a couple of stories you may have missed.
They both concern timber and construction. The first at its genesis point, the second much further along the road.
READ MORE: Forests to provide timber for 1.4m homes by 2040
In Ireland (which has been in the news this week), it has emerged the country's forests will grow enough timber to build 1.4 million homes by 2040. The timber produced by Irish woodlands will be worth more than €15 billion over that time, a Department of Agriculture report estimates.
Amid this, Mark McAuley, director of lobby group Forest Industries Ireland, argued the Republic could cut carbon emissions further by building timber-frame houses and apartments.
Doing just that – or at least the next best thing – is timber and forest management company Kloboucká lesní in the Czech Republic.
Its new HQ has been constructed with oversized timber gable, the four-storey structure in Brumov-Bylnice nodding to traditional architectural forms. And the studio behind it wanted to underline the possibilities of timber buildings.
“We wanted the new building to be made from local materials and we wanted to know how far we could go with it in terms of design and, more importantly, in terms of construction,” Mjölk Architekti architect Filip Cerha told Dezeen.
READ MORE: Czech forestry company creates mass-timber building as new HQ
“The result then is the monumentality of the gable, which gives us a beautiful space of a covered terrace planted with pots of greenery, but above all refers to the magnificence of the possibility of using wood in buildings that can help us to build sustainably.”
Maybe the tide is finally turning and timber in construction will soon be as common place as Facebook complaints about Sitka; the usual irony of those social media posts not withstanding.
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