Wooden architecture is natural and sustainable: a testament to the technological innovation applied to the use of this material is the Maggie's centre in England, dedicated to cancer patients.
The Maggie's centre in Oldham, England, which offers free support for people with cancer and their families, is the first building constructed from cross-laminated American hardwood tulipwood (Clt), through a technological process that represents a breakthrough for sustainable architecture and modern construction. Designed by architect Alex De Rijke of Drmm architects with the support of the American hardwood export council, which brings together American hardwood producers, it won the Wood Awards last year — a British accolade for the most sustainable and innovative projects using wood. It is a manifesto for wood as a natural choice for contemporary architecture in support of physical and psychological wellbeing, and for how places of care can be transformed into places that heal.
Maggie's centres are oncology drop-in centres offering practical and emotional support for people affected by cancer, together with their families and friends, following the idea of a new kind of care originally developed by the writer and artist Maggie Keswick Jencks, who lost her life 18 months after being diagnosed with breast cancer. The first opened in Edinburgh in 1996. The Maggie's cancer care centre in Oldham, designed by architect De Rijke, is the most recent to have been built and joins a network of 20 existing centres throughout the United Kingdom and abroad.
They are warm, welcoming places with qualified staff, designed to offer patients the support they need. The architectural quality of these places is considered a fundamental element of the care the centre provides. For this reason, the design of the centres is entrusted to leading architects such as Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, who are capable of creating environments with strong emotional qualities — qualities that are very important for the people who visit and work in them.
American tulipwood is one of the most sustainable timber species thanks to its capacity for regeneration through natural growth. It is a fast-growing tree cultivated in sustainable forests: "Every two minutes, the American hardwood forest grows by the equivalent of a football pitch" — this is how Ahec promotes the architectural use of tulipwood, highlighting its rapid capacity for reforestation. It is also approximately 70 per cent more resistant to bending than a typical softwood. Strength, lightness, speed of construction and sustainability are its defining characteristics.
De Rijke chose tulipwood for the design of the Maggie's in Oldham for the positive influence wood has on people and for the beauty, strength and warmth that characterise it. Wood is known to significantly reduce blood pressure, heart rates and recovery times; it also delivers greater health and wellbeing benefits than any other material used in construction, as attested by the 2015 Wood housing humanity report produced by the environmental non-profit Planet ark.
The building's architecture is made up of more than 20 five-layer cross-laminated American tulipwood panels, ranging from 0.5 to 12 metres in length, developed by Züblin Timber, specialists in this technology. "The possibilities for application, thanks to the sustainability of hardwood and, in particular, the rapid regrowth capacity of tulipwood Clt, are endless," says De Rijke. "From the outset of the Oldham project we knew this wood would be the right material for the Maggie's, not only from a structural point of view but also from an environmental and aesthetic one. A raised, open-plan building, entirely in wood and glass — with trees growing around and inside it and every detail conceived in terms of usability, health and pleasure — that will always be special because it will retain these qualities over time. The building has an implicit and visible content of holistic design that supports the essential objectives of the project: to lift and offer hope to people affected by cancer."
Wood has always been one of the most widely used building materials in the world. Organic, beautiful, connected with nature, with the sole "drawback" of limited durability over time and, as a natural material, the maintenance and protection it requires. After decades of using concrete and steel in architecture — excellent technological and structural materials — a new environmental awareness that has spread through the world of architects has in recent times "rediscovered" wood and its qualities: a natural and sustainable material, easy to work with, capable of producing high-quality aesthetic results, with refined finishes and a warmth in buildings and interiors that is unique and unachievable with other materials. The choice of wood in architecture has been encouraged by technological research which, through a great deal of engineering work and the refinement of advanced industrial processes, has progressively transformed the structural capabilities of the material by increasing the resistance of its wood fibres.
Today, industrial solid wood panels, thanks to the cross-lamination process applied to wood fibres, are also suitable for constructing buildings subject to heavy loads and stresses — something that was previously entirely inconceivable. The technological evolution of the material makes it possible to create buildings that are experimental from an aesthetic and formal point of view as well, often with surprising results.
The project for the temporary installation Smile, created by Alison Brooks architects with Arup for the London design festival 2013, applied tulipwood panels — designated by the abbreviation Clt — experimentally for the first time. Arup's engineering calculations demonstrated that this rather unusual and daring suspended structure could support one hundred people simultaneously. The wood from the structure was entirely recycled for other installations.
According to David Venables, European director of Ahec, we need greater education on the potential of using wood and to spread awareness of the material's long-term sustainability — a concept that has yet to enter the mindset of many architects. But the development of technological research shows that there are new possibilities for an ever wider use of wood in contemporary construction, and for a vision of architecture that is more harmonious and emotional, as architects Alison Brooks, Andrew Lawrence of Arup and de Rijke passionately argued during the seminar Architettura in legno, creatività, tecnologia e innovazione organised by Ahec and held in Milan last December.