Wood Awards 2019: Royal Opera House and Battersea Arts Centre among striking projects shortlisted for annual awards

Wood is one of the world’s oldest natural resources and is still highly sought after by high-profile, experimental architects and designers.

Ample evidence of this can be found in the extensive raft of projects shortlisted this year for the annual Wood Awards.

Founded in 1971, this competition promotes outstanding design, craftsmanship and installation of wood and is split into two categories — buildings and furniture.

Twenty buildings, shown as photographs, and 12 actual furniture projects will be displayed at 100% Design, held at Olympia during the London Design Festival, from September 18-21. Winners will be announced on November 19.

The projects reveal the malleable, warm, tactile qualities of wood with appeal in an astonishingly broad spectrum of contexts.

The shortlisted buildings include the Linbury Theatre at London’s Royal Opera House, which is lined with American black walnut, and Battersea Arts Centre, where a new decorative latticework birch-faced plywood ceiling has replaced a 19th-century plaster roof destroyed by a fire in 2015.

Meanwhile, residential project Cork House in Eton, Berkshire, by Matthew Barnett Howland with Dido Milne and Oliver Wilton, features load-bearing cork walls, a Western red cedar roof and doors and windows made of Accoya, a modified timber derived from fast-growing wood sourced from sustainably managed forests.

Another contender is senior architect Daryl Fitzgerald’s elegant lightweight staircase of tapering oak spindles dovetailed into cantilevered treads in a Holland Park home for Michaelis Boyd Associates.

Shortlisted furniture and products range from conceptual pieces such as David Gates’s playfully precarious-looking Littoral Chances cabinets in oak, sycamore, cedar, Douglas fir and bird’s-eye maple, to Ian McChesney’s oak and walnut bench for Benchmark, carved using a computer-controlled machine, then finished with hand-applied oil to keep the timber looking natural.

Eleanor Lakelin, a wood artist and judge for the furniture and product category, relates wood’s appeal to broader social trends: “It’s linked to our growing concern with climate change and estrangement from nature. It reflects our desire to rediscover the simple, physical pleasures of making and knowing the provenance of products.”

Britain once had a rich history of wooden architecture, a particularly impressive example being the 14th-century oak hammer-beam roof at Westminster Hall.

Today, a greater understanding of wood’s eco-credentials is fuelling a burgeoning revival of wooden architecture. Says Lakelin: “In Europe, most structural timbers come from sustainably managed coniferous forests.”

Ruth Slavid, an architecture journalist and one of the judges of the building competition, says: “The total energy consumed in manufacturing and transporting wood for building — its embodied energy — is outweighed by the carbon dioxide it absorbs while it’s growing. Wood is much lighter than steel or concrete and reduces the materials needed for foundations. Cross-laminated timber, a structurally strong engineered wood, is now widely used and is environmentally friendly as very little glue is used to make it.”

Increasingly wood is treated with non-toxic finishes, such as linseed or tung oil, shellac or milk paint, free of harmful volatile organic compounds and air pollutants.

Green virtues aside, wood appeals aesthetically for its countless tonal variations, which can also age beautifully: cedar wood, originally reddish in tone and commonly used outdoors, is prized for eventually turning grey when exposed to the elements.

One major trend is for scorched wood used on the exterior of buildings, which gives them a protective surface — an effect sneaking into interiors, too, according to Lakelin: “Charred wood is now popular inside homes as a natural alternative to staining wood.”

A more realistic option for many is to acquire a finely crafted piece of wood furniture.

Lakelin believes the internet has greatly facilitated this: “It’s possible to find a furniture maker online whose work you like, after which early ideas can be discussed by email. An experienced maker will be able to explore all the options — the design, material and suitability for a particular space. The only boundaries ought to be budget and imagination.”