Can a clutch of timber frame schools spur sleepy Welsh county Monmouthshire into a green future? TiC visits the valleys to find out

NOT SINCE the 1800s, in its great period of prosperity and fashion that saw vernacular timber-frame buildings rise in favour of ones faced with brick and ashlar, has Monmouth created such a locus of imagination.

Pitched to the east of the town and circled by a tired looking housing estate, lies the new glulam frame Kymin View Primary School.

It is a beacon of freshness matched only by the wooded valley it hangs over.

Even on the greyest of days, the laminated sheen from the glulam sparkles, and having turned left at a dreary steel frame Lidl supermarket to get here, it seems a haven of sacredness.

Five-year programme
Kymin View Primary School is part of a succession of new primary schools in South Wales built by Willmott Dixon.

Monmouthshire County Council (MCC) awarded the five-year framework contract in 2005 as part of the Authority’s Education Strategic Review.

Four schools have so far been built with another one currently onsite.

The framework requires Willmott Dixon to put together a supply chain and an experienced team of designers and engineers to turn the council’s sustainability push into practice.

Willmott Dixon appointed architect White Design as sustainability consultant on the back of its successful partnership in delivering Kingsmead School in Cheshire, Anns Grove Primary School in Sheffield and the Re-Thinking show school at the BRE Offsite 2007 exhibition.

Beaming marvellous
To date Bristol-based White Design has supplied sustainability advice for the glulamframe Kymin View Primary School and Abergavenny’s Llanfoist County Primary School, which is also glulam-frame and is currently onsite.

For Rogiet Primary School in Caldicott, the sixth school in the programme, White Design has been appointed throughout and is currently assessing glulam’s viability for the scheme.

The idea behind appointing White Design as sustainability consultant for the two most recent schemes was convenient for both the practice and the client, explains senior architect Nick James. “We went up to Stage D, which was a convenient cut off point, because it’s when designs are submitted for planning,” he says. “The specification of glulam for the schemes was embedded very early on. MCC was very keen for us to come in with the experience and sustainability advice, but they also wanted a local architect for the site work.”

James says the main argument for using glulam stems from its low embodied energy, compared to its main competitor steel. Embodied energy refers to the quantity of energy required to manufacture and supply to the point of use. “The embodied energy of a tonne of timber equates to about 640kw/h,” he says. “Steel has about 24 times that.”

James says that ultimately, specification of materials comes down to the client’s desire to reduce its carbon footprint.

“When you compare it with steel in terms of tonnage of material it’s more expensive,” he concedes. “But Monmouthshire is very keen to explore the sustainability aspects of the design.”

Rob O’Dwyer, deputy head of property services at MCC says it wasn’t set on any particular construction material. “We’ve used glulam before but not on the scale we used it at Kymin View,” he says. “We were obviously keen to implement a sustainable strategy and were keen to use as many natural products as possible. Secondly glulam is good on the BREEAM scoring matrix.”

Cost and compromise
Despite glulam’s obvious benefits to the sustainability programme, O’Dwyer says it came with a compromise on cost. “We’re trying to introduce as many sustainable carbon reduction features as possible and it can be a bit of a compromise. For example if we use biomass heating, it costs a lot more to introduce than gas, it is the same for using glulam. If we use it then we’ve got to sacrifice something else.”

Kymin View uses a 149kW wood-fired boiler system, which has been designed to work on either wood pellets or wood chips, but for Llanfoist gas is being used.

James says the framework allows the design team to take the previous building’s performance into the next. “With Llanfoist there were other pressures on the budget and actually we went for gas heating,” he says. “The council is in a unique position within a framework agreement where they can make this comparison. The schools are in similar parts of the country so we can look at the use of biomass in one and gas in the other.”

The analysis is allowing White Design to push for a BREEAM rating of “Excellent” for Rogiet School in Caldicott. “We are currently assessing glulam’s viability for Rogiet,” says James. “It is an interesting site in that it is sandwiched between the M4 and the M48 and is right next to the River Severn tunnel junction. So there are acoustic issues to consider.”

James says using glulam also throws up handling and transport challenges. “Steel frame installers are a breed apart,” he says. “They work very quickly and very efficiently but they are working with a material that can take a few knocks. If glulam takes a knock you’re taking a big chunk out of the wood. It means tradesman need to be very careful about how they work around it.

“People are very conscious of its beauty onsite though. You get all sorts of people coming up and stroking it. It’s unusual. It has a warmth and a familiarity to it.”

He says glulam is not prone to the cold bridging you would normally experience with steel. “Thermally it is very good,” says James. “You are not going to get the condensation you’d get from using a steel beam that’s going from inside the school to outside.”

Thermal debate
James had to account for timber’s low thermal mass when he assessed glulam’s viability for Kymin View.

Despite school buildings not being occupied during the hottest time of the year the practice still had to ensure there was natural ventilation.

For Kymin View, White Design used Windowmaster’s automated window system that opens and shuts depending on the temperature and CO2 levels within the classroom. “It opens and closes your windows by a tiny motor system depending on what parameters you set,” says James. “It can open in tiny increments so that the window doesn’t just fly open and you get a blast of cold air. It ensures you have a constant air flow and responds to the climate before people notice it.”

Another method the practice has used, most recently at Anns Grove Primary School in Sheffield – a two-storey glulam-frame school, was to increase the volume of the classrooms. The first floor of Anns Grove sits on precast concrete and slabs but the second floor has higher volume rooms. “While we don’t have the volume downstairs we have the thermal mass,” he says.

James says the building is now achieving figures for similar ratings both upstairs and downstairs. “Hot air rises so if you have that little more volume you’ve got that reservoir of hot air at the top of the room and not in the occupied areas,” he says.

Sourcing glulam
MCC’s demands on sustainability initially led White Design to search for a UK-based manufacturer and supplier of glulam. However after being unable to find any, they imported the glulam through Danish supplier Lilleheden. “Their expertise is very good and they worked very closely with us and the engineers. They are able to create the large spans and curves we need.”

James says he hopes the schools in Kingsmead, Anns Grove and now the clutch in Monmouthshire will lay down the impetus for more glulam manufacturers in the UK. “I think it will inevitably happen because when people look at the embodied energy benefits and the low carbon benefits of the material it will only increase in use. We are increasingly demanding locally sourced products.”

Lilleheden managing director Michael Vaughton says UK demand is increasing. “There is little doubt that it’s being driven by the sustainability agenda,” he says. “The majority of it does tend to be in the larger structures, so in that respect we are sort of replacing what would have been steel frame.”

The next two years will see the completion of Llanfoist and Rogiet primary schools, adding to the clutch already completed in the framework. For James, a graduate of the Welsh School of Architecture, designing in Wales is something he takes immense pride in. “I’m half Welsh so it’s good for me to go back,” he says.

“For us as a business it is just across the border so we can claim to be an international practice doing work in Scotland, England and Wales,” he laughs.