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Tim is Carpenter Oak & Woodland’s managing director. Tim has extensive experience of managing companies of all sizes, in many business sectors, including construction and building. Tim’s no-nonsense hands-on approach, coupled with his outstanding management experience and commercial acumen, make him the ideal complement to the craft-based skills of the rest of the team.
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I’m delighted that the Gridshell roof over the Orangery at Chiddingstone Castle was awarded ‘Best Use of British Timber’ at the recent wood awards. For me, it is a lovely little project that perhaps would also have been worthy of an Innovation Award.
The roof is unique in that, while we have made a number of gridshells now, this is the first time that one was to be used to support a frameless glass roof, and therefore the interfacing of green timber which would move, and the glazing which could not, was critical. For us, there was a further complication, which was that the sophisticated computer modelling that we employed could only predict that the finger jointed chestnut lath would bend uniformly – unrealistic, but critical at these fine tolerances. The original design we inherited had impossibly tight radii, and we had to devise a way of getting the lath to bend where it would normally have snapped. Normally when a gridshell is produced, it is accepted as inevitavble that the shell will ‘find its own form’. In this case, the glazing meant that was not good enough. Let’s just say that it’s lucky that we believe in R&D!
It was a great concept by the Architect Peter Hulbert, and the Trustees of the the castle were very brave to have commissioned this innovative project. I wonder if they would still have gone ahead knowing the challenges that this presented. The fact is that they did, and I’m pleased for them that this project has been recognised with this award.
Without people with this kind of vision, our architectural landscape would be all the poorer.
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