Lendlease and Stora Enso have launched a global sustainable timber partnership for environmentally friendly construction.
Sustainable timber construction has just received an enormous boost with the announcement of an ongoing partnership between Lendlease and Stora Enso.
The partnership will focus on research and development into sustainable mass timber products including cross laminated timber (CLT), new ways these products can be used in construction and their accessibility in the global market. Stora Enso’s product catalogue will also be fully digitised through Lendlease’s end-to-end digital platform, Podium, making it easier for the company to design and build with sustainable timber in the future, but with wider impacts, too.
“Our digital products, together with Stora Enso’s, will support the wider industry as it looks to more sustainable and efficient ways of building, not just Lendlease,” says Daryl Patterson, chief product officer and head of design, Lendlease. “Making timber structures easier to design and assemble is our joint goal with Stora Enso – under our broader aim of making the building industry more productive, and greener.”
Lendlease also announced a dedicated studio in Milan to facilitate the creation of new sustainable timber products and increased use of sustainable timber across its $52bn portfolio of European development projects. Named Podium MX, the Milan studio will be based at the company’s $3.6bn Milan Innovation District (MIND).
“MX Studio Milan is one of four regional Lendlease Podium studios that work across a range of building designs and systems,” says Patterson. “The adoption of mass timber is a design element we are testing for prefabricated manufacturing of building facades, panels and beams, and more.”
Patterson describes the studios (the other three are based in Sydney, Silicon Valley and Singapore) as being collaborative – both with each other and with a mix of local and global partners – but also specialised.
“Our model allocates building systems to different studios around the world, which act as centres of excellence,” he says. “For example, our MX Studio in Sydney has a core focus on structural products. In addition to each studio specialising in one building system, they also bring local requirements and expertise together, enabling solutions developed in other regions to be tailored. That means the work done in each is adapted and extended in other regions. CLT has a longer history in Europe, but there are valuable lessons being transferred from elsewhere around the world – including seismic solutions from California and New Zealand. Future work will include improved solutions for fire protection and acoustic attenuation. Milan offers better access to the timber manufacturing experience, which we hope to bring back into the front end of design ideas.”
Lars Völkel, executive vice president, Stora Enso Wood Products division, expressed delight at the new partnership, saying, “Together we will lead the transition towards more circular, innovative and digitalised solutions to help speed up the construction industry’s transformation.”
For more, visit www.lendlease.com and www.storaenso.com
Image: Trafalgar Place (UK), courtesy Lendlease
