Leading Design Professionals Recognise Wood Solutions

Leading design professionals recognise wood solutions

1 August 2017 - Across a range of professional disciplines more architects, designers and project managers are finding that engineered wood is now rapidly becoming the leading choice for solutions to meet demands of both building codes and building owners.

A bonus for this burgeoning new development is that engineered wood products are increasing the product of choice of discerning architects and designers. These changes bring advantages including better earthquake engineering design, faster and cheaper project management and material cost benefits.

Beyond the construction benefits that wood brings, the people occupying these new age office buildings are reporting high levels of satisfaction with the working environments that offices designed in wood bring their occupants.

To recognise this and spread the message, a national conference is planned for builders, developers, building owners and their architects, engineers, designers and specifers for September 28th in Rotorua. “Changing Perceptions of Engineered Timber in Construction” conference features an international line up of speakers. The 2017 conference theme is “Advantages of Timber in Mid Rise Construction”.

“We’ve brought together a wide group of people from building design and engineering specialists to the project managers who lead commercial construction work. The one thing they have in common is their new-found enthusiasm for the attributes of engineered wood as a revolutionary new building material,” says conference director John Stulen.

“Every single speaker has gained their early work experience with traditional materials, so they are well-placed to recognise that wood meets or exceeds both structural and aesthetic design requirements,” adds Stulen.

“Many companies, like Lendlease, one of Australia’s largest developers, are discovering hugely positive reactions from employees of their new office tenants to these new wood-rich office environments. Their world-class office building, International House at Barangoo, has set new standards for commercial and environment benchmarks.”

“One of the leading community and home builders, Strongbuild has just won an award for their Macarthur Gardens residential apartments as well – so there is wide acceptance of these new engineered wood buildings and techniques.”

All building professionals will find inspiration in our lineup of experienced award-winning speakers. With the conference theme for 2017 being “Timber in Mid-Rise Construction” the list of international speakers includes:

• Karla Fraser, Senior Project Manager, URBAN ONE Builders, Vancouver, Canada

• Andrew Dunn, CEO, Timber Development Assoc, Sydney, Australia

• Adam Strong, Managing Director, Strongbuild, Australia

• Jeremy Tompson, Project Manager, lendlease, Sydney, Australia

• Julian Addington, Director, Engco, Christchurch

• Linda Lodetti, Managing Quantity Surveyor, Josephs & Associates, Christchurch

• Bernie O’Fagan, Managing Director, RM Design, Christchurch

• Daniel Scheibmair, Technical Manager, Building Officials Institute NZ

Rotorua was the obvious choice as host city for an international commercial building conference with it’s ‘Wood-First’ policy making it a local leader in encouraging sustainable commercial buildings. The conference is set to be part of a wood technology week of events coming to the city in September, including the FIEA WoodTECH 2017 two-day conference and trade expo. For full conference details see : www.cpetc2017.com

ENDS

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