The project

This award winning project was part of London Design Festival 2018 and challenged how we build our towns and cities. The panels are the first ever hardwood cross laminated timber (CLT) panels manufactured in the UK.

Combining sustainable American tulipwood with innovative methods of modular construction, MultiPly confronted two of the current age’s biggest challenges – the pressing need for housing and the urgency to fight climate change.

A unique partnership of business, academia and applied research came together to manufacture the tulipwood cross laminated timber panels (CLT) for MultiPly. They all also agreed that the project held lessons for the future of wood-based building and specifically use of hardwood in engineered timber construction.

The innovation

The innovation lies in the material used to manufacture CLT and the method of joining the CLT panels to allow them to be demountable.

Given the ever-increasing demand of solid laminate timber systems in the UK, MultiPly has allowed us to demonstrate the manufacturing process, structural characteristics, flexibility, environmental credentials, visual impact and consistency of solid timber laminate systems.

-Mark Milne, Technical Manager, CSIC

Commercially American tulipwood is one of the most prolific hardwood species from the U.S. hardwood forests and is unique to North America. It has a high strength to weight ratio and so is ideal for use as a structural material. The CLT panels are connected using bolts rather than screws so can be demounted and re-assembled. The panels are the first ever hardwood CLT panels manufactured in the UK.

The outcome

MultiPly, an eight metre high, carbon neutral, timber pavilion, made exclusively from American tulipwood that encourages the built environment to re-think the way we design and build our homes and cities.