The specification of trees within an urban area can provide many benefits, including improving inhabitants’ mental and physical wellbeing, to filtering urban pollutants and aiding the offset of carbon emissions.

Justin Hayward, Technical Timber Manager at Lathams, explores the versatility of engineered wood and its increasing popularity in both contemporary and heritage projects.

With the world still in the grip of COVID-19, the built environment is having to respond. While lockdown is easing, it is being done on the condition that social distancing and hygiene are top of the agenda for individuals and businesses. This means changes to the places we work, shop and relax; changes that are likely to remain until next year at least.

This has been an unprecedented year on many levels, what with construction sites having to implement social distancing measures and four in 10 architects reportedly struggling with their mental health during lockdown . The industry has been battling to keep sites open and building work progressing, and the UK’s 2020 outlook now sits between a contraction of 5 to 12%, with the bounce back in 2021 forecast to be between 1 and 10%.

Major construction projects are becoming increasingly more complex, involve multiple task teams and span several years, making projects fraught with challenges. As individual task teams work in isolation from other members of the delivery team, the result is unsynchronised processes and procedures with no defined standards for quality control. As a result, issues are only identified as work commences on site, causing abortive work and wasted materials which all come at a cost to the project and the environment, says Paul Hargreaves, Group BIM Manager at TÜV SÜD.