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Decorative image — Five reasons why timber buildings are the future
The Black & White Building is our most sustainable workspace to date. Here’s why...
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Fora

Spend any time at all speaking to Andrew Waugh, the co-principle of Waugh Thistleton Architects, who worked with us to design The Black & White Building, and it won’t be long before you get onto the business of construction. Waugh is a passionate advocate for sustainable design and an internationally recognised expert on mass timber architecture.

“We need to break our addiction to concrete and steel,” he says. “The building industry is one of the largest polluters globally, and in the UK over 50% of landfill is construction waste.” With its timber design and innovative use of natural materials, The Black & White Building is a new kind of office (in fact it’s the tallest mass timber office building in central London) and an exciting chapter in our sustainability journey at Fora.

Here are five of the ways that timber buildings can help the planet to reach net zero, with some insight into how The Black & White Building became our most sustainable workspace ever.

1. Sustainable sourcing

The timber we used to create The Black & White Building was sourced from managed forests in central Europe. While the idea of cutting down trees to make buildings may sound counter-intuitive, countries like Austria are a leading global source for sustainable timber, and only 40% of the sustainable timber grown annually in Europe is harvested, so there’s a huge surplus of raw material.

“All these forests are FSC or PEFC regulated, which means that for every tree that you cut down, you have to plant three to five trees in its place,” explains Waugh. “The way in which you cut a tree down, how it’s cut down and where it’s cut down are all regulated. We’ve visited the foresters and sawmills who supply our projects – we really do understand the supply chain.”

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