Surface Design Awards – Complete

• EXTERIOR SURFACE OF THE YEAR - NEW
  This is a new category that recognises wall and surface design products including decorative, creative and inventive surfaces for the exterior of building including both commercial and residential properties.
• HOUSING - EXTERIOR
  Buildings such as houses, flats and apartments that are used for sheltering people. These could be either part of the private or public sector and could be individual dwellings or multi-dwelling developments. Social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing, provided to specified eligible households whose needs are not met by the market are included.

Located in Brockenhurst within the New Forest, this garden building was both designed and built by Neutral Projects. The project gave us an opportunity to pilot a range of alternative, digitally-enabled and low carbon building techniques and provided the client with a gym, a sauna and relaxation facilities in a disused corner of their garden. See our instagram page to see images of the building under construction.

The building is clad with a rainscreen of freshly sawn vertical board-on-board Douglas Fir timber sourced from a local sawmill in the New Forest. The trellis - that re-supports an existing and mature grape vine - is an extension of the cladding; together they act as a single facade element framing the view of the garden from the relaxation room within and providing a degree of solar shading. We chose rough sawn timber to contrast with the highly controlled nature of the vertical cladding.

The building confirmed the high thermal performance of the construction techniques piloted; the enclosure has excellent levels of airtightness due to the highly accurate and tight-fitting cnc-cut kit-of-parts developed and deployed by Neutral Projects for the building.

Project Cost - £120,000
Project Completion Date - 08.06.23

We used Douglas fir timber sourced from the New Forest. We used it fresh cut and rough sawn making it very easy to pick up more timber quickly as and when we needed it. Special detailing was required to ensure the cladding assembly could cope with the movement in the timber as it dried out. We chose a rough sawn finish to keep the costs down, but also to contrast with the regularity and precision of the cladding pattern. The surface deserves to win an award for the following reasons: 1. It demonstrates how cladding surfaces can have multiple purposes; this cladding provides a rainscreen, solar shading and a structure for plant growth. 2. It reimagines what a cladding surface can be by introducing three-dimensionality; the plant structure / trellis and the cladding are imagined as a single element. 3. The experimental and digitally-enabled manner of its assembly - see examples of the assembly manual in the submission images. We designed a complex and dynamic jig - assembled from a series of cnc-cut plywood parts - to complete the cladding in panels rather than installing each board one-by-one as is the tradition. All the types of cladding panels, both ‘standards’ and ‘specials’ could be produced by a single jig by swapping in or out small parts. This method could be adopted in the future to produce beautiful bespoke cladding offsite and at speed.

Trees sequesters carbon as they grow and using the harvested timber locks this carbon away. Using timber sourced locally minimised the carbon associated with its transport.

The issues we faced had to do mainly with the cladding jig we designed. It was the first of its kind and we knew we'd face issues; the idea was to test if an assembly approach like this could be refined and made to work at a larger scale, not to pull off an issue-free installation. Installing the corners were tricky and we'd approach this differently next time around. Our system relied a little too heavily on the precision of the jig. We found that small inaccuracies in each panel's position on the walls accumulated at the end of a run into something unmanageable. In the future, we'd mass produce the panels as we did, but allow the ends of runs or the connections between large runs to be finished in the traditional way to give us more tolerance.

I designed the cladding and the assembly system myself, but had the help of Sam Flynn - a furniture maker - and Joe Mercer - an architect - on site who lent their ideas and contributed greatly to any further iteration of the installation method.