Amin Taha, Founder and Director of Groupwork, sets out a radical approach to new construction: start with a timber building, then go through and assess each component, only substituting materials out where strictly necessary.

Using materials intelligently

Amin Taha, Founder and Director of Groupwork, asked the audience to begin with a deliberately simple thought experiment: “We should make everything out of timber.”

The point was not that timber can replace every material, but that it provides a useful starting point for thinking about carbon storage and material choice. “It’s not about eliminating the high embodied carbon materials. It’s about mixing them intelligently. So, definitely not suggesting we get rid of concrete or steel.”

Taha argued that structural stone can also play a much larger role. “You can actually replace the concrete frame with or a steel frame with stone, with exactly the same skills we’ve got on site at the moment,” he said.

His broader challenge to specifiers was to begin with the lowest-carbon option, then add other materials only where their properties are genuinely required. “My whole building is timber, and then slowly I substitute material, one material after another.”