THE CALL for entries for the Wood Awards 2023 is now live! Enter your wood-centric building, furniture or product before 23 June 2023 and have your work recognised as the best in the UK.
Architects, engineers, installers, furniture makers, product designers — or anyone else with an exceptional timber project — can now enter via the Wood Awards website — free of charge — for a chance to receive a highly coveted Wood Award.
Since 1971, the Wood Awards has been the UK’s premier competition in the timber design and construction industries. By recognising and rewarding outstanding timber design, craftsmanship and installation — and showcasing the many ways that timber transforms and enriches our lives — the Wood Awards acts as a vehicle to drive positive change in our built environment. Submissions are split into Buildings and Furniture & Product, with categories including ‘Commercial & Leisure’, ‘Education & Public Sector’, ‘Interiors’, ‘Private’, ‘Small Project’, as well as ‘Bespoke’, ‘Production’, and ‘Student’, respectively. This covers a wide range of projects, alongside one additional category introduced in 2022: ‘Restoration & Reuse’, which will recognise the ways timber is preserving and enhancing our architectural heritage — and importantly — reducing the embodied carbon of construction. The prestigious Gold Award is given to the standout project that the judges deem to be the overall winner-of-winners. As well as the Gold Award, other awards that can be given at the judges’ discretion include the Structural Award and, for the first time, a newly introduced Sustainability Award.
The Wood Awards is believed to be unique. It is not-for-profit: purely aiming to recognise excellence. It also features an elite independent judging panel that assesses all submitted entries — and visits each shortlisted project in person. This makes the Wood Awards an exceptionally rigorous competition.
Judging panels are led by Jim Greaves of Hopkins Architects, for Buildings, and design critic, curator and journalist, Corinne Julius, for Furniture & Product.
Image © Jim Stephenson.
Jim Greaves, chair of Buildings judges, said, “This year we have a new ‘restoration and re-use’ category that will recognise the work of designers and constructors who have chosen to restore and adapt existing buildings. We have also asked Neil Smith, of Max Fordham, to assist the judges in their assessment of the environmental performance of the entries. With each year the ambition and breadth of the Wood Awards entries grows, and I would positively encourage everyone involved in an interesting timber project to participate.”
Corinne Julius, chair of Furniture judges, comments, “The Wood Awards are aimed at encouraging the use and appreciation of wood by the public, industry, makers and students. We hope that the Awards promote a renewed appreciation of this beautiful, varied, sustainable and renewable material. Wood is the material of the future.”
Dave Hopkins, CEO of Timber Development UK, comments, “Timber Development UK is delighted to be leading on the Wood Awards 2023 after a stellar first year of organisation for 2022. We want to encourage more people to use wood in all kinds of design projects in order to try and decarbonise the material world — and believe that the first step to doing this is to inspire people with incredible designs.”
With permission from the owner, anyone associated with a building or product that has been completed in the last two years is able to enter. Buildings must be located within the UK, whilst furniture and other products must have been either designed or manufactured in the UK. Fitted furniture must be in the UK. There are no restrictions on the size or budget of a project. Entrants are welcome to submit more than one project. All entries must be submitted via www.woodawards.com . Please note that there is no entry fee for submission.
The 2023 shortlist will be announced in September and showcased at a specially commissioned exhibition. The Wood Awards has ambitious plans for an exciting finale to the competition, further details on both will be announced in due course.
As a not-for-profit competition, the Wood Awards can only happen with collaborative industry sponsorship. Major sponsors of the Wood Awards 2023 include Carpenters’ Company, American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) and Timber Development UK
For over 30 years AHEC has been at the forefront of wood promotion in Europe, successfully building a distinctive and creative brand for US hardwoods. AHEC’s support for creative design projects such as Discovered, Connected, and MultiPly for the London Design Festival demonstrate the performance potential of these sustainable materials and provide valuable inspiration. AHEC has pioneered the modelling of environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for hardwoods, an approach that has since been adopted by other industries. LCA measures a number of impacts: primary energy demand (from renewable and non-renewable resources); global warming potential; acidification potential; eutrophication potential; and photochemical ozone creation potential.
The Carpenters’ Company is a City of London Livery Company. The Company was originally established as a medieval trade guild to safeguard the welfare and interests of carpenters in the City of London. Today, charitable activities and support for the craft of woodworking through scholarships, competitions and the Building Crafts College are the two cornerstones of its work.
Timber Development UK has been formed from the merger of two of the largest and longest established organisations in the supply chain, the Timber Trade Federation (TTF) and Timber Research and Development Association (TRADA). Bringing these two associations together as one has created the largest, most comprehensive supply chain body in the UK, spanning from sawmill to specifier and all points in between. The aim is to use this new organisation to capitalise on the growing interest in designing with timber and to act as an agent of change towards more sustainable, low carbon forms of construction.
For contact details, see page 10-11 of our April/May 2023 issue on our Back Issues page.
