vered with gypsum panels, to avoid confusing potential buyers. However, the innovative timber structure was leaked to the press and stories were published in the newspaper. Apparently, all 29 apartments were sold within two hours to buyers, many enthusiastic about the more environmentally friendly construction method.
4.2. CLT Building 2: Bridport House, Hackney, London
The eight-storey Bridport House is (at the time of writing), with Stadthaus, the tallest all cross-laminated timber (CLT) building in the UK (both were constructed for the same developer client and the London Borough of Hackney). Both have pushed the boundaries of CLT construction up to eight storeys, although Stadthaus is marginally taller at nine storeys, featuring a concrete ground floor, whereas Bridport House is CLT from the ground up. Bridport House replaces an original 1950s block with 41 new homes in two joined blocks, one eight storeys and the other five storeys high. All elements from the ground floor upwards are of cross-laminated timber, manufactured and supplied from Austria by Stora Enso Wood Products–including the lift shaft. Below ground level the raft, foundations and lift pit are of reinforced concrete. Often in such projects the ground floor will be concrete because it is used for retail and needs larger facade openings. At Bridport House, however, the lowest two floors are occupied by residential maisonettes that have been oriented in a different direction from the apartments above. In the design phase, reinforced concrete and structural steel was compared in detail with the use of a CLT system (Eurban ran a detailed comparative analysis). There are several reasons why CLT was selected: one was weight. CLT is considerably lighter than the alternative structural materials, as a large Victorian sewer runs beneath the site and point loads needed to be avoided. Speed of construction was another benefit of CLT which can take as little as half the time to construct as a conventional reinforced concrete frame. In addition, the construction process is far less likely to be interrupted in bad weather conditions. Stephen Powney notes in Timber and Sustainable Building Magazine that, despite the transport, carbon saving over steel and concrete was 2113 tonnes; the amount of sequestered carbon is the equivalent saving to providing 20 per cent of the building's energy requirement in use for 139 years . The building was completed in October 2011. Probert noted that CLT was becoming very competitive with UK construction companies, partly due to the carbon sequestration in the structures.
4.3. CLT Building 3: Svartlamoen Multi-Apartment Building in Trondheim, Norway
This development (architects: Brendeland and Kristoffersen, Trondheim, 2005) consists of two buildings with an overall area of around 1000 sqm . The main five-storey building, which measures 6 m × 22 m, also contains rooms that can be used commercially, and the four upper floors contain units of 120 sqm designed to accommodate 5 persons each. The entire construction was made out of solid CLT boards and clad with Norwegian larch. The untreated timber surfaces of the load-bearing elements are exposed on the inside (see Figure 5). The use of prefabricated elements reduced total construction time significantly (9 months, about half the usual time). The efficient assembly of the timber elements allowed four workers to erect the main structure in just 10 working days. This project has provided student housing and was selected through a design competition set up by the city municipality, drawing on grants from the central government for sustainable and innovative buildings. The building was controversial and one of the architects (Brendeland) commented that ‘the day the Svartlamoen housing block was opened, concrete companies took out a full-page advert in the city newspaper showing a blazing timber building, a scare tactic focusing in on timber’s fire risks’ . The following Figure 5 and Figure 6 introduce some of the occupants of the selected cases. A post-occupancy evaluation for the building i