Open Source Wood is an initiative that aims to increase the use of wood as a building material by making knowledge and innovation of wood construction better available to everybody. Hackathons invite professionals and students of wood construction to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. The teams are challenged to design a wooden module or element within a single day. After the event, the designs are uploaded on the opensourcewood.com platform, from which anyone can download them and utilise them in their own projects. The designs are licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0.
This time, the hackathon was organised at the Nancy School of Architecture in France and in collaboration with Hors-Site magazine. The challenge was to design a solution for student housing, and the task was to create a wooden module that could be used to build a multistorey house. “It is exciting to see how students in architecture and wood engineering can work with professionals and rethink how a student home can be built using modular wood construction,” says Franck Besançon, a teacher at the Nancy School of Architecture. It was also a requirement to demonstrate how the building could be easily relocated if it were needed somewhere else.
The end results provide practical examples of how using Metsä Wood’s Kerto LVL (laminated veneer lumber) can provide fast, light and green solutions for housing. The winning design is based on portal frames made of Kerto LVL S-beams. The basic solution is easy to extend into multistorey buildings as well. “Off-site construction challenges us to rethink the way we work through the construction chain. The hackathon challenge, completed within a day, requires similar teamwork, resulting in 2D or 3D designs of elements,” says Pascal Chazal, CEO at Hors-Site Magazine.
All the end results are available and free to use at opensourcewood.com
Images and a video of the day: https://databank.metsagroup.com/l/wdVVfL_kdtK5