Hybrid Timber Construction

Krittika graduated from the Master of building technology, Architectural Engineering and was pre-selected for the Archiprix 2020. In collaboration with student association BouT and their publication RuMoer, Bnieuws has re-edited and printed Krittika's article. You can contact Krittika via krittikaag@gmail.com

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Words and image Krittika Agarwal

January 2016, the seismic tremor made the porcelain statue tremble on the floor. As I ran down the stairs to help my grandparents, shivers ran down my back. Sadly, the worst was yet to come... Being born in the eastern end of the Himalayan seismic belt, my personal experiences have been the driving force of this research. Traces of the events that I have witnessed in the Indian city Shillong, have created an urgency to meet more rational living standards. In this article, I discuss my graduation project and how it reacts to this urgency by local traces of timber construction.

Following the global trend of using reinforced concrete and steel as main building materials, Shillong is getting transformed into a ‘concrete jungle’. While the city shares the history of earthquakes, the quality and planning of the built fabric still demand very high attention. The region is full of problems which are widely spoken of, yet the lack of initiation of scientific research in the field is impairing local technological growth. The ‘Assam earthquake in 1897’ was one of the most devastating events in the Himalayan Frontal arc and a turning point in the construction history of the region. Following this, the expertise of light-weighted timber construction was borrowed from Japan and introduced as a substitute for the heavy traditional stone houses. This new seismic responsive construction technique called ‘Assam-type construction’ was developed using local timber, bamboo reeds, and lime plaster.

Also, the building industry is responsible for huge environmental impact due to carbon emissions coming from the production of common materials like steel and concrete, pollution during building construction and the energy consumed during the life of the building. The urgency of the global climate change crisis has forced us to question the fundamentals of our building materials. The historical success story in timber construction and abundant local availability creates hope for the region, giving us a strong base to re-investigate. Perhaps timber, being one of the oldest and most natural building materials, would have a more positive environmental impact than highly energyintensive materials. The contextual study of resource availability, innovations in contemporary timber buildings, literature research on timber strucutres and seismic design form the scientific basis of conceptualization of this research. Upon retrofitting and reimagining, this historical construction technology has been transformed into a 6 storey tall timber structure, using locally available natural timber, which slips into the existing requirements of present-day habitants of urban Shillong. The scientific solution is directed by the iterative laboratory tests, structural calculations and computational simulations tailored to accommodate the seismic problem and the current regional technological advancements.

To conclude, the design logic of the proposed technology is encoded in a digital tool that could be used by the local designers for immediate implementation at an early design phase. The final output aims to go as local and ecological as possible. B