Entries in the 2020 Timber Design Awards show what is around the corner
The annual Timber Design Awards, which show off the latest structures and furniture using milled or engineered wood as the lead material, have always been a reliably interesting forum for checking out what’s going down – or up – in the latest application of one of nature’s loveliest materials.
But as revealed in this year’s 101 entries across 25 categories – from stand-alone installations to big commercial buildings largely made of, or lined with, wood in some sort of iteration – a material once restricted to being milled into planks, veneers, particle boards or poles can now be applied to be so apparently fluid that it can make spaces with all manner of curvy volumes.
As the Timber Development Association’s long-time chief executive Andrew Dunn says, “I’ve given up trying to define what the end possibilities of timber are because as soon as we say ‘that can’t be done’, someone will come up with a machine that can do it.”
The awards had just a couple of categories when they were started by the association two decades ago to demonstrate the excellence of timber.
With the explosion of possibilities made available by computers that can be programmed “to so accurately, [relatively] cheaply and easily form shapes from big slabs of wood”, says Dunn, this year’s 21st awards show how excited architects, designers, cabinet makers and builders are in being aided to make things that go so far beyond boxy shapes that the envelope of limitations has been detonated.
While five judges, including last year’s overall winner James Fitzpatrick of fitzpatrick + partners, got to select the best in each category – and as always Australia’s best designers and makers eagerly lined up against talented small-scale creatives – the public also gets to adjudge the spectacular 2020 line-up of entries to select their “People’s Choice” winner.
Dunn says the overall winner is a highly prized accolade in the industry, but second for the entrants is to be named as the people’s choice best in show.
“And like the packing room prize of the Archibald [portrait] prize, normally the people’s choice is not what the judges choose. The people look at it differently.”
In the varietal menu of the awards, industry insiders will be able to identify the authors of many of the entries.
And you’d have to have been living under a trestle this year not to know that the cathedral-like, ribbons of thin oak bending with such extraordinary and unexpected beauty around the performance space inside Judith Neilson’s new Phoenix Gallery are the work of Sydney’s Durbach Bloch Jaggers Architects.
DBJ did the interiors of this august forever building in Chippendale, while Melbourne’s John Wardle Architecture made the folded and crimped brickwork of the exteriors appear as if they were made from fabric.
The building has already won Australian state architecture awards and is currently being celebrated across the globe in the international architecture media.
But the rest of the entries that the public gets to peruse and to have one vote on per accredited email address are presented as anonymous pieces. So the people’s choice option maintains all the fun and intrigue of a blind-tasting.
The amazing dexterity with which the entrants have used this mostly sustainable material is a marvel to behold. It makes the website well worth the visit, if just to see that what can be done now, and to get a glimpse that what might be done in future when timber will only be restricted by human imagination.
Having been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 presentation of the awards has been pushed back to late November and will be made available on the night via YouTube.
Public voting for the people’s choice award closes on September 30.
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