Cork House [2of2] - Matthew Barnett Howland - BS110

00:09:52    JEFFREY HART
uh so it's this

00:09:54    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
is going

00:09:55    JEFFREY HART
to be a drastic swerve

00:09:59    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
in yeah good

00:10:00    JEFFREY HART
material so i saw at the waste age exhibition yeah um i saw There was a little video, I think it was something to do with this house. It was certainly Ameren, but they showed a robotic

00:10:17    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
arm. Oh yeah, the machine

00:10:18    JEFFREY HART
thing, yeah. Like the ones that build cars, that sort of multi-angle.

00:10:23    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah, the Cooper

00:10:24    JEFFREY HART
robot. Yeah,

00:10:25    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
just whizzing round. Yeah, speed it up. Yeah. Okay.

00:10:29    JEFFREY HART
when I use this stuff, I wanted to get, they called it shiplap, I think. It was a product on the website.

00:10:38    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
That's right.

00:10:39    JEFFREY HART
I wanted that as a stopping water tracking in, but couldn't find anyone to sell it to me. So I made my own with a router table and spent days putting it through. It machines remarkably well, isn't it? How nice is it to

00:10:56    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
work with? Yeah,

00:10:57    JEFFREY HART
and the granules, the little fine granules that come out were just

00:11:03    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
compost. Yeah, that's right. Brilliant.

00:11:06    JEFFREY HART
Is there sort of

00:11:08    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
an interlocking?

00:11:08    JEFFREY HART
That's a sort of strange way into that question. Are these blocks sort of sculpted to be, they're more than just a slab? Yeah, machining.

00:11:20    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah, good question. It feels

00:11:26    JEFFREY HART
odd to try

00:11:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
and get back to... Yeah, yeah. No, well, that's the weird way. It's not... It's not unconnected to that story, because in terms of this lovely material with this nice backstory, and in terms of preserving its nature until after the when it stops being a building again in future, it obviously relies upon disassembly or relatively easy slash economic disassembly. And one of those, one of the key factors there obviously is not sticking things together with glue and mortar. And one of the ways of doing that obviously is through dry jointed construction. a bit like dry stone wall, or even the ancient cold tomb structures that were made without glue or mortar. And the way of achieving that, in this instance, at the same time as meeting contemporary building regulations, was to use the digital technology, in that instance, a KUKA robot, to achieve that nice snug friction fit interlocking system. So yes, it's a tongue and groove system with no offset in the toolpaths, so by which I mean that block below is machined exactly as the negative of the block above, or vice versa, which gives you this really nice friction fit, which we did initially just through a router, like you. There's quite a lot of hand tooling in the first couple of prototypes and so on, and it's a really nice fit. It

00:13:25    JEFFREY HART
kind of... It almost

00:13:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
sort of... It sort of... It's nice, it's nice. And... What did that really give us in terms of, I guess it gave, I guess it gives you just a nice, tight, structural interlocking fit. Obviously, you don't really want to wobble built into it. I don't think it really did much more than that in terms of air tightness. So I mean, obviously, it would have contributed a bit to the air tightness. But then if you're relying on a dry jointed system, there are always going to be places in the construction as a whole where that isn't the total perfect friction fit. Yeah. Interference

00:14:11    JEFFREY HART
fits, what they call it in the machine world. As in, so it's just

00:14:15    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
touching enough to create a bit of friction. Yeah. So, yeah, it was a really lovely thing to work with. And I did most of the prototypes by hand, like you did. And then it got to the point where where we were, although it sounds like a nice simple idea, blocks of cork equals wall, or equals roof, that material simplicity actually ended up, in order to function really as a proper piece of wall or roof, ended up quite complex geometry to each of the blocks, with the tongue and the groove. And obviously you get corner blocks, half blocks for windows, eaves blocks, then the roof as it corbels in. I can't tell you how many block types that generates. And obviously offsetting creates quite a lot of complexity, because obviously in the wall it's relatively straightforward, which you could probably do on a router, just push it through a spindle molder, get an easy tongue and groove, you know. But when you start offsetting, obviously your tongue and groove don't line up above and below. And then corners, And then we had all these extra grooves for water management, which I'll come back to in a minute, because it is a red herring, was a red herring in the research. Anyway, because the way I'm going to with this is, the complexity in those roof blocks you just wouldn't slash couldn't do by hand with any level of accuracy, or if you did it would take you four hours a block. So the barklet has got relatively well, very good robotics department in the workshop there. This was about, again, eight years ago now. And so the guy who runs the workshop there, or used to run the Beemade fabrication facility there, Peter Scully, he was really useful and helpful in taking that hand analog technology into the digital world. Then obviously, then you're into toolpaths and You know, so whether it's Rhino or SolidWorks and how that connects into toolpath software, that's, you know, for the research, it was done on the KUKA robot using Rhino and Grasshopper to drive the toolpaths. And that was good enough for the little test cabin we made, which proved a sort of proof of concept halfway through the research, and then we realized, and then in the next step up, we realized that that form of digital fabrication was one block at a time. KUKA robots are not really ideal for making that sort of very accurate orthogonal geometry on that sort of scale. So we went to five axis, CNC machine workshop called Buck Doodle in Suffolk. And because the house is 1300 blocks. Right. And It just made sense to go slightly more commercial with that. And then he turned out to be a really interesting character who I'm still very good friends with, and we're still working with him on the other core type projects. It was a hell of an undertaking for him, because they're quite big. Because you're machining them on this side, you've got quite big Z-axis. There aren't that many workshops that do that scale of Z-axis on a five-axis CNC. Most of it's done more with the scale of steel engineering and so on, smaller scale components. And it was hugely messy and loads of dust and they had to get these extraction systems on. Anyway, that's how we delivered the house. So he would make about 25, 30 blocks in a batch, deliver them here in a van while I was going around and making sort of building at the house up course by course in a kind of Lego type way. Each course had a little diagram with block numbers and I'd have to sort them out and then set them up around the edge of the CLT slab. you know, with a big, with a bigger scaffolding cover to keep the whole place dry. Yeah. And then it was really nice. Once you got to the swing of it, it was actually really, it was relatively straightforward. You lay all the blocks out and then at the end of the day, you could just go around and they literally would just go 10,

00:19:14    JEFFREY HART
15 seconds a

00:19:15    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
block. Yeah. Yeah. But obviously I don't want to give you the wrong impression that it was, that it was all, you were having

00:19:22    JEFFREY HART
a lovely time the whole

00:19:23    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
time. Yeah, exactly. So the machining, yeah, because it's about 18 meters long, the building, you're relying upon the last block that goes in on each course has to be a double female, as it were. Because you can't get that last block in, so it has to come from above. And that last, if you're going to get an interference fit, you're asking the building to be half a millimeter accurate, over 18 meters or so. And occasionally, it was great. Occasionally, it'd sort of slide in and you'd go, yeah. And then occasionally, oh man, here we go. And you get the old hand tools out and off you go, butchering it. Yeah. How long

00:20:05    JEFFREY HART
did it actually take to build? Don't

00:20:08    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
know really. When I look back on it, I had another guy help me who lived on site. And we think it took us about a year between the two of us if we were working. full time every week, we reckon about a year for two

00:20:29    JEFFREY HART
that's for a building of this size, that's it's quite efficient, you know, foundations,

00:20:37    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
you know, services. Yeah, it's all right.

00:20:44    JEFFREY HART
I suppose my house took 18 months of just me. Yeah, but

00:20:48    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
part, but if you condensed

00:20:49    JEFFREY HART
it all.

00:20:50    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah. Yeah. But it didn't feel, and obviously the self-build was a huge part of it, a huge motivation, which, you know, isn't something really that I talk that much about. But yeah, as I said, going back to, you know, I like being physical and outdoors. And so that was a real motivation to do that, not to go back into conventional practice.

00:21:15    JEFFREY HART
So you said that the guy dropped off 25 blocks at a time. Yeah. How quick was he sort of producing them? Yeah, pretty quick.

00:21:23    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Tim's allowed me to use their site just here and had a hole in the fence. And so I stored them all. And often, obviously, the block you'd want, as you can imagine, is deep, deep down

00:21:36    JEFFREY HART
at the

00:21:36    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
bottom of the pile. They need to cover them up. And I had sort of huge tarpaulins, like 20 meters long. Logistics, isn't

00:21:46    JEFFREY HART
it? Just

00:21:46    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
logistics. Because until you get to the eaves and you lock the whole structure together with this timber ladder, at the eaves, which there is, typically great if you like, and plan. The house is pretty, it's a pretty movable feast really, because there's no mortar or glue, no? So it wants to, not wants to, but it can move longitudinally, laterally, diagonally, you know, when the wind blows, yeah. So there was an interesting phase where when I built the walls, nothing's holding in place. The ladder goes up and then just getting it, getting the walls into the millimetre perfect position so that the ladder, which is prefabricated as well, would fit. And then once you bolted and screwed all that down, then the house becomes a kind of thing, a fixed structure. So all the beams and ring beam, valley beams, CLT wardrobes, so they're all prefabricated in Estonia, strangely. Just got a really good deal from someone, so it wasn't direct from the mill.

00:23:08    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah, so that was an interesting discipline, was everything, which I've not done before, everything being drawn. So breaking the building down, I guess, from the architectural thing, breaking it down into components, and then sending those off to some workshop somewhere, whether it's the cork or the timber or the doors and windows, and understanding all those processes enough to send those drawings off as fabrication drawings. and then getting them sent direct back to me, not to a warehouse or via a company or anything like that. As I say again, it was that materials idea. That was a really lovely thing as well. Actually,

00:23:52    JEFFREY HART
that was a really

00:23:55    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah. Doors and windows, they were fantastic. I got a really fantastic joiner prototyping with me. Because again, you won't come across this, but when you open the, they're a bit like a Velfak, so the opening frame shuts onto the fixed frame. You don't get a double thickness or an offset. But that's really hard to achieve if the outside bit is also timber. And Velfak do it by having the outside bit being

00:24:25    JEFFREY HART
aluminium. Oh,

00:24:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
I see. Anyway, that was nice. So all the doors and windows are totally bespoke as well. That's quite something because just understanding, it makes you think a lot about when you're doing things from first principle about water, and air pressure, and drainage, and that really works. Actually, the doors and windows, probably when one of the RBA judges came, that was the thing she was most interested in. She said, you should really think about those doors and windows, never mind the cork stuff. in terms of scalability. And they are really successful. They're a coyer, super stable, good longevity. Yeah, I think they're really, those are probably the most successful things coming out of it in the long term. Oh, Greg, that's right. So with the cork, that was interesting. We had all these extra grooves and things. Again, so it became what I was, what I, Oliver and I were looking at with the doors and windows in terms of understanding pressure and water. We sort of looked at that at the scale of the whole wall and roof in terms of how do you design a block system that's dry jointed, so water's gonna come in, no? You can't stop that. It's gonna come in through those joints. And how do you then control the water? into grooves, vertical, some of which are vertical if it's on a perpendicular during the perp, and then catch that water in a groove, take it down into a horizontal groove in the block below, and then feed that out into a groove that exits. Sort of a

00:26:06    JEFFREY HART
little internal gutter.

00:26:07    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
My water management facade. That's fancy. And actually, weirdly, although So the reason it doesn't work, and the reason it was a huge waste of time and effort and money, probably about 10 grand's worth of machining down the drain, literally actually, is because obviously cork's like a sponge, eh? Because it's reconstituted material. So it's permeable. Right. So it's like designing grooves in a sponge cake or something. It's pointless, no? If you pour a hose onto a sponge cake, it's wet. It doesn't

00:26:50    JEFFREY HART
matter how many

00:26:51    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
grooves you put in it. So that system works if the material itself is impermeable. It's actually a very clever system.

00:26:59    JEFFREY HART
Yeah. If we had

00:27:01    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
a technology that made magical, impermeable cork blocks using a water-resistant binder, and so the blocks were sort of big, yeah, impermeable units, then it's a great system. Yeah. Which we really, which honestly, when

00:27:16    JEFFREY HART
we did it

00:27:17    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
on the prototype, it was like, because we got, it's a double thing as well, a double lock, so where the tongue fits into the groove in plan, you've got an opportunity at the front of that joint to catch the water and then if the water somehow managed to get through to the back yeah we've got another one there that goes into this double groove in plan and then it all feeds back up honestly we were like we were like come on that's pretty bloody good come on olivina we're high-fiving and then and then and then we did the water test and it came out of these grooves we're like fuck that's so clever man And then over the space of sort of six months, well, the prototype eventually started to leak. Right. Because it was just a big

00:28:09    JEFFREY HART
sponge cake. Was

00:28:11    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
this the cabin?

00:28:12    JEFFREY HART
Yeah. Yeah.

00:28:13    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Ooh, yeah, that's not, that's not worked, is it? And then we went back to how the cork is made. So when it comes out of the pressure cookers, it's this big steaming, it's a brilliant looking thing. Got great readers of it. It's like a sort of, like a spaceship as it comes out there with smoke going everywhere. It smells amazing and the heat. And it goes into this chamber and about 50 hollow needles get, shoved into the top of it, which impregnate water deep into its heart of the cooking block to stop it cooking. Otherwise it keeps on cooking and burns, which is a disaster. And as it does this, all the water comes piling out the sides of the block. So we've been to the factory, watched this happen. What does that tell you? It tells you that the block is permeable, doesn't

00:29:08    JEFFREY HART
it?

00:29:09    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
So honestly, one day we went, hang on a minute, Oliver, remember that video? He

00:29:17    JEFFREY HART
got the

00:29:18    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
video out. Our man. Anyway, so then we had to reassess how those blocks performed and that they were not just breathable, but also for a long period of time in the roof, particularly where you're catching water vertically. on an inclined surface. Eventually, over a number of months, that will come through, unless you put some kind of jacket on the roof. The walls, I'm happy with it. The walls are

00:29:50    JEFFREY HART
like a

00:29:51    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
brick wall. That's what it's like. And it's like making a clay brick, you know, like a Georgian house. If you made a roof out of cobalt clay bricks, eventually it would leak. Like in all vaults around London, the brick built underneath roads, they're all soggy. Because over time, that percolates through. So yeah, that was explaining why all that super smart ass Channels and things. But it was, you know, anyway. So the walls are just

00:30:22    JEFFREY HART
solid, let's say just solid. Yeah, so they'll get wet about, we

00:30:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
reckon, we did some tests after that, about two or three inches into their depth. Uh-huh.

00:30:33    JEFFREY HART
And then

00:30:34    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
will dry out. Yeah, because they haven't got any membranes in there. That's where the monolithic nature helps you out. Yeah. Like it would on a solid brick wall.

00:30:46    JEFFREY HART
Yeah. And so the wind blows and blows away that dries it

00:30:51    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
also, obviously, it's important. It's occupied like a brick. And if you're going to a brick house that has been occupied for 10 years, it damp and moldy, especially on north faces. It's a much more living, interactive kind of relationship to the environment

00:31:08    JEFFREY HART
have. Yeah. Yes.

00:31:09    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
You know, they do really that whole concept of breathability and that often confuses people in terms

00:31:17    JEFFREY HART
of air tightness.

00:31:18    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yes. And in terms of permeability, you know, they're all slightly different

00:31:24    JEFFREY HART
concepts. Yeah. We've

00:31:26    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
talked about that

00:31:27    JEFFREY HART
quite a lot. Yeah. What

00:31:29    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
was I going to

00:31:31    JEFFREY HART
I'm exhausted actually.

00:31:33    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
You're doing fantastic, by the way. This is great.

00:31:37    JEFFREY HART
I think it was that stuff

00:31:39    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
about death that finished me off.

00:31:45    JEFFREY HART
You might get

00:31:46    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
the first

00:31:46    JEFFREY HART
one. Yeah, assembly. So it's

00:31:48    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
going through this life cycle. So we did the cork, done the fabrication. We mustn't forget the transport as a life cycle, because it's Portuguese material. Well, it's Mediterranean material. It's obviously going to have quite a lot of transport carbon emissions associated with it. Just to give you an idea, about half of the tonnage, well half of the, well it was tonnage in the end, of sequestered carbon in the fabric of the house is offset in the transport.

00:32:22    JEFFREY HART
Right, have you got sort of numbers

00:32:25    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
for that?

00:32:26    JEFFREY HART
No isn't

00:32:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
it, except

00:32:27    JEFFREY HART
for Lancer. I think

00:32:29    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
it was around

00:32:34    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
30,000 kilograms. So that's 30 tons. Right. So

00:32:38    JEFFREY HART
I guess around...

00:32:39    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Of sequestered. Yeah. In the

00:32:42    JEFFREY HART
whole building. In the

00:32:44    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
cork. Yeah. And about 15 tons in transplant. Right. We had a whole life carbon assessment done by Simon Sturgis. You've probably come across, who now his organization is called Targeting Zero. At the time it was a carbon assessment business, which no longer exists. It was quite a long time ago, when was that? Six years ago maybe? Five, six years ago we were having those assessments done My knowledge wasn't what it is now, and the industry's probably wasn't, and we didn't massively interrogate it, but it was a whole life carbon assessment according to BS EN 15978, which is the RICS methodology, also adopted by RBA and Ton, and also relates to a European standard as well. And then that did show it was the lowest whole life carbon assessment they'd ever assessed. And particularly embodied carbon was very low compared to the model reference projects that they were using at the time, which obviously would be much, those reference projects would have significantly

00:33:58    JEFFREY HART
improved since

00:33:59    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
then. Yes. So we've got material origins, how it's made in the factory, then it's transported, we've got a lot of carbon, then it goes to the workshop in Suffolk, Watdoodle, where it's machined, which obviously also uses embodied carbon. Then it's brought down here, we'll transport. Packaging, which often isn't talked about.

00:34:23    JEFFREY HART
I've talked about it quite a lot recently. It's one of my bugbears. Bugbears,

00:34:28    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
yes. So that came on pallets, which I couldn't get anyone to take off my hands. No really? No, no one interested. 50 pallets or something, maybe more. Wrapped in that cellophane that holds things together really beautifully in transport. But what do you do with that? Yeah. One nice part of that is that the waste from the machining, Richard found a way of compressing it into briquettes, little elephant poos they look like. And then he uses that still, I think, to heat

00:35:01    JEFFREY HART
his massive

00:35:02    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
workshops up there. Brilliant. Brilliant for him. I've paid for that.

00:35:07    JEFFREY HART
Sorry, not only

00:35:08    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
have I paid for it by the court, I then paid for him to machine it. And then he gets to heat his workshop. Anyway, he's still a good, he's a very good friend as a result. So that's the packaging. Then the assembly process, which as I say, is a rather, that again was a very satisfying, another pretty successful part of the thesis. And it was generally speaking, rather nice thing to build. Quite sort of caveman-y, primitive. Your tool

00:35:49    JEFFREY HART
kit for the day must have been pretty... Hand tools

00:35:53    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
generally, nothing major. maybe a chop saw, maybe electric planer, a router, you know, the usuals, you know, and a general multi tool for those bad moments when the block refuses to fit. Yeah. And obviously, and then and then just the cordless drill, you know, by and large, because everything is. Either done by friction. Placed in position by hand. or it's mechanically fixed using bolts wherever possible and if not then screws so bolts for the doors and the windows those bolts i was describing earlier for the actual structure brass screws for the floorboards furniture screwed together everything pops out everything's accessible no hidden fixings Roof is assembled without formwork, which is unusual. So voltage structures generally require falsework. I see. Yes. This is quite interesting.

00:37:05    JEFFREY HART
We're doing

00:37:07    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
it this kind of form of construction, the corbel, which obviously predates volts and voussoirs and so on. So as you build up three or four courses and it starts to come in board, as you walk around on that when you get to about the third or fourth course obviously it starts to give obviously there's a limit to which point you might drop in so that's why when you look up here every fourth course i see you see a a minor ring beam we called it it's about 150 by 50, so 6 by 2 on its side, because obviously the problem isn't vertical load, it's lateral load with cork, because it's weak in that direction. So that would stiffen it up, so it would geometrically help you set the roof out, it would hold it in the right kind of dimension, so then the blocks would keep working as it were. And yeah, I mean, you can walk around, so it's almost like built-in sacrificial scaffolding. Integrated scaffolding. Yeah.

00:38:16    JEFFREY HART
And then

00:38:17    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
you build four more, another one, four more, and then the roof light, which again is the timber frame, holds it true, and then you drop the roof lights on. And then so the roof lights, and the foundation, the screw part foundations and the CLT floor, those three things are where I had help from a friendly local builder with a telehandler and a massive Polish bloke to help me lift things into

00:38:47    JEFFREY HART
place. And

00:38:48    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
I mean, just giant. So otherwise it was just done, yeah, very light, light technology. That was really lovely thing. Which again, I don't think was totally thought

00:39:03    JEFFREY HART
through at the outset. Had you already sussed out the sort of integrated scaffolding

00:39:09    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
on your test? That happened on the test one, you know, on the cabin. Again, that happened working, you know, partly through us working with the material and doing test structures, but also working with Arup, who were fantastic, brilliant, two brilliant engineers. Arup, who were timber specialists, and they were great. They were part of the research team and part of the engineering team for the house itself. Yes, that

00:39:43    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah, the only real challenge during the assembly was fixing the house into shape when you move from the wall to the roof. It's a big moment. I had to make a very elaborate clamping system with these quite Heath Robinson ratchet straps, you know, like literally about 20 ratchet straps, about 30 metres long, going around the walls with anatomy and clamps. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise

00:40:11    JEFFREY HART
it would

00:40:11    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
destroy the cork. So these big reinforced timber end clamps, quite a lovely set of things they were. And he ratcheted it up, so putting God knows how many tonnes of pressure through all the walls, longitudinally through the walls, if that makes sense, to kind of get into position. Then you could drop in the ring beam, and then life was good.

00:40:34    JEFFREY HART
Just drop it in the room,

00:40:36    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
really. Yeah, that was relatively easy, because then that was all

00:40:39    JEFFREY HART
pre-fabbed. So it just

00:40:41    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
had to be exactly how you drew it. There are some screwed down metal plates making the connections in there. But again, those would be accessible. So the point about the falsework is that, therefore, when you're disassembling the building, it's quite uneconomic to have to rebuild a load of temporary falsework, which is what you would do. for a vaulted building. So here, you go up, you take the roof light off, take down the blocks, take off that minor ring beam, unscrew them at the corners, only two screws each corner, take those off, then go all the way down, then you get to the eaves, you take off the six metal plates that are in the ring beam, which are now accessible, take those off, ring beams come back out as parts, you take the valley beams off. Valley beams are the beams that run between the pyramids. And then the same for the walls, down to the base, windows and doors pop out very easily. Like I say, six bolts, 10 minutes. Even these CLT wardrobes, these structural wardrobes, which is what the ladder beam is tied down to for the lateral loading. So these are working that direction laterally. Those you can see, so everything's expressed and accessible. So those undo. Floorboards unscrew. Again, the CLT panels on the screw, the lap jointed with the CLT screws, they come out. If they lift those out of the Akoya ring beam around the edge, which is just a 300 by 100 beam with a ledge beam screwed into it, which a ledge beam is just an extra batten at the bottom of the beam that the CLT sits on through gravity. So lift out the CLT, unbolt the sections of a coil ring beam which go from screw pile to screw pile, so about 3.6 meters span each one. So I don't know what that is, let's call it 20 bits of beam. And then the screw piles come out. And then you're left with

00:42:41    JEFFREY HART
a garden,

00:42:41    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
gone, nothing. Gone, just left, left, back to pure garden. Cork house was never here. and all those materials, in theory, have been relatively easy to recover or reclaim, let's call it, it's a more conventional word. So it's reclaimed. Now, whether those materials genuinely are reusable is a more complex question.

00:43:10    JEFFREY HART
Like, could you, as in, could you take them and build a structure elsewhere

00:43:16    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah, because the circular economy, one of the key words there, apart from the idea of the circle, is the word economy. So is there really an economy of cork bricks out there? No, not unless you turn it into a scalable thing. And then at what point does a system really become a platform across an industry? I mean, the world's supposed to be a simple place, but we have Apple and Microsoft

00:43:46    JEFFREY HART
now, which don't

00:43:47    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
talk very well to each other. And actually, the best material for the circular economy is as old as the hills, isn't it? Which is a brick with lime mortar. What's not to like about that? Yeah. Totally reusable. Everyone understands it. It's in between the material and the product. It's a really interesting thing, isn't it? And if it's lime water, clean the water off. I built a house about 30 years ago. My first house for myself was made with reused bricks, London stocks. Tragically, at the time, because I was an idiot, I used cement-based mortar, which still most people use. Yeah, so it couldn't

00:44:31    JEFFREY HART
be reused again. We're doing a house

00:44:34    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
at the moment that's made entirely with reused stone and brick from a demolished house on the site that we're reclaiming. And that's possible because it's a Victorian house made with lime mortar. And obviously, over time, they'll probably degrade a bit and lose their arises and probably limit how many times you can do that. And then there's a lot of, people have a lot of issues with the embodied carbon that goes into firing bricks, or at least the timber brigade do. Sly use of the word brigade there. You know, there's a lot to be said for that. It's fired, but it still goes back to the, in a thousand years when that starts to break apart, that still goes back into a dust, which I imagine, can go back into the pedosphere from where it came from, you know, the clay strata. But it's got a lot of building lifespans in that. Yeah, well, interesting conversation there, isn't it? You were deconstructing

00:45:39    JEFFREY HART
the

00:45:40    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
building. Deconstructing, so... I think I've deconstructed

00:45:45    JEFFREY HART
it, yeah. While you were doing that, I was sort of mentally wondering how long it would take sort of verbally deconstruct, you know, a conventional build. Yeah. Yeah. Well, could you? Well,

00:46:00    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
exactly. There's so

00:46:01    JEFFREY HART
many. You'd get

00:46:03    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
stuck, wouldn't you? Yeah. When you got your plaster skim on top of plasterboard with scrim tape and foil on the back of it with black screws fitted into a maybe metal, aluminium metal stud or steel stud,

00:46:22    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah. Talk me through that one. Yeah. Yeah. Cork and fire.

00:46:29    JEFFREY HART
Mm. But you've, there's these beautiful sprinkler systems within your building,

00:46:43    JEFFREY HART
flammable is cork? It's

00:46:46    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Euro class E. Well, that's what we were dealing with at the time. I mean, now since leaving the EU, we now have to talk in terms of UK, but at the time it was a European material with a European partner and their cross platform. So we called it Euroclass E, which essentially means

00:47:09    JEFFREY HART
it's pretty rubbish. So A would

00:47:11    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
be non-flammable. Yeah. Concrete. Right. Yeah. It's difficult because I don't like talking about materials, the fire performance of materials in isolation from how they perform in situ as a building. Because it is a complex interaction to do with compartmentation, escape routes, sprinkler systems, spread of fire, fire integrity or structural performance during fire. So yeah, so it's complicated, but that's my, so I think that's really important thing to, we had a fire engineer on this that was Arab again. So in order to meet building regulations with where this building sits in relation to the boundary and the layout of the house and the nature of the material and the nature of the fire suppression and detection system, it meets building regulations. Yeah. Does that mean that cork is a sensible or easy material to use in relation to fire? Probably not. So. Yeah. Because it's I mentioned this earlier,

00:48:38    JEFFREY HART
a trade show where someone was selling cork and they said, of course, you know, cork is non flammable.

00:48:48    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
And I

00:48:50    JEFFREY HART
nonsense because I'm using offcuts in

00:48:55    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
my wood burner

00:48:56    JEFFREY HART
to start my fires. I know

00:48:58    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
very well that's not true. So we did a fire test, a proper BRE fire test to the relevant BS during the research process for the roof, the performance of the roof, which is a roof classification, which is AA, AB, AC and so on. We had to achieve, I think, in A, B, anyway, we achieved it in terms of the spread of flame and the integrity and fire penetration, if you like. And yes, there was some charring, as you'd expect. And over the course of the test, we lost about 60, 70 millimeters of the thickness of the material, but that's okay because it's very thick. So it still worked as a structure, but that is meeting a very specific set of performance requirements in relation to regulations that relate to roofs. which is a certain temperature, a certain distance of the fire panel in the test from that surface, how long it burns for us. When it comes to walls, we haven't, we didn't do, because I didn't need to, fully understand or do the fire test for load-bearing walls. So in a single-story building, you need to understand how the roof performs, but you don't need to understand necessarily how the walls perform. And in terms of fire, you know, there are lots of routes out from this, and it's got springs, and it meets necessary regulations through fire engineering. You know, I'm pretty certain that, well, I know that wall tests are more demanding as one would expect if you start building multi-story buildings out of it. Yeah, it's complicated. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like, I know there's all sorts of discussions, shall we call them, going on across the industry about building in

00:51:11    JEFFREY HART
timber and

00:51:12    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
building in timber at height. Yes. The magic 18 metres and 11 metres and so on. But. Yeah, you know, it's a combustible material, so, you know, proceed with caution. I think the same with tall

00:51:29    JEFFREY HART
buildings. Yes. I'm not saying

00:51:31    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
that, you know, One shouldn't make tall buildings using timber, using CLT mass timber, but. Not to be sensible about it, the people I know that we worked with in Edinburgh originally, he did some characterisation of the material rather than the full BRE testing. I mean, I watched some of their, where they comment on some of the industry discussions going on. And they're very, you know, when you listen to a fire engineers, they're Well, as you'd hope, very sensible. Yes. Yes. Circumspect about some of the claims that are made by some parties in some situations, as you say, in trade shows or. Yeah, just yeah. What topic is it? Yeah, it's a difficult one. I mean, then the question of building high in any material probably is interesting. Yeah. Never mind whether it's combustible material or

00:52:39    JEFFREY HART
not. Mm hmm. Well,

00:52:40    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
yes. You've still got to. You've still got people at height, haven't you, a long way from escape, let's call it. Unless it's unless it's a stay in place strategy, you've still got people, you know, a long way. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty tough stuff, isn't it? Yes. I don't

00:53:01    JEFFREY HART
think I'd want the job of specifying that.

00:53:04    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
No, no, no.

00:53:05    JEFFREY HART
Nor do

00:53:06    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
we. I'm not sure I'd ever want to go there, really. I think the mid-rise is a nice place to hover in terms of one's interest, architecturally, for urban reasons and so on. Yeah. I'm not a massive fan of any high-rise, really. So I suppose that makes my position on fire quite easy, really. Yeah. Don't go high. Yeah. Insulation

00:53:30    JEFFREY HART
wise, obviously cork is an insulator. It sounds

00:53:36    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
like you

00:53:37    JEFFREY HART
made the wall thickness based on kind of the material thickness. Sort of instability.

00:53:45    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
And yeah. Yeah.

00:53:47    JEFFREY HART
Yeah. How much insulation do you have? Yeah,

00:53:51    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
it's in the walls. I think it's about point one.

00:53:59    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah. And

00:54:00    JEFFREY HART
then does it change in the... Changes

00:54:03    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
a bit in the roof because you've got slightly fatter and thinner moments in the profile. So it's 0.13 I think. Okay. It's good

00:54:11    JEFFREY HART
though. It's

00:54:12    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
good. But you know, it's a slightly, it's quite a lot of material. Yeah. So then you get to that, you know, it's that again going, is it more intelligent to use different materials? for functions that they're really good at. Three or four materials, maybe one for structure, one for intellect. And of course, there's a good argument for that. Yeah, it'd be idiotic if I didn't acknowledge that. But there are some benefits in terms of building a life cycle in using a single monolithic material, making things simple, So that's what's interesting about the Building Life Cycle as an approach, the whole life approach as I call it. Again, it's really useful when you're teaching as well, it's a really good overarching framework for having an intelligent, nuanced conversation about buildings and where some decisions work really well, and maybe those decisions don't work so well in other places in the building life cycle. And it's no magic bullet. I don't know of any system yet that nails every single thing. It's brilliant in terms of performance and cost and scalability and disassembly. So that's where I think it's really useful. framework for thinking about buildings and

00:55:42    JEFFREY HART
design process.

00:55:43    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
Yeah. Yeah. Balanced, balanced decision

00:55:49    JEFFREY HART
I think just sort of wrapping up, I guess. Yeah. First of all, is there anything that you particularly feel

00:55:58    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
like you

00:55:58    JEFFREY HART
want to say?

00:56:00    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
I'm particularly interested in the richness of the material, spatial, embodied experience that a building is, which is why I wanted you to do this podcast in the building. That's what we discussed. Yeah. I didn't want it to be another sort of press interaction, press being what I mean. Yes. Yeah. An interaction with another external party. that was in the abstract that became about sustainability, or actually any of the ideas we've discussed, not in the context of the thing itself, of the experience. Yeah, what that is, talking about ideas over Zoom or somewhere else. I was talking about as a body, as a physical body in a physical space. Well, yeah, metaphysical space, should we say, because the building is sort of physical, but space is somehow metaphysical, isn't it? The importance of having that conversation in here with the smell and the texture, you know, the warmth of it. and feeling

00:57:28    JEFFREY HART
the quality

00:57:29    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
of light, and feeling the form of construction, even feeling the sequence of construction in those corbels, and the load path, you know, the human being that made it. Yeah, that was important to me. So that, I guess that's why I was here, is that I had some funny experiences of people writing about it, or making judgments about it, who haven't been here. That's a funny thing, isn't it, in a world where that increasingly obviously happens now. Inevitably, that's not

00:58:09    JEFFREY HART
good or bad,

00:58:10    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
it's just a fact. It's nice to bring it back sometimes, just to that really simple embodied experience.

00:58:20    JEFFREY HART
ending on moving forward what does what does the future look like uh in

00:58:27    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
terms of future

00:58:29    JEFFREY HART
is cork what's the future

00:58:31    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
like it's all about the past bill um yeah we've had lots of obviously over the last few years about yeah scalability and what we're doing with cork now and stuff, and it's sort of, I've sort of, yeah, as one would imagine, slightly moved on from that. Well, into other materials and how they work and stone works and aluminium. I'm quite Catholic in that sense. That's the other thing I think that the life cycle approach gives you in the thinking about the relationship between buildings, buildings as artefacts, the layer of human systems that feeds into those buildings, and then the layer of Earth systems which feeds into the human system, thinking about it in those terms, what can be simplistic, slightly binary conversations around certain materials at the moment in the industry. Yeah, I think they call it materially agnostic.

00:59:45    JEFFREY HART
OK. That's

00:59:46    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
nice. Just so that we're doing this in this. We just met with this press day today for Chelsea Flower Show next May. And we're doing a garden there for the National Autistic Society. And obviously our involvement really is around the corkiness of it and sustainability. But also there are bits of reused stone in the project. There's aluminium, recycled aluminium, which is dyed with plants. There's a coir, again, mechanically bolted coir frame system. There's a coir mechanically fixed boardwalk system.

01:00:34    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
So yeah, in terms of renewable and non-renewable materials, as I say, I'm pretty agnostic. So for me, it's about developing an architecture now which responds to that broader understanding of the relationship between natural ecosystems and what building life cycles, I guess. So obviously, none of that would have come about, obviously, as I said, originally from 2013 without Cork House. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the future of Cork House is definitely not about Cork. We diagram it, the one with Oliver, we write about it, but we also started diagramming a lot. So I like doing this sort of funny, quite layered or overlapping, interlocking circles and cycles. And then within that, they sit within a geographical context of local to the regional, to the global, and they also have an element of, deep time built into them, don't they? So, you know, some of those systems like the biosphere is probably around roughly human lifetime in terms of plants and trees and so on. But then stone is, you know, millions of years, isn't it? And then the soil is interesting, that has a time scale, isn't it? If you're making with mud or, yeah, so just I think that's a really, you know, and there's no, and what's nice about it, there is no simple way of making an easy,

01:02:15    JEFFREY HART
Yes. Decision

01:02:15    MATHEW BARNETT HOWLAND
about it is just a really lovely thing to sort of work with and understand. And then how those things are brought to those different materials and time scales and ecosystems out there in the hinterland of your thought, how they come together to form a physical object for 60 to 100 to 500 years. You know, I mean, how rich is that? What a way to spend the

01:02:45    JEFFREY HART
day!