I Remember When /
Retired engineering professor Andy Buchanan has spent a career championing the environment and innovative timber buildings.
Retired engineering professor Andy Buchanan continues to be an advocate for innovate timber buildings
HOW CHRISTCHURCH HAS CHANGED. ANDY
Buchanan recalls growing up in the 1950s when the streets were full of hundreds of bicycles. ‘I was one of them because after going to Cashmere Primary School I’d bike across town to high school every day for five years and come home in the evenings when there was wood smoke and coal smoke thick in the air.’
Houses were nearly all rimu, built out of trees that were hundreds or even thousands of years old. ‘The rimu loggers said it was forestry but it wasn’t, it was mining, because the trees were so old. This house I live in now is a one-hundredyear-old house built of rimu, and it’s delightful, but it would be impossible to find this much rimu now and it would cost an arm and a leg.’
The city was packed with old masonry buildings. ‘It wasn’t until I became a young engineer in the 1970s that I suddenly became aware that these were earthquake hazards, that this was a disaster waiting to happen – and I never expected it in my lifetime but in 2010 it came. I’d been waiting for it for 50 years.’
At the age of 17, a life-changing moment occurred during Andy’s last year at Christ’s College. Having attended a talk on Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA) he flew to Sarawak, Borneo. ‘I stepped off the plane and I was welcomed by an ex-pat English headmaster who said, “Right Andy, you’re teaching maths and science to the fourth and fifth form, and you can be the Boy Scout leader.”’
Andy lived in a small town surrounded by jungle. He went camping with boy scouts and travelled up and down rivers into the heart of the jungle. ‘I saw amazing timber structures – longhouses, shared by dozens of families, all hand-hewn out of the most amazing logs in the days before the forests of Borneo were destroyed and exported to the world.
‘These were huge buildings, built with marvellous precision and polished floors. Some of them were half a mile long, housing a hundred families. The longhouses all had private quarters in the back and communal living in the front, stretched along the river.
‘Prior to commercial logging, there were plenty of trees there. In later life, I went back to Sarawak and I helped my ex-pupils to establish appropriate development and stop the drowning of the country in mega dams, after the destructive logging had cleared much of the country.’
When he returned to Christchurch as a young man,
Andy decided to study civil engineering, partly because of his interest in the buildings in Sarawak but also because a great uncle had been a civil engineer. It was a decision he never regretted. ‘I was taught by world experts on earthquake engineering – never expecting an earthquake. It was all steel and concrete, I wasn’t taught anything about wood. My interest in wood came some years later when I became a greenie. I joined the Native Forest Action Council (NFAC) and I started doing home-grown research into house construction in Christchurch. I presented a paper on that at the Environment ’77 Conference in Christchurch.’
Andy then headed to California and did a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialised in fire safety and buildings. Back in Christchurch, he was employed by what is now Holmes Consulting as a structural engineer, working with architects. One of the buildings he was most proud of from that time was the Canterbury Public Library (designed with architect
Sir Miles Warren), demolished after the earthquake. ‘I went into that building a few days after the earthquake and if I’d been in charge I would have kept it.’
At the same time, Andy campaigned to save native forests. ‘We certainly didn’t need to build houses out of rimu because we had more than enough radiata pine. Most of the rimu being cut down in the 1970s was wasted, which was a crying shame.
‘I had a sort of epiphany when I met a visiting Canadian timber engineering professor. I realised I could marry my conservation interests with my engineering interests when he said, “Why don’t you come to Canada and study timber engineering?” So, in around 1980, I took off with my wife and two babies to Canada and I enrolled in a PhD degree at the University of British Columbia. I started a whole new path of learning. It was fascinating.’
Back in New Zealand, there were no jobs for timber engineers, so Andy set up his own consulting business, Buchanan & Fletcher Ltd, with partner Mike Fletcher. Some buildings from that time are still being used, including the Jellie Park and the Aqua Gym swimming pool buildings, both made out of glued laminated timber.
Then Andy was invited to join his old university. ‘I started teaching and over the next 25 years I probably taught 2,000 students how to make buildings stand up under wind and earthquake and snow and fire, and I had dozens of research students, many of whom are still designing timber buildings.’
Andy’s book, the Timber Design Guide, is still a highly regarded reference book after 30 years. Together with two Italian colleagues, Andy studied timber multi-storey buildings. This led to a new building system called Pres-Lam, for prestressed timber buildings. ‘Most people have heard of prestressed concrete; well, this was doing the same thing with wood. It worked so well that we got a multi-million-dollar research grant and set up a research and development company called STIC – the Structural Timber Innovation Company.’
From 2008 to 2013, Andy coordinated the timber research programmes at the Universities of Canterbury, Auckland, and Sydney. ‘That research and development, during those five years and beyond, has led to lots of exciting new timber buildings around the country.’
In Christchurch, new buildings using Pres-Lam technology include the Trimble Navigation building, the Young Hunter building at 134 Victoria Street, and the old St Elmo Courts building, now Wynn Williams House – a hybrid building with 102 massive timber beams, mostly hidden from view.
Andy believes new timber technology has many advantages, including strength, versatility and sustainability. New engineered wood products include glulam (glued laminated beams), LVL (laminated veneer lumber), and CLT (cross-laminated timber).
‘I probably taught 2,000 students how to make buildings stand up under wind and earthquake and snow and fire.’
‘What happened is that my diverse interests in conservation and earthquake engineering and fire safety and timber buildings all came together in the development of exciting new building systems for timber buildings.’
The Christchurch 2011 earthquake changed everything.
‘It shocked everybody, but it created enormous opportunities. I would have liked to have seen Christchurch rebuilt in structural timber. It didn’t happen because there was a battle for market-share between steel and concrete. In central Christchurch more than a thousand multi-storey concrete buildings were knocked down, and since then, most have been rebuilt in steel. So steel won the battle, although there are a few new concrete buildings and a few timber buildings.
‘The time for timber buildings is still to come. You can’t weld wood, you can’t make it into a liquid and pour it into a mould, so the engineering of a timber building is more demanding than the engineering of a steel or concrete building. As much as the public of Christchurch wanted to see timber buildings everywhere, they are coming, but only the best engineers can design them.’
Do we build better now? ‘Well, 50 or 60 years ago we weren’t thinking about climate change or carbon so we thought nothing of building using concrete and steel. But now the world has realised that concrete is a very polluting material and so one of the drivers for timber buildings is to replace concrete and steel, which take far more energy to produce. We’ve got a long way to go. What modern civilisation has to do is to stop burning fossil fuels. We’ve got no alternative. Building in timber is a contribution towards that.’
Andy is also proud that after the Kaikōura earthquake in November 2016, Civil Defence based itself in the District Council offices, a brand-new building using Pres-Lam technology that was undamaged in the earthquake.
Andy still works two or three days a week for PTL Structural Consultants, and also looks after his pine forest. He loves hiking, tramping, skiing and climbing. ‘While I’m there, I take photographs, and another of my hobbies is to try and convert those photographs into oil paintings of mountain scenes. People look at my paintings and they say they look “very engineering” because I have lots of straight lines. That’s a hobby and it’s a fascination.
‘One of my retirement goals has been to climb all of the Canterbury peaks I can see from my kitchen window. I have a panorama which was drawn 50 years ago and I have recently completed climbing all the 133 peaks on that panorama. The highest was Mount Cook. Not many people know you can see Mount Cook from the top of Cashmere Hills.’
With new projects constantly on the boil, one suspects Andy will find plenty to keep both mind and body fit and active for a long time to come. As for bicycles, he still bikes everywhere he can; and once again, there are more cyclists on Christchurch streets – a positive sign for the future.
‘What modern civilisation has to do is to stop burning fossil fuels. We’ve got no alternative. Building in timber is a contribution towards that.’