Republic London was named Commercial Project of the Year and Solid Wood Project of the Year at last week’s Structural Timber Awards 2020.

Republic’s Design team, Heyne Tillett Steel & Studio RHE, were awarded the accolades for their Republic masterplan, which involves the retrofitting and extension of the Import and Export Buildings and the transformation of the public realm into a biodiverse water garden.

Both the Import and Export Buildings, the two existing nine-storey office buildings, were retained to preserve embodied carbon, and the masterplan champions the use of engineered timber within the commercial sector to create sustainable and beautifully crafted workplaces. The majority of the existing structural elements across the masterplan have been retained, reused and repurposed, lowering the embodied and whole life carbon of the two buildings.

Heyne Tillett Steel worked in close collaboration Studio RHE, Trilogy and the timber subcontractors to specify structural timber from a very early stage to ensure the responsible reuse of the existing structure and provide lightweight, efficient and sustainable structural solutions. The carbon of the new structure has been counted using Heyne Tillett Steel’s HTS + Carbon Calculator; for the Export Building the count equates to approximately 88kgCO2e/m² over the new floor area, providing a 73% improvement of the structural portion (65%) of the RIBA 2030 target of 500kgCO2e/m², while at the Import Building the count equates to 155kgCO2e/ m² over the new floor area. This is only 9kgCO2e/m² and 12kg CO2e/m² over total building areas respectively. The carbon stored in the new structure equates to 404 tonnes at Export and 460 tonnes at Import, meaning that for the buildings’ lifetime until demolition the structure stores more than 1.5 times carbon than used to be built.