Lesovna Opens in Suchdol: 405 Cubic Metres of Czech Timber, and a Government Target Attached

The Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences of the Czech University of Life Sciences has opened a new research and teaching building with a laboratory on its Suchdol campus. The timber building, called Lesovna, cost more than CZK 49m; the university funded almost 90 percent of it and partners contributed the rest. ČTK reported the opening on 3 September.

The numbers are the point of the building as much as the programme is. Lesovna has 581 square metres of usable floor area and 405 cubic metres of Czech-sourced timber in its structure — a ratio its authors say puts it among the most significant public timber buildings in the country. The architecture is by Mjölk architekti; archiweb credits Jan Vondrák, Jan Mach, Tobiáš Hrabec and František Fiedler. The studio set out to place the building in the university campus while respecting the faculty's forestry tradition.

We did not want to create merely a functional object, but a place where the structure is exposed, comprehensible and inspiring. Lesovna shows that contemporary timber architecture can combine technical quality, sustainability and the natural beauty of the material.

— Jan Mach, Mjölk architekti

A building that is also its own instrument

The teaching use is the ordinary part: programmes in wood science, timber building design, forestry and related fields. The research use is what makes the structural exposure more than an aesthetic decision. The faculty lists projects on structural systems, on the physical properties of wood, on long-term monitoring of buildings, and on new technologies that use timber as a renewable raw material. A building whose structure is left visible and instrumented is a specimen the faculty can watch over decades, and students will be working in one rather than reading about it.

It will also be open to the professional public, to schools and to the faculty's partners as a place to present new findings on timber construction and sustainable forest management.

The policy framing at the ribbon

The opening was attended by the prime minister, Andrej Babiš, the education minister Robert Plaga and the agriculture minister Martin Šebestyán. Babiš used it to restate a target: by 2035 the state wants a quarter of new buildings to be timber-based.

He set out the trajectory he is measuring that against. In 2000, timber buildings accounted for 1.4 percent of new family houses; last year the figure was over 15 percent. In the past year, ten apartment buildings using timber were completed, containing 103 flats, along with 123 other non-residential timber buildings. Timber construction now makes up roughly 12 percent of new non-residential buildings.

Thanks to a change in the rules, timber buildings can already rise to eight storeys. Our task is to remove further unnecessary obstacles. Because if we know how to build faster and more efficiently, it will also help solve housing affordability.

— Andrej Babiš, prime minister

Plaga said he hoped more buildings like Lesovna would be built and that such projects would become standard in future, and described the building as evidence that investment in education and innovation produces added value.

The gap between the two framings is worth marking rather than resolving. A 581-square-metre faculty building is a demonstration piece, and the eight-storey rule change the prime minister cites is about apartment buildings — the sector where the target of a quarter of new construction would actually have to be met, and where the current figure of ten buildings and 103 flats in a year is the distance still to travel. The single source for this story is ČTK's report, which carries the ministers' claims without independent verification of the figures.