Timber Building Details for a Leaner Design Process

The concept of lean construction has been defined as an application of lean thinking in the design and construction process, aiming to create value for the customer and reduce waste. Building with timber is complex and waste in the planning process caused by redesign is not uncommon. This paper explores the feasibility to optimize this work with pre-designed details.

The study bases on four recent built cases. Selected structures and joint details as built are compared to available material in six European collections of pre-designed timber building details. The discussion evaluates the applicability in practice and whether the buildings could have been designed using ready-made material. The results show a large variation with some built projects matching well with national collections and others corresponding poorly with any of the presented structures or details in evaluated collections.

The conclusion is that a vast selection of pre-designed details exists. However, they are not yet used. Details as built are often the result of a collaborative development process between pro-ject partners and based on earlier experiences. From the viewpoint of European wide procure-ment and the competitiveness of timber building the findings are problematic. Clients are forced to accept system solutions and unable to receive comparable offers. The promotion of mass-customized timber building production would require more established common solutions.

Research leading to these results is part of the transnational WoodWisdom-Net Research Pro-gramme, project leanWOOD, Innovative lean processes and cooperation models for planning, production and maintenance of urban timber buildings.