Students at Cardiff University mastered an ancient technique invented by the Celts to build a traditional Japanese teahouse using hazel from a nearby Welsh Government woodland.
The nine first and second year architecture students based their building on a sixteenth century teahouse in a temple in Kyoto designed by the Japanese tea master Sen No Rikyu.
With the help of Forestry Commission Wales, they gathered hazel sticks coppiced from Parc y Van woodland near Caerphilly to use as a key component for the timber-framed building where people can sit and relax while sipping tea in the university grounds.
Staff at the Museum of Welsh Life in St Fagan’s taught the students the ancient wattle and daub construction technique that has been used for at least 6,000 years and is still popular in many parts of the world.
Wattle and daub is used for making walls in which a woven lattice of wood called wattle is slotted between a timber frame and daubed with a sticky material, usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw.
It is becoming popular again in more developed areas as a low-impact sustainable construction technique, as using wood in buildings can help to reduce our CO2 emissions.
Up until the late eighteenth century, wattle and daub was used for infill panels in traditional timber frame buildings in Wales.
FC Wales forest ranger Emma Louise Felkin said, “Wood has the lowest carbon footprint of any commonly used building material and it’s wonderful to see these students demonstrating how versatile it can be.
“Timber is also a renewable resource and, by managing our woodlands in a sustainable manner, can provide an endless supply of material in an environmentally-friendly way.”
The students, who are working on the Vertical Studio architecture course, took two and half weeks to build the teahouse, measuring about two metres by two metres, using hundreds of hazel sticks cut from the FC Wales-managed woodland.
