WCTE 2025 - Timber Engineer’s Paradise!
We attended this week's World Conference on Timber Engineering (WCTE 2025) in Brisbane. It was an unmissable opportunity to catch up with leading lights in the timber industry from all around the world in our own backyard and stay up to date with everything that's cutting edge in timber research and projects. The event was really well run with some amazing speakers, fascinating presentations and lots of opportunities to connect with the passionate timber community
It's hard to create a highlight list and with so many concurrent sessions there is a lot of FOMO at times when you have to make some tough choices on which sessions to attend, but we'll do our best to highlight those that we got the opportunity to see and other aspects of the conference.
- It was definitely an international conference with an Australian twang! It is always great to catch up with friends from the industry, but the mix of academia, consultancy, suppliers and builders was great to see. We're doing a really great job in Australia of linking research with industry to make sure we're solving real world problems.
- There were some great keynote speeches from the likes of Ralph Belperio, Karl-Heinz Weiss and Katharina Lehmann and Philipp Dietsch, which got to highlight some awe-inspiring projects from around the world and got the energy levels up.
- We attended a lot of presentations looking at water management and this has been a key focus area for our business to ensure we're leaving lasting legacies for our timber buildings. There was a really great session with presentations from Jeff Morrell, Claudia Roder and Maryam Shirmohammadi, PhD. And we got an extended Q&A session at the end where we got a bit more into discussion with the presenters on how to drive this message with designers and who should be taking responsibility for this.
- Some other highlights included: Tom Watts showing insitu repairs for CLT slabs, David Barber's testing of different exposure levels for mass timber in full-scale burns, The TS3 system and full-glued butt joints in CLT floors and some interesting glued truss concepts for long-span roofs which have the potential to reduce the costs of steel fixings. There are some really innovative ideas being put into practical use around the world and it was amazing to see how these could be adapted and used for Aussie projects
- There was lots of opportunity for socialising and between sessions there were lots of great discussion had and connections made outside the conference itself. The Timber DiaLog drinks on the Monday night were a roaring success and the largest event we've organised. A more energetic morning for the Running Club on Tuesday morning was also a great opportunity to get the blood flowing and set some of us up for another day of busy conferencing!
Thank you to Keith Crews, Gregory Nolan and Kelly Rischmiller for putting on such a well-run event and showcasing the best of Australian timber innovation to the world ❤️ 🪵
