Three RIBA Awards to Piers Taylor who was a participant on the first Glenn Murcutt Master Class in 2001. The Tree Management Centre Westonbirt Arboretum designed by Piers Taylor, received a 2017 RIBA Award, a RIBA Sustainability Award and the RIBA Client of the Year Award. This project by Piers and his Invisible Studio for the Forestry Commission went through a formal government tendering process, which included builder Charley Brentnall as part of Invisible Studio design team - pre contract - before Brentnall went on and won the tender as main contractor for the larger of the two buildings, the Machinery Store.

Charley ran a course with volunteers to hew the enormous Corsican Pine into the main structural members, before leading the construction phase for the Machinery Store with his team of carpenters. The smaller of the two buildings was sub-let to Nick Perchard and Jim Symon (who were originally trained by Charley) who led a band of volunteers in the construction of the Mess Room welfare building.

The engineering by Buro Happold was deceptively complex. The main timber structural members are possibly the biggest ever in UK Construction. Engineers Andrew Wylie and Graham Clarke understood how to use the unpredictable, ungraded, unprocessed, untreated timber directly from site. The Sustainability Award is a testament to their thinking.

The Client of the Year Award for the Forestry Commission - as the jury citation said - is a client organization that now totally owns these buildings, that fully supported the experimental, risky and unpredictable way of working. An easier option would have been to put up a few steel portal sheds. Westonbirt Arboretum had never before used its own timber in any of its buildings.

Piers Taylor was a speaker at the Architecture Foundation Australia 'Diversity + Community' Conference at the NGV in Melbourne in February 2017.

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