So the Cork House was really an attempt to completely rethink construction, compared to most modern buildings,
where the external wall has separate layers for waterproofing, insulation, air tightness. This was this
idea from the architects [Matthew Barnett Howland and Dido Milne], which – could the entire wall be made out
of one material? Could that material be cork?
So cork is actually the natural bark of the cork oak tree. And I think what's rather nice is that you can sort of
shear off the bark, almost in the way that you shear a sheep. And that bark will then regrow over the next 9
or 10 years. So it sort of naturally replenishes and as you pull off this layer, it's perhaps 30-40 millimeters
thick, these great slabs of the cork. If you go to Portugal, where most of the cork forests are, you can see the huge
volumes of this raw material sort of stacked up. Now, to make a wine cork, you literally press the cylindrical
corks out of these slabs. And what you can imagine that leaves is a sort of blank with all the holes in it.
That gets crumbled, put into a sort of a giant cake tin and heated and when it's heated, the natural resins,
the suberin, comes out of the cork, and then sort of glues it all together. And that's the sort of dark
baked, dark cork blocks that we end up with. Absolutely natural product.
So this was a real experiment, it was taking very, in some ways, a natural and quite an old material,
but combining it with new technology in the sense of computer machining, to accurately machine these
large blocks. And so, it's not necessarily saying that we should be building the future out of cork, what it's saying
is, "let's rethink how we build, let's see if we can make a future which is better, which is more sustainable."
So you approach the Cork House and it sits in this wonderful garden, there is actually a cork tree in the
garden. This building has been created out of nature, it's taking this natural product and turning it into the
structure. And it's incredible because it's the first time I've been in a building where you can not only see the
material, but you can also smell it and you can hear it. You can smell it because this is actually, the cork has
been cooked. So there's almost a sort of burnt, wonderful burnt charcoal, burnt toffee sort of smell.
And you can hear it because the cork obviously absorbs sound, it's used when you want to make anechoic
chambers, and so there's this wonderful sort of peace inside the house. So, actually having the opportunity
to spend a night there and you wake up inside this – everything you can see around you, you look up,
you're looking up into this sort of pyramid of cork walls. And although it's a new building material, it's built in a
really traditional way, much like we build bricks. And so the idea that you can see how the building is made,
I think, I don't think you need to be an engineer to appreciate that and the sort of the tactile nature of it.