How timber helped SUMA step up to the top

That SUMA should be the practice that went on to win the 2024 EU Mies Award for Emerging Architecture – with a mass timber library that embodies the firm’s two obsessions – is evident as soon as I meet co-founder Guillermo Sevillano on Zoom. Behind him, in frame, is SUMA’s elegant timber studio in Madrid. It is part of a mass timber residential complex of eight apartments, one of which is owned by him and his wife and co-partner Elena Orte. The chalet-like room that he is sitting in looks warm and ‘cool’ at the same time, with a large window to an open courtyard; interestingly, what it doesn’t look is particularly Spanish.

A smiling Sevillano agrees, looking around cheekily as if to check. ‘It does feel more Nordic, but unfortunately timber is still a novel construction material in Spain. When we both graduated from Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM), students weren’t encouraged to design in timber or even investigate its technical possibilities; the emphasis was always on steel and concrete.’ Perhaps it was Sevillano’s MArch experience at Columbia’s GSAPP in New York that proved a road to Damascus. ‘Being a foreigner abroad also makes you a foreigner to your own ways of thinking and cultural background,’ he says. Something shifted for sure. After three years back in Spain at Antón García-Abril’s experimental Ensamble Studio, a wish to question givens seemed hard-wired.

Rising above the trees at a crossroads in the working class neighbourhood of Sant Martí de Provençals in Barcelona’s Eixample district, SUMA’s new Gabriel García Márquez library, named after the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author who made the city his adopted home, is the last in a 30-year plan by the city government to create a network of urban libraries. Voted best new public library in the world 2023 by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, it was praised both for its architecture and novel ways in which it engages its users. Designed for 800, but often housing more, since opening it’s proved transformative for the community in this densely populated district, who treat it as a home from home.

Here in its 4300m², five storey, mass-timber structure, you’ll find not only bookshelves but a ‘current bazaar’ entrance-level newspaper and journal area. This opens via huge sliding glass doors to a streetside agora, while inside diaphanous white curtains of the ‘ideas forum’ pull across to separate – but not isolate – book clubs from local groups or associations. Look down from here to the basement at a multi-purpose space for theatre or events, meeting rooms and even a studio for local Radio Macondo, named after García Márquez’s fictional village; look up to a warm, light-filled triangular atrium and staircase that runs past a children’s library and sensory spaces to an adult reading palace at the top with multi-media spaces, ‘concentration rooms’, roof terraces and winter gardens. It’s less a library than an ecosystem of social functions. LEED Gold certified, it’s not just the carbon-sequestrating structure that makes it a model of sustainability. With solar panels and grey water recycling, the atrium’s stack effect passively ventilates the building while its orientation and ventilated fibreglass envelope mitigate solar gain. Having done five library competitions and now built two, this is the latest and most successful manifestation of SUMA’s bookish fascinations.

Sevillano and Orte, both 43, set up SUMA in 2005. Their 2010 competition-winning Gran Tarajal library and multi-purpose centre in Fuerteventura, Canaries, was designed as a sculptural form of CLT and Corten steel, which, says Sevillano, wouldn’t survive a client or contractor desire to stick with what they knew. ‘The first thing that went in technical development was the timber structure when they opted to build it in concrete,’ he says. Now complete, it’s notable that only competition drawings are on their website: ‘It feels like Frankenstein’s monster to us in that we can only recognise bits of it,’ he adds, but it taught them lessons about the necessary buy-in of a client to realise good architecture.

But the experience did not dampen the desire to develop the library typology using the very material that, pulped, pressed and printed, goes on to line its shelves. SUMA’s 2012 mass timber entry for Helsinki Central Library was one of six finalists from 544 entries. Even here the two were developing the idea of an open structure library allowing for multiple uses – its ‘diagonal agora’ allowing the public through at ground, with sensory spaces and the textures and smells making the experience ‘as intense as a sauna’. Similar conceptual ideas fed into the design of the Gabriel García Márquez library, not least in the CLT structure driving its huge hybrid timber trusses. Despite not winning in Finland, life lessons were learned here too, says Sevillano. ‘We felt a push from Finnish timber industry suppliers for our design to test timber use at scale on a major new cultural building in the capital.’ That realisation that architects can drive change still resonates for the firm.

Back in Spain, frustrated by a timber-averse industry, SUMA decided to take matters into its own hands and be its own client. ‘The benefits of mass timber are unquestionable, but we need to deal with prejudices against it. If a new house is built of mass timber in Spain, most insurers won’t cover it so it means finding ones that will.’ Doing that drove SUMA’s 2014 foray into development, acting as a project manager for a client relation, finding a site to design and build the structural CLT, ventilated facade and clay-clad Juan Valera House in Madrid. Not only did the pair then rent it but they started looking for a larger site for a co-operative residential scheme for themselves and invited shareholders. ‘Juan Valera, in effect, served as a showroom for our ideas, says Sevillano. ‘It helped us sell the big idea to potential partners by reassuring them about timber and securing investment in the co-op.’ Ten years on, Our Shelves Houses, the eight apartments above and around SUMA’s new courtyard office, obdurately challenges industry prejudice on buildability, fire safety and marketability, hopefully ushering in a brave new world of timber construction in Spain.

Sevillano mentions its two-phase, concrete- framed San Francisco housing (2017) and Play- Time apartments (2015) in Madrid, which, while they are skilled, he seems distanced from, as if they represent a less assured period in SUMA’s evolution. Current work for the 10-strong practice includes the renovation of a historic steam mill in Cantabria – and obligatory competitions of course – but Sevillano admits the struggle of completing the co-op project concurrently with the library was stressful and both partners are taking a step back to consolidate. Perhaps past experience and the freedoms of being their own client has made them more wary of who they work with. ‘We’ve said for years that we’re in a Groucho Marx phase where we wouldn’t want to be in a club that would have us as a member!’ jokes Sevillano, but they seem happy to let the firm tick over while they concentrate on teaching. He is associate professor at ETSAM while doing a PhD there. Both teach at Barcelona’s Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), arguably Spain’s most progressive school. ‘I still know of professors telling students they can’t build in timber,’ he adds. Clearly there’s more to do to change mindsets in education.

Then, towards the end of our chat, he brings up the project that’s driving them on: SUMA’s collaboration with the IAAC and Massmadera – a national umbrella of organisations and individuals trying to promote use of timber in a sector where it accounts for only 3% of built output – for a new centre for timber innovation, CIMBRA. While IAAC runs a Masters in advanced ecological buildings, where students spend a year at its remote Valldaura Labs learning design and construction from the land along Hooke Park lines, this is more organised and networked with industry – think Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth on steroids. ‘We’re planning it to facilitate research into biomaterials, where there’ll be technical staff and resources to train people in ecological construction,’ explains Sevillano, excitedly listing people they’re working with to realise it: ‘We have industry experts, forest stewards, engineers and architects, all doing it because they love it. It’s positive, optimistic and entrepreneurial.’ Still in its early stages, CIMBRA seems like a mission for this firm with circular sustainability aspirations. Bringing our interview full-circle, he observes: ‘We’ve found that people really connected with the world of timber are lovely – just like librarians!’.