Sabah Timbers, A Perspective

25 juli 2025

As a valuable addition to the Shelter@Rainforest project, architect Ken Yeh shares his insights into the Sabah timber industry and the reconnaissance that shaped the project’s material choices in the early phase of the project:

This is my account/discovery into understanding Malaysian timber specifically from timbers in the state of Sabah Malaysia.

My firm Marra + Yeh Architects was appointed to help a Forest Management Unit (FMU) with the creation of a village to house the staff of a private company tasked with the reforestation of 100 000 acres previously logged forests.

Before embarking on the design of the village, we made reconnaissance trips to timber plantations, sawmills, factories producing wood products, prefabricators of wooden buildings and other FMUs within the state of Sabah.

This gave our team a holistic view of the current state of the timber industry in the State of Sabah. I would highly encourage any and all future design teams to go through an initial reconnaissance and research phase which has proved extremely useful and relevant in making choices of timber that is most appropriate.

Our team had roughly intuited from the very, very tall trees (100 meters and beyond) that are dotted around the nature parks in Sabah that the flexural strength of the timbers in Sabah would be very high and we wanted to take advantage of this aspect of the timbers. After confirmation of our intuition, we designed a structural portal system that allows for this extreme flexural strength, in our case Selangan Batu, to be useful and showcased this in the Architecture we created. The high flexural strength of the timbers meant that we could use the slenderest profiles in our portal frame to span the longest distances. In our portal frame design, the Selangan Batu member is 50mm by 100mm in section and it spans 5.5meters at its widest (see pic)

In most promotional literature of woods, the underlying message has always been the beauty of the woods and this beauty is indisputable. However, I hope the reader has been exposed to other important properties of these woods from the island of Borneo in general and Sabah in particular, which unlike other woods in other continents have special and extreme characteristics.

Trefwoorden

duurzaamontwerpen innovatief tropisch architectuur ecologie duurzaamheid woningbouw architect regenwoud

Malaysian Timber Council

Neem contact op

Staat van realisatie Voltooid

Start ontwerpproces 2011

Start bouw 2012

Ingebruikname 2012

Meewerkende partijen

ArchitectMarra+Yeh ArchitectsProjectarchitectCarol Marra, Ken YehOpdrachtgeverprive klantFotograafBrett Boardman

Leveranciers

OverigMalaysian Timber Council

Neem contact op met Malaysian Timber Council

Je bent momenteel niet ingelogd. Hierdoor is het alleen mogelijk om meer informatie per e-mail op te vragen. Wil je liever gebeld worden of documentatie per post ontvangen? Klik dan hier om in te loggen.
Heb je nog geen account? Maak dan hier een gratis account aan.

Voornaam

Achternaam

E-mailadres

Opmerkingen