Vietnamese design competition celebrates legal timber
Hanoi, Viet Nam
The Center for Education and Development (CED) has launched a hybrid in-person and virtual exhibition, featuring winning designs from a design competition using legal timber. Celebrating the potential of domestic plantation timber in furniture and housing design, the competition aimed to promote legal timber use and increase demand for low-risk domestic timber and was a key part of a recently concluded project by CED, supported by the FAO-EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Programme.
The exhibition showcases three projects by students of Hanoi Architectural University, Hanoi University of Civil Engineering, and the Mien Trung University of Civil Engineering. The designs include a martial arts cultural centre, a historical museum, and a pavilion on the engineering campus of the Mien Trung University. Five design companies have also presented work in the exhibition to highlight the possible uses of legal timber in architecture and interior design.
To help further promote responsible timber usage in Viet Nam, CED created an online course providing information on legal and sustainable timber, Viet Nam’s timber industries, development potential and opportunities for the design and interior industries. To date, over 1 800 people (largely students) participated in the e-course. A recent online workshop organised by CED as a follow up to the e-course involved highly influential speakers and attracted over 440 participants during the workshop while some 3 000 people participated virtually.
Bruno Cammaert, FAO-EU FLEGT Programme Coordinator for Asia, expressed support for the results at the project’s closing workshop, “this project is very unique and important to the Programme because it reaches out to important but not so traditional stakeholder groups in the forest sector. The knowledge, expertise and connections that CED has put them in an excellent position to successfully implement a project like this one.”
The winning entries of the design competition can be viewed here and in person at 282 Design Studio and Factory in Hanoi.
For more information:
Related story: Vietnamese NGO works with youth to promote a culture of legal timber
Green Future – Forest Governance and Sustainable Forestry (Documentary by CED)
Stop Illegal Logging (Trailer by CED)