“New tools for an ancient material”: wood according to Bjarke Ingels

We started this materialist journey with stone, from the perspective of stone being the primal material of cavemen turned architects. However, the architecture of the Greek temple is famously timber tectonics petrified into stone. So wood came first. Wood construction is undoubtedly the first material we learned to harvest and manipulate to create tools and shelter. I spent a week with the tribe of the Sápara Indians in the Amazon Rainforest, and saw them effortlessly use machetes to make temporary structures, skinning the bark to make rope to tie sticks together, essentially transforming the forest from riverbed to campsite, in situ. The architectural equivalent of farm to table. 

Once a civilisation evolved to a certain level of sophistication, it naturally transitioned from timber to more demanding and durable materials. Hence the Greek temple with all its articulations originating in woodwork translated to stone. The timber skeletons of traditional Japanese paper pavilions are the tectonic templates of the steel frames of Case Study Houses: rigid frames with light translucent infills. Lately, this migration away from timber has started to reverse with the advent of mass timber composites such as glulam, cross-laminated timber and laminated veneer lumber, etc. The negative carbon footprint of sustainably grown and sourced timber is probably the most direct way to reduce the carbon footprint of a building today. Automated milling machines allow us to resurrect the ancient wisdom of Japanese wood joinery in increasingly complex constructions. A dying craft conserved and cultivated by robots. 

Scandinavian architecture is anchored in timber. The longhouses of the Vikings were essentially longboats flipped upside down to serve as roofs. If they can displace water from below, they should be able to repel it from above. Log cabins of Sweden and stave churches of Norway. In the Faroe Islands, there are  timber houses that have lasted for almost a millennium. To protect the timber against the bugs, frost and humidity of the Nordic climate, black tar, white chalk, Falu reds and yellows from copper and iron ore have become native colours of the Scandinavian scenery.

My summer house is a homage to this traditional colour palette, and has served as a personal vent for levels of hue and saturation rarely attainable in contemporary Danish architecture.

One of the first things I did as an architecture student was to build a giant model of Charles Moore’s Sea Ranch. The barnlike tall open space, with the inhabitable niches slung over the sides like saddlebags under a continuous cape of weathered redwood. I was captivated by the materiality of the untreated timber. And the rawness of the unfinished space, where every element is legible as what it is. In lieu of the conventional coat of paint, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s supergraphics treated the raw timber architecture like a canvas for signage and symbols. I realised that the most traditional materials and typologies could be wielded to produce the most radical spaces and the most striking iconography.

Our first built design was a wooden terrace raised and lowered like a timber blanket covering kayaks and canoes for a maritime youth club. Abstract form in organic material. A wooden factory followed in the pursuit of building the most environmentally friendly factory in the world. Today we are building universities, headquarters and airports in timber. All because of the beauty of the bones of the building. You don’t need to apply finishes when the columns, beams and slabs are already made of wood. And it is the simplest way to lower the embodied carbon of the building. Provided you can solve for fire code, and source the timber sustainably. The world of architecture is teeming with a return to timber. 

You have neo-vernacular pursuits of contemporary timber architecture, like Peter Zumthor’s celebration of traditional Alpine construction techniques in Vals. Or the antitectonic use of timber as an abstract material in the hands of Herzog & de Meuron, with their consistent use of unexpressed timber in the Stadtcasino Basel. In the Wooden Chapel, John Pawson carves openings into a monolith of logs. Sou Fujimoto’s Final Wooden House treats the inhabited space like a residual left between timber solids. A sensation he has elevated to the monumental scale with his gargantuan inhabitable ring encircling the Osaka World Expo. Timber pavilion as urban infrastructure. Ephemera as monument.

Bjarke Ingels

In this issue, we attempt to chart the current landscape of timber architecture. Lindsey Wikstrom explores the design of forests to feed the construction industry’s growing appetite for timber. Shigeru Ban shares his insights of decades of pioneering in timber, paper and cardboard construction. Lucas Epp of StructureCraft explores ways to combine traditional craft and sophisticated computation with automated manufacturing for a new era of timber structures. Chris Precht is applying Austrian heritage and know-how to a global sensibility. Kengo Kuma stacks giant wood beams in a form of expressive timber brutalism. KGDVS’s 25 Columns house is like a Dom-Ino House made from CLT and telephone poles. Herzog & de Meuron tap into the warmth and wellness of wood as an antidote to the stale and sterile environments of conventional health care. Elding Oscarson explore the form and strength of timber with their Wisdome. 

Sigurd Larsen has branched a classic pitched roof house into a crossroads of a home, while Christian Wassmann has embraced a leftover glacial boulder with the lightness and warmth of his wooden family home. GAAA’s Casa Detif reduces the structural members to that of mullions or matchsticks; like an architectural drawing with a single line-weight for all elements.

We follow the journey of the pine from the Black Forest to the English countryside for Pawson’s furniture series. Onno Adriaanse explores timber through texture, gradient and plasticity. Peter Marigold and Tadanori Tozawa reveal the inner morphology of the tree by splitting open giant tree trunks. Ferruccio Laviani materialises transmission glitches in solid orm. Chris Kenny collects and catalogues a zoomorphic taxonomy of twigs, while Giuseppe Penone uncovers the central nervous system of the tree, like the inner child of the elder tree trunk.

All are evidence of a material field of immense diversity and tremendous intellectual energy. Where the digital and the analogue, the traditional and the avant-garde, the austere and the exuberant inhabit the same medium with equal ease. The renaissance that timber is having won’t be a neoconservative return to the good old days. It will be a new generation of architects and artists harvesting knowledge and wisdom of craft and tradition to apply new tools to ancient matter.  

Opening image: Bjarke Ingels. Photo by Wallpaper