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Global Timber Histories
Ongoing research,
2018-2024
2018-2024
Timber has an uneasy place in 20th-century history. On the one hand, unlike steel or concrete, timber is derived from a living matter—a tree. Similar to a tree, timber buildings are “alive”: wood performs differently in different climatic and geographic contexts, and physically, along and across the direction of its fibres, and no piece is internally homogeneous or has the same cellular structure, knot position, or surface as another. Thus, the materiality of timber retains a direct connection with its place of origin and the climatic conditions of the specific geographical location. The local specificity and biodiversity shape timber’s physical structure and performance, and simple planks and wooden elements carry aspects of natural habitat even when transported across vast distances. At the same time, in the 20th century, new artificial forestry practices imported to Europe from the United States eradicated traditional logging and profoundly transformed vast territories and ecologies. Solid timber construction was substituted with imported framing methods, which required new artificial insulation materials. With scientific advances of wartime efforts, timber’s natural fibres were infused with various chemical substances. Plywood, fiberboard, and engineered timbers modified wood’s chemical, material and physical properties. New laboratory research modelled after new American timber research facilities transformed timber from a “natural” to a (sl) “scientific” material whose structural qualities could now be closely controlled and adjusted through a series of parametric variables.
This project is particularly interested in the global histories of 20th-century timber. It aims to challenge the notion of timber as a “natural” and “ecological” material and explore the international networks of production, regulation, control and transport, allowing pieces of natural habitat to travel vast distances. Through a series of case studies ranging from the early history of glued laminated timber in Norway and the American iterative designs of Finnish houses to the export of prefabricated timber homes to Australia, Kenya and Iceland, this project traces the 20th-century political economies of timber.
By zooming into specific material artefacts, their physical properties and international provenance, the project unwraps the many layers of production of this “natural” and “environmental” material. Mediating between different scales, this project probes a new methodology for architectural history, more attentive to architecture’s global ecologies and environmental effects.