Hot Nordic Timber: Not so Ecological After All?
Paper presented at EAHN x MOMA Thematic Conference,
“The Third Ecology,” Reykjavik, Iceland,
October 11-13, 2023.
“The Third Ecology,” Reykjavik, Iceland,
October 11-13, 2023.
Nordic architects have monopolised the ideas of sustainability, climate resilience, and ecology, which are often expressed through the abundant use of timber. The concept of “Scandinavian design” instantly evokes images of sleek mid-century minimalist shapes in natural woods. While timber is a material intrinsic to the Nordic context, this paper proposes to scrutinise the idea of timber as a “natural” and “ecological” material. In the 20th century, artificial forestry practices imported to Scandinavia 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 heavily artificial insulation materials. Plywood, fiberboard, and engineered timbers modified wood’s chemical, material and physical properties. Natural fibres were infused with chemical substances, such as silicate of soda, dextrin, asphalt, rosin, turpentine, paraffin wax, asbestos, plaster of Paris, casein, cassava flour, blood albumin, and urea-formaldehyde. Small pathological particles of industrial timber permeated factory walls, seeping into blood, air and water, transforming natural environments.
This paper investigates global ecologies of 20th-century Nordic timber through a case study of 94 prefabricated timber houses delivered to Iceland in the wake of the 1973 Vestmannaeyjar volcano by a Norwegian company, Moelven Brug. Built with timber obtained with new forestry methods and enhanced through chemical additives, transported across thousands of kilometres and constructed with new framing methods and synthetic insulation materials, this project complicates the narrative of timber as a “natural” material called to remedy the consequences of a natural disaster. By zooming into specific material artefacts, their physical properties and international provenance, the paper taps into larger networks of material extraction, environmental pollution, global trade, and Nordic diplomacy. Mediating between different scales, this paper offers a new method for a different type of architectural history, more attentive to architecture’s global ecologies and environmental effects.