Long essay for Autoportret 2 (89), 2025: Wood.
Today, timber is living through yet another revival, accelerated by the rise of new engineered timbers and concerns over the environmental footprint. Timber is considered a more sustainable building material with the lowest embodied carbon, while new engineering technologies have expanded its application to an ever-increasing range of typologies. However, how closely do these assumptions reflect reality?
As Antoine Picon notes in his book The Materiality of Architecture, the relationship between humans and materials is not fixed and varies considerably across different chronological periods and societies. This relationship is influenced by various technical, economic, and cultural factors, the availability of tools, instruments, and machines, the organisation of labour, and philosophical and scientific regimes. According to Picon, while the term “materials” refers to wood, iron, or stone, “materiality” describes how humans relate to matter and materials through the prism of their own beliefs, knowledge, and practices—one of these practices being architecture.
In her book Material Matters, Katie Lloyd Thomas argues that architects had long refused to consider materials beyond the visual. A new type of architectural history needs to reinstate the attention to materials that produce experiential and place-specific political effects. This essay follows this call, investigating the social and political effects of 20th-century timber materiality through two dialectic juxtapositions set at the foundation of our contemporary assumptions about wood. Is timber a natural or artificial material, and is it local or global?
This essay dives into the many historical and cultural layers of timber materiality, questioning the 20th-century cultural narratives crafted around this most common building material. It suggests a more nuanced understanding of the constructed nature of timber materiality and its global interdependencies, for a more informed conversation around wood construction today.