Wonderful wood: wood-materials for inspirational design - Reviews - Wood: Materials for Inspirational Design - Brief Article - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, August, 2003 by John Winter

WOOD-MATERIALS FOR INSPIRATIONAL DESIGN

By Chris Lefteri. Hove: RotoVision. 2003. [pounds sterling]27.50

This is a lovely book. The author invites you to 'browse, tuck in and enjoy' it, and you certainly will. It is high on image and light on facts, but it does tell you where the facts can be found.

There are images of wood moulded into organic shapes, wood extruded, wood made flexible, wood re-formed so that it behaves more like plastic, wood re-formatted so that it increases in strength while retaining workability and so on. To extend the mind, to enlarge one's vision of what wood can do, this book is great.

During the High-Tech years wood has not been a key material. How odd that car manufacturers, working in a genuinely high-tech industry, feel the urge to give their products a sense of quality by putting wood on the dashboard. Perhaps we should learn from this; much of our architecture could do with a splash of luxury.

In addition to the pages on inspiration, on craftsmanship and on technology, the book illustrates and describes an amazing range of timbers. They are grouped as hardwoods, softwoods and derivatives; the latter being the man-made materials that the industry is now producing in such profusion, and where much of the future of timber may lie.

The author is very concerned with ecological issues, and the pages on 'how to buy wood' give good common sense advice on how to be reasonably sure that the timber you specify has not come from a source involved in illegal logging. As we all come to share in the ecological imperative, so timber is likely to be a major player in twenty-first century architecture. This book may persuade you that that is quite an encouraging prospect.

Book reviews from this and recent issues of The Architectural Review can now be seen on our website at www.arplus.com and the books can be ordered online, many at special discount.