Wood spirit

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Peter Davey

Many of our deepest perceptions of architecture come from wood. For all the arguments over its provenance, the Doric order plainly owes at least something to timber precedents. Its very proportions, which have so influenced architecture ever since, are perhaps derived from trees. But maybe our relationship with wood and trees is deeper. As Juhani Pallasmaa has remarked 'the tree ... is also one of mankind's most common and meaningful symbols - take the Cosmic Tree, the Tree of Life, the Tree of Fertility, the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of the Soul, the Tree of History and the Sacrificial Tree. These diverse associations are hidden in the shape of the tree and even today add dimension to our relations with wood. The tree is man's shape and we feel it our equal'.(1)

At the same time as having this mythic dimension, wood is also the most approachable of materials, quite unlike stone or brick, glass or metal. All of us feel that we can manipulate it in one way or another. We may not be able to make a perfect dovetail joint, but particularly after the advent of power tools, carpentry seems to be available to everybody. Yet the command that machines give over the material has often been disastrous. Frank Lloyd Wright railed against nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century machines which had made 'carpentry and millwork ... synonymous with butchery and botchwork'.(2) Wright was in many ways ahead of his time when he argued that 'Wood becomes more precious as our country grows older. To save it from destruction by the man with the machine, it is only necessary to use the Machine to emancipate its qualities ...

'There is no waste of material whatever in such uses ... The Machine easily divides, subdivides, sands, and polishes the manifold surfaces which any good stick can be made to yield by good machine methods'.(3) Undoubtedly, huge quantities of wood are still wasted, if not in creating the machine-ornamented 'botchwork' which Wright attacked so fiercely.

Waste occurs at many stages in wood production: in arboriculture when thinnings are discarded and burned for instance, and in methods of cutting trees into building timbers.(4) In fact, now some younger trees are made into alternatives to solid timber, such as laminated veneer lumber (LVL) which is made of sheets peeled from relatively thin logs using the normal rotary process. The veneers are bonded together to create members that have similar properties to ordinary structural timbers.(5) While such techniques enable use of relatively thin logs, the most slender thinnings cannot be employed in such a fashion, and it is far from possible as yet to manufacture LVL and the like all over the world, partly because of the cost of the technology. But the approach does hold out a good deal of hope, not least for the great trees which still exist in the North, and are still being felled to provide timbers of large section.

A further source of waste is inappropriate use of timber in construction. For instance, the traditional way of making a concrete building is to create a timber one, pour the concrete and then throw the timber one away - of course, modern reusable shuttering generally avoids this problem, but beton brut is scarcely regarded as the precious material that it should be, and the horrendous destruction of the forests of Queensland and some other areas of the south-west Pacific is at least in part due to the huge demand for shuttering in Japan. A further waste of timber in the life-cycle of buildings is in demolition, where far too many old timbers are usually destroyed, unless they have spectacular section or decorations. But there is, at least in the United States, a move to re-use marvellous fine timbers from pre-twentieth century buildings, cut when the nation was new and the supply of great trees seemed illimitable.(6)

The theory of wood being virtually the only replaceable building material is at least partly true. The United Nations has forecast that in 2010, there will be enough forest in the world to generate 2.3 billion cubic metres of wood a year, while demand will be about 2.7 billion. Demand will exceed supply by a relatively small amount. But 2010 is a microsecond away in the life of the planet, and demand will clearly grow rapidly, if not exponentially, as poor countries develop.(7) But at least there is hope that, as far as softwoods are concerned, it may be possible to achieve sustainability with a combination of enlightened arboriculture, sensible construction, products like LVL and new approaches to building like those pioneered by Richard Burton and Frei Otto for John Makepeace at Hooke Park(8) (and more recently by Edward Cullinan Architects) which explore the tensile properties of new glues and fabrics to make possible use of thin softwood thinnings green, without seasoning.

Hardwoods are a different story. Many claims are made by different organisations all over the world that local hardwood forests are managed in a sustainable way but some of these seem dubious. The long growing period of hardwoods is a factor against them. Demand for agricultural land in the tropics is another factor in the decay of the great rain-forests. Because of such destruction of habitat, the planet is losing irreplaceable species daily as the tree cover is removed. Perhaps the only long-term hope for most rain-forests is that some parts of some of them may be preserved as reservations, though this will need a great deal more international co-operation (and enlightened local control of the territories) than seems possible in the near future. In such circumstances, tropical hardwoods would rightly become precious materials.