As synthetic materials and mutant and hybrid concoctions attain prominence in our daily lives—in our handheld devices, cooking utensils, vehicles, even things as simple as our shopping bags—the design and construction industries have instead re-embraced the familiar, the conventional—wood, which has regained prominence through innovations in engineering and construction methodologies. Technology is now commonly used—and often (though not always) affordably used—to cut, perforate, assemble, erect, and even fabricate materials in a manner not previously possible. Wood is one such material, and Timber in the City documents both the imaginings of those in the nascence of their education and practice and the executed work of design professionals at the leading edge of architecture. These designers, regardless of the duration of their immersion in the field, have imaginatively rethought the means by which we build and the methods by which we define space merely through differing deployments of a familiar building material.

Over the past 10-15 years a renaissance in wood architecture has occurred with the development of new wood building systems and design strategies, elevating wood from a predominantly single-family residential idiom to a rival of concrete and steel construction for a variety of building types, including high rises. This new solid wood architecture offers unparalleled environmental as well as construction and aesthetic benefits, and is of growing importance for professionals and academics involved in green design. Solid Wood provides the first detailed book which allows readers to understand new mass timber/massive wood architecture. It provides: historical context in wood architecture from around the world a strong environmental rationale for the use of wood in buildings recent developments in contemporary fire safety and structural issues insights into building code challenges detailed case studies of new large-scale wood building systems on a country-by-country basis. Case studies from the UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia highlight design strategies, construction details and unique cultural attitudes in wood design. The case studies include the most ambitious academic, hospitality, industrial, multi-family, and wood office buildings in the world. With discussions from leading architectural, engineering, and material manufacturing firms in Europe, North America and the South Pacific, Solid Wood disrupts preconceived notions and serves as an indispensable guide to twenty-first century wood architecture and its environmental and cultural benefits.

Mass Timber / Design and Research presents new research and design work with Mass Timber, a new construction technology, well-known in Europe, but relatively unfamiliar in the United States. Leading the Mass Timber design dialogue in the US, the author, Susan Jones, an architect in Seattle, Washington, has been pioneering the new, innovative use of wood over the past six years, since she built her own family's house from cross-laminated timber in 2015 in a neighborhood in Seattle. The book presents her Seattle firm, her family, and her University of Washington students' years of research and design. Opening with the story of three generations of her family's own sustainable forest practices, the book presents research into Pacific Northwest forestry, timber and Cross-Laminated Timber manufacturing practices, to carbon analysis and carbon comparisons between standard building construction assemblies and technologies; and concludes with the design of model buildings both designed and built by her firm, atelierjones and her University of Washington students: including a single-family house, a church, schools, multi-family housing, and a twelve-story Tall Timber Wood Innovation tower on the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

Faced with man-made climate change and the need to provide housing for a growing world population, society needs to rethink the way future buildings are made. Wood is a truly renewable building material that is unlimited in supply if its growth and harvest are sustainably managed. Recent technological advancements in engineering allow the use of timber for the construction of multi-story structures, turning our buildings into carbon sinks rather than becoming sources for CO2-emissions. The book presents convincing arguments for the increased use of wood as an alternative to more fossil fuel intensive building materials, with the goal of demonstrating that an integrated approach can have the potential for positive impact on the environment, local economies, and the building culture at large.

Together with masonry construction, timber construction is usually one of the first building exercises encountered by the student in his or her training. This volume begins by presenting the building material timber in all of its facets and explaining the fundamental principles of timber construction. It then goes on to describe the most important building components and their constructive possibilities, specifically as they pertain to building with timber. Subjects: Timber as building material, Timber preservation, Systems for building with timber, Building components from foundation to roof.

This book weaves a much needed and transformational narrative about making architecture through paying close attention to cross-laminated timber as a material for today. The material becomes the site of experimentation, innovation, and research in search of specific meanings of CLT in architecture at various scales by selecting the "CLT Blank" as the building unit. The structure of the book brings together work and texts from a diverse group of theorists and practitioners, who make material central to their inquiry, to suggest design approaches that will broaden the cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry. The outcome focuses on materiality through fast slippages between art, architecture, and science, that we hope will invigorate and expand new discourse to act as an antidote to the current conversations about the material, that is fixated on its making and mass production, disappointingly portraying it as a bland and lifeless product--a notion we want to be distant from in preference to seeking areas we feel were not yet conceptualized or theorized. The potential to see the spatial properties of its use and what kind of world that might suggest is shown in the book, with selected striking visual materials, to reposition its architecture though new forms of representation and responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics. Aesthetics of CLT with a connection to wood and art practice is a central thread though the book.