Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1965633
W. Davis
Abstract A well-known anecdote describes how a young William Le Baron Jenney, traveling the Pacific in 1850, was taken by the construction of bamboo and palm houses in the Philippines. Jenney, and those that historicized him, attributed his experimentation with steel-frame tall buildings in Chicago later in the nineteenth century to these early impressions of bamboo framework with palm-woven panels. This paper proposes a contextualization of Jenney’s inspiration alongside the work of two American botanists active in Guam and the Philippines between 1890 and 1920 in order to understand the creation of analytical categories and the texture of academic imperialism. Elmer Drew Merrill and William Safford recorded their encounters with plant-based architecture in the tropics during a period of violent imperial transition. These vignettes of viewership reveal how unstable claims about a changing environment were validated through the interpretation of plants animated through human interaction as building materials rather than inert timber.
1850年，年轻的William Le Baron Jenney在太平洋旅行时，被菲律宾建造的竹子和棕榈房屋所吸引，这是一个众所周知的轶事。珍妮和那些把他历史化的人，把他在19世纪后期在芝加哥对钢框架高层建筑的尝试，归因于这些早期对竹框架和棕榈编织面板的印象。本文将珍妮的灵感与1890年至1920年间活跃在关岛和菲律宾的两位美国植物学家的工作结合起来，以了解分析范畴的创造和学术帝国主义的本质。埃尔默·德鲁·梅里尔和威廉·萨福德记录了他们在帝国暴力过渡时期在热带地区遇到的植物建筑。这些观众的小插曲揭示了关于不断变化的环境的不稳定说法是如何通过人类互动的植物作为建筑材料而不是惰性木材的解释得到验证的。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1971832
C. Nuijsink, M. Kaijima
Abstract The work of Atelier Bow-Wow has, over the last 29 years, turned to exploring what they call behaviorology: the full social and cultural effects of constructing architecture. Through collaborations with local craftsmen, wood specialists, timber management companies, house construction companies as well as architectural design studios in Japan and Switzerland they unlock the potentials of local timber networks. This interview with Momoyo Kaijima, founding partner of Atelier Bow-Wow, examines this aspect of their work, and places “timber behavoriology” in the context of an expanded scale of design: from forestry, to communities, to codes, to cultural history, to seismic details, and, somewhere in between, architecture.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1986083
Laila Seewang
Abstract This essay examines how a small cottage built in 1915 on the Oregon coast became the Rosetta Stone of Pacific Northwest regional modernism. It places the historiographical project of regional modernism articulated in the 1970s alongside a history of timber in the region in order to understand how place was characterized, and designed, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Timber history situates architecture within a broader network, including different species of trees, the soil in which they grow, the practices and ownerships to which they are subject, the mills that transform them into timber, the ships that carry logs to Asia, and the caprices of the residential housing market towards which much of the lumber industry is oriented. These material relationships expose a complicated assemblage of place that has defined the Pacific Northwest regional style.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1981025
Laila Seewang, Irina Davidovici
In 1852, a hunter called Augustus T. Dowd came across a grove of Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The find aroused sufficient public curiosity for prospectors to see an opportunity. In 1856, the second largest among the trees, recorded at circa one hundred metres in height and twenty-eight metres in diameter, was covered in scaffolding and stripped of its bark up to a height of thirty-five metres. A total of sixty tonnes of bark sections, 2.4 metres high and on average twenty-eight centimetres thick, was shipped to New York and exhibited as a reconstituted, crownless, trunk. This structure was later reassembled inside London’s Crystal Palace, which itself, disassembled after the 1851 Great Exhibition, had been rebuilt as a permanent attraction in Sydenham (fig. 1). There, the hollow redwood remained on display until its destruction, along with much of the central nave of the Palace, in a fire in 1866. By that time, back in California, the partially de-barked tree had stopped growing foliage (fig. 2). Its base unprotected, it eventually burnt down in a wildfire in 1908. A 2500-year-old giant tree perished within six decades—not, presumably, of its first encounter with the human race, but following its violent incorporation into the flows of interests, finance, technology, and greed associated with colonisation, industrialisation, and associated cultural production. The scattering of its parts thousands of miles away from its original location traced these currents faithfully enough. The lack of protection that destroyed the tree was both concrete, following the removal, transportation, and commodification of its protective layer, and abstract: as so often witnessed in history, the public outcry that followed its destruction formed the basis of laws for the protection of the natural environment that are still in force today. Not that humans can always claim learning from their historical mistakes. Worldwide, the current destruction of forests amply illustrates the same disregard for the natural world, with ominous consequences for our own survival as species. This sorry tale tells us more than the strange parallelism of architecture and exploited nature, the hollow Giant Sequoia and its short-lived shelter, the Crystal Palace. Both of these monumental structures, man-made and man-appropriated, were moved from their original location, consumed and turned into surplus. Timber, as part of a global mercantile exchange network, had of course previously been incorporated into these economic flows for centuries. But in the 1850s, these mediating flows are
{"title":"Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History","authors":"Laila Seewang, Irina Davidovici","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2021.1981025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2021.1981025","url":null,"abstract":"In 1852, a hunter called Augustus T. Dowd came across a grove of Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The find aroused sufficient public curiosity for prospectors to see an opportunity. In 1856, the second largest among the trees, recorded at circa one hundred metres in height and twenty-eight metres in diameter, was covered in scaffolding and stripped of its bark up to a height of thirty-five metres. A total of sixty tonnes of bark sections, 2.4 metres high and on average twenty-eight centimetres thick, was shipped to New York and exhibited as a reconstituted, crownless, trunk. This structure was later reassembled inside London’s Crystal Palace, which itself, disassembled after the 1851 Great Exhibition, had been rebuilt as a permanent attraction in Sydenham (fig. 1). There, the hollow redwood remained on display until its destruction, along with much of the central nave of the Palace, in a fire in 1866. By that time, back in California, the partially de-barked tree had stopped growing foliage (fig. 2). Its base unprotected, it eventually burnt down in a wildfire in 1908. A 2500-year-old giant tree perished within six decades—not, presumably, of its first encounter with the human race, but following its violent incorporation into the flows of interests, finance, technology, and greed associated with colonisation, industrialisation, and associated cultural production. The scattering of its parts thousands of miles away from its original location traced these currents faithfully enough. The lack of protection that destroyed the tree was both concrete, following the removal, transportation, and commodification of its protective layer, and abstract: as so often witnessed in history, the public outcry that followed its destruction formed the basis of laws for the protection of the natural environment that are still in force today. Not that humans can always claim learning from their historical mistakes. Worldwide, the current destruction of forests amply illustrates the same disregard for the natural world, with ominous consequences for our own survival as species. This sorry tale tells us more than the strange parallelism of architecture and exploited nature, the hollow Giant Sequoia and its short-lived shelter, the Crystal Palace. Both of these monumental structures, man-made and man-appropriated, were moved from their original location, consumed and turned into surplus. Timber, as part of a global mercantile exchange network, had of course previously been incorporated into these economic flows for centuries. But in the 1850s, these mediating flows are","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44003839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1973049
J. Marin, Bruno De Meulder
Abstract This paper constructs an alternative history of wood in Leuven (Belgium) to help contextualize the city’s contemporary project for a building materials bank as part of their larger efforts to make the urban metabolism more circular. Focusing on the history of Leuven’s forests, canal, and deconstruction practices, this paper aims to show how the materials bank will also intervene into the larger overlapping timber flows of the region. By analysing how (circular) wood flows were strongly intertwined with urban and landscape development projects in pre-industrial Leuven, the paper speculates on how the materials bank could revitalize broken spatial connections towards more circular timber flows in Leuven, while catalysing circular urban landscape and infrastructure development. It shifts focus from a materials bank as a circular waste management response “redirecting” wood waste flows to an integrated infrastructural question addressing path dependencies in the wood extraction, processing, consumption and disposal chain.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1974065
Shuntaro Nozawa, Yosuke Komiyama
Abstract Architects’ perennial discussions on the walls of the Japanese house started in the early twentieth century, when calls for the rationalization and modernization of people’s everyday lives became the impetus for their engagement in housing design. One of their solutions to this sociocultural issue was the introduction of western prefabricated wall construction, structurally contrasting with the conventional post-and-beam construction. This architectonic approach to modernizing Japanese life and dwelling was further activated by modernism, and oriented toward the standardization and industrialization of housing. This essay focuses particularly on the interwar years, when some modernist architects, including Tsuchiura Kameki, designed prefabricated houses using timber rather than steel. We explore their experimental attempts to discover the heretofore unexperienced features and meanings of panelized walls and materials, as well as the relationship between construction and architectural production. Their progressionist vision, predicting the future shift of building materials and methods, cognitively affected postwar home industrialization.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1969583
C. Macdonell
Abstract Gothic Revival architecture projected a sense of unity throughout the British Empire, even though the materials used to construct such architecture varied by available resources, geographic location and climatic conditions. In Canada, this led to the proliferation of wooden churches during the mid-nineteenth century, including William Hay’s Anglican “Garrison Church” for Toronto. The resulting forms allowed Anglo-Canadians to participate in a global discourse of Britishness while laying claim to local materials. However, the contested legality of local lands disrupts timber’s ability to ingrain Anglo-Canadian identity. Instead, I speculate that the transformation of local forest growth into timber-constructed designs is haunted by an uncanny act of appropriation, and I use the “garrison mentality” of a Canadian gothic novel to discuss the unstable boundaries between the demonised Indigenous peoples of Canada’s mostly coniferous forests and the would-be civility of Anglo-Canadians sheltered behind the wooden walls of Hay’s Garrison Church.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1946574
Erin Putalik
Abstract In the twentieth century, a decades-long debate about timber conservation in America began to shift. As opposed to cutting fewer trees and planting more, conversations about sustaining the nation’s forests increasingly circled around the ideal of higher utilization. Fundamentally, higher utilization meant waste reduction, which entailed turning a greater percentage of the harvested forest into useful products. Practically, this meant finding new markets for building materials that were made from what had previously been considered waste: the tops and branches of trees, lower value tree species, sawdust, and the edges of trimmed logs and boards. This essay will trace the strange ways in which publicity for these materials evaded any association with waste reduction, focusing instead on notions of purity and naturalness. In addition, it will demonstrate how these products were assiduously positioned to retain their associations with solid timber, even while leveraging claims to scientific improvement upon and transcendence of “natural” wood’s intrinsic limitations.
{"title":"Pure Trash: New Woods and Old Claims in Architectural Materiality","authors":"Erin Putalik","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2021.1946574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2021.1946574","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the twentieth century, a decades-long debate about timber conservation in America began to shift. As opposed to cutting fewer trees and planting more, conversations about sustaining the nation’s forests increasingly circled around the ideal of higher utilization. Fundamentally, higher utilization meant waste reduction, which entailed turning a greater percentage of the harvested forest into useful products. Practically, this meant finding new markets for building materials that were made from what had previously been considered waste: the tops and branches of trees, lower value tree species, sawdust, and the edges of trimmed logs and boards. This essay will trace the strange ways in which publicity for these materials evaded any association with waste reduction, focusing instead on notions of purity and naturalness. In addition, it will demonstrate how these products were assiduously positioned to retain their associations with solid timber, even while leveraging claims to scientific improvement upon and transcendence of “natural” wood’s intrinsic limitations.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"64 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43590265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1963297
M. Rusak
Abstract Timber is an ambiguous material, saturated with implicit values of sustainability, and locality, and at the same time globally ubiquitous. This essay examines the curious moment in Norwegian architectural history when timber, long associated with tradition and craft, became an industrial material of mass-production—in particular, through prefabricated structures produced by the Norwegian company Moelven Brug. By tracing the marketing narratives behind the company’s two main products—large timber housing panels and glued laminated (glulam) beams—this essay reconstructs a complex field of ideas related to building with timber. It argues that, on one hand, Moelven products reflected shifting architectural attitudes towards timber in mid-twentieth-century Norway, treating it as the most “neutral” material, and on the other, they shaped new narratives of “updated tradition” advanced through the use of engineered timber in representative buildings. A curious by-product of a marketing narrative, the myth of updated tradition survives until today, providing a local resolution to the homogeneous global typologies of timber construction.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2021.1932825
Stuart King, A. Leach
Abstract An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of the architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established geographies. Drawing on a recent body of work concerned with those architectural histories of the Tasman world and the interplay of extractive industries and “grey” architecture, this paper reflects on the conceptual stakes of prioritising specific industries over habitual historiographical frames. Timber’s dual standing as an extracted resource subject to the vicissitudes of trade, and as a building material deployed in settings immediately adjacent to forests and at significant distances from its point of origin, exposes the complexity of a form of architectural history attentive to historical events and the images history necessarily draws from them. The paper responds to a proposal by Mark Crinson intended to address this complexity, suggesting that an architectural history of timber in the specific setting of the colonial Tasman world may offer a useful test.
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