the culture of wood construction ted cavanagh
W ood reinvents itself every century. The material remains the same but the building culture changes. Currently, the material culture of wood is realigning. Are we headed to a cellulose fibre future, or a mass timber redux? Or, is it a future of diversity with no singular popular way? Wood construction is ubiquitous, historic, ephemeral, malleable, sustainable, unpredictable, vulnerable to weather, insects and fire. Material culture is inherently social, not just technical, and new technologies are based in
it demands dexterity, care and judgment before and during production. Like other products of industrial alienation, there is a loss of ‘nearness’ and a reduced potential for ordinary interaction with wood in this form. As with lumber, early versions of this new wood product often merited the public’s sceptical view: ‘The early plywoods were glued with vegetable or blood glues, and having virtually no moisture resistance, became almost a term of abuse. The introduction of phenolic glues changed all this and, incidentally presents an interesting picture of the way in which the public image of a material can be changed.’ 3 It can take as long as 50 years before a new product becomes mainstream. Today plywood is perceived as stronger than wood, and an ideal, stable, planar substrate, more obviously manufactured than lumber. As a result, it is open to ambivalent interpretation: sometimes as material, sometimes as product. ‘Traditionally, a material was thought of as an elementary system whose task was to give structure to a more complex system. Only design could then put together various appropriate materials, formed according to different geometries, so as to produce objects capable of performing complex functions…’ 4 When materials themselves are designed products, then this concept starts to become much more complex. In his stackable plywood chairs, Aalto found it necessary to re-produce plywood manufacture, customising the process rather than using the stock components of standard production. Both structure and aesthetic appearance required this level of engagement in the process of manufacture. A different strategy is where designers accept the planar nature of plywood and investigate the formal potential of planes and their details of intersection. Materials and components of industry as stock items assembled into a kit-of-parts is open- ended, plug-in, replicable and economically opportunistic. Re-designing the components and materials of the building for improved efficiency, ergonomics or aesthetics restocks the shelves of industry. The developing, changing, relationship between wood products and industry, taste, commodification and production leads me to the current project of Coastal Studio, a twenty- first century project that sits at the genesis of a third design strategy, neither the acceptance 1 Charles Cleaver, ‘Early Chicago Reminiscences’, Fegus Historical Series 19 (1882): 40 2 Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Dilemmas of Diversity: Vernacular Style and High Style’, Precis 5 (Fall, 1984) p118 3 J E Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials, or why you don’t fall through the floor . London: Pelican Books, 1967. p 151 4 Ezio Manzini, editor. The Material of Invention . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989. p 39 5 Coastal Studio, a summer program at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University. dalcoastalstudio.com
design strategy research
roles and neighbourhoods, a dramatic increase in household goods and appliances, and new considerations of health and efficiency of domestic arrangements. The coincidence of these transformations with the introduction of a new building technology created a set of associations (as tropes, as limitations, as possibilities) between technology and culture – between the ‘American home’ and the limitations and possibilities of frame houses. I have co-opted Gwendolyn Wright’s description of the vernacular to apply to this innovative, hybridising commercial culture of building: ‘People have to choose which elements from high culture and traditional culture have meaning for them. They have to decide how to allocate a limited budget; they say what matters to them now, and what still matters from the past. And so they create new cultural forms. The values that determine what to accept, what to reject, and what to alter draw from a variety of sources. These are both positive and negative, innovative and conservative. They include political liberalism, religious conservatism, folklore, ethnic traditions, the desire to be different, and the messages of advertising or social conventions.’ 2 Building innovation advanced in the early 1800s in the context of a double hybrid – the coincidence of vernacular building from many cultures and the many overlaps generated by the ascendant commercial culture of the time. Twentieth century wood products were based on engineering principles. Plywood, glue-laminated beams and parallel-strand materials are derived from innovative structural understanding, analytical processes and a new spatial appreciation. Plywood is a material of the twentieth century: engineered, laminated and effectively isotropic, material qualities quite distinct from timber or lumber. Softwood laminate or ply can be reunited with itself and, with the addition of glues, produces a material with improved structural properties. This improvement comes at the expense of material flexibility. More rigid and more brittle than lumber, it is more difficult to form and transform. Its decreased workability requires a different set of tools and processes. However, its isotropic nature suited twentieth century engineering theories and any limitations were glossed over easily in favour of plywood’s predictability and uniformity. Plywood is a good example of a modern industrial commodity. Value is added to a basic material in the production process while changing our understanding of that material’s properties. Plywood’s processing is complex;
social consensus … as history shows. Lumber was essentially a new and
experimental product for house structure in the early nineteenth century. Lumber products were based predominantly on milling, a formal and linear process that produces dimensional lumber, sash and moulding. Building components are defined by dimension, profile and section. Dimensional lumber reacts differently than timber or even planks: posts made of the entire cross-section of a tree are stable, and timber that squares the cross-section is only slightly less so; planks tend to instability in one direction as they slice across growth rings; and 2x4 lumber that cuts growth rings on all four faces can bend and twist. Selecting lumber needs a trained eye; seasoning and storing it is just as critical; assembling it into a building must allow expansion and contraction. It was probably the potential for buildings to tear themselves apart, as much as to collapse structurally, that made early balloon frame houses so risky to build. Lumber was described as dimensionally inadequate, as mere stuff, as sticks. Architects bridled against its impermanence, often for good reason: ‘In its green state … in drying it will shrink, warp and twist in every way, drawing out the nails, and, after a summer has passed, the siding will gape open, letting the wind through every joint. Such was the stuff used for building in 1833 and 1834.’ 1 Lumber is politically and economically a nineteenth-century commodity. Its production combines aspects of agricultural harvesting and mining – basic extractive industries that depend on the boundless resources of the land, that privilege monocultural production and that define numerous by-products as waste. Its industrial processing is simple and linear; it follows an assembly line sequence – a harvested product is made to conform to the mechanical exigencies of production. Giedion cites the wood-frame slaughterhouse of nineteenth- century Cincinnati in Mechanisation Takes Command and by 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright was praising lumber as the supreme product of the machine. The predominant site of lumber’s application – the nineteenth-century home – accommodated significant socio-cultural revisions, including an ascendant bourgeois domestic morality, a spatial reconfiguration of room and use, a social reorganisation into family units, gender
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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