Analyze a Timber Building – TREE

Authors: Gilbert Koskamp, et al.

Analyze a Timber Building is both a design guide to architectural precedents and a hands-on toolkit for young architects eager to understand timber construction in all its forms. Drawing from two decades of the Bk Wood Group’s Analyze + Make workshops, the book teaches how to read, model, and assemble timber structures with precision and curiosity. Through comparative case studies, spanning rural projects, cultural halls, floating platforms, and tall timber systems, it reveals how geometry, joinery, and material behavior inform design at every scale. Beautiful physical models, meticulous drawings, and expressive joints bring the studies to life, showing how careful observation can lead to smarter, more sustainable building. Combining the craft of hand tools with the accuracy of digital fabrication, Analyze a Timber Building offers a clear and inspiring framework for learning from the built environment and shaping the future of timber architecture.

#education #craft #joinery #toolkit

Soft cover: 354 pages / English / 176 x 250 mm

ISBN: 978-90-83621-01-2

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This book compiles comparative case studies that teach how to read, model, and build timber with precision across contexts. Through consistent analytical tools such as plans, sections, structural axonometric, joinery details, and construction sequences, it renders force paths legible and links geometry to fabrication and assembly. The method emphasizes material behaviour (fibre direction, moisture, withdrawal, creep) and the reciprocity between detail and system, enabling designers to evaluate performance, reversibility, and buildability rather than form alone. Hand-tool know-how and digital processes are presented as complementary literacies: prototypes and CNC routines are used to prove tolerances, reduce waste, and standardize clarity in connections. Themes are organized by setting and typology. Timber framing chapters dissect industrial halls and cultural buildings to show how member sizing, bracing logics, and service layers co-produce large, adaptable spans. Floating structures translate structural reasoning to buoyancy, demonstrating interfaces between raft, superstructure, and envelopes under variable loads and climate. Rural projects foreground resource-conscious construction, marrying local species, simple joints, and landscape-driven form. Additional sections survey tall structures, panellised systems, bridges, and grid shells, each mapping the coupling of architectural intent, structural strategy, and fabrication work-flow. Across the book, a didactic stance prevails: analyse precedents to extract reusable connection grammars; dimension to stock; document assembly and disassembly as core performance; and use drawings to coordinate ecology, regulation, and craft. The result is a transferable operating system for contemporary timber practice, one that equips architects, engineers, and builders to deliver clear, efficient, and repairable structures.

Design:
Benedetta Rizzo, Santiago Reinel, Gilbert Koskamp

Editing:
Benedetta Rizzo, Pierre Jennen

Printing and Binding:
OnlyPrint B.V.

Publisher:
BK-Wood Books
Publishing Partner:
Delft University of Technology

Printed on PEFC certified paper.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or reprinted or utilised in any form without prior permission in writing from the author or publisher. Picture copyright are reserved to authors and contributors, unless otherwise mentioned.

ISBN 978-90-83621-01-2