Anatomy of Timber – TREE_TimberREengineered

Authors: Gilbert Koskamp, Pierre Jennen, Stijn Brancart, Max Salzberger, Benedetta Rizzo, Alex de Rijke

Anatomy of Timber celebrates wood as the future of architecture, tracing how designers, engineers, and makers are reinventing building culture through craft, ecology, and innovation. Born from an international forum, the book brings together bold ideas and real projects that show timber’s power to connect forest to city, structure to climate, and design to responsibility. It’s a call to build beautifully, intelligently, and sustainably, with timber at the heart of it all.

#lecture series #material intelligence #sustainability

Soft cover: 180 pages / English / 176 x 250 mm

ISBN: 978-90-83621-03-6

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€ 24.50

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This volume assembles a contemporary timber culture in which wood is both structural method and ecological medium. Through lectures, case studies, and design build pedagogy, contributors argue for legible tectonics, geometry, section, and joints that deliver comfort with minimal services, and for circular assemblies that remain readable, repairable, and demountable. Projects span a didactic workplace (Innovationsfabrik), nature inclusive cooperative housing (De Warren), and hands on programs at Aalto and IAAC that prototype full scale systems from forest to fabrication, coupling digital craft with low tech joinery and measurable carbon intelligence.

A second thread re-frames territory and city. Regenerative design demands long horizon value and co creation; evolutionary architecture choreographs spaces that adapt with living systems; landscape based construction links regional materials, craft, and cooperation into resilient value chains; and urban forestry proposes the city as forest, aligning feature, site, and network scale interventions with governance, biodiversity, and circular bio economies. Together these approaches reposition timber practice as stewardship across scales.

Finally, the book details the infrastructures needed to mainstream timber. A manifesto for urban industry (WorkStack) pairs structure as finish with reconfigurability; regulatory pathways and testing protocols are mapped as engines of trust; the interregnum between mineral and bio based construction is addressed through standardized, adaptable systems; mass customized housing platforms and glue or metal free dovetailed boards advance circularity; and large span public buildings, including an Olympic aquatics hall, demonstrate timber’s performance at scale.

A historical survey situated these advances in a lineage of repairable frames and connection logics. The result is a clear operating system for practice: design with reversible detail, coordinate ecology and regulation, and use digital to craft work-flows to make structure speak, beautifully, efficiently, and for a long time.

Design:
Benedetta Rizzo, Santiago Reinel, Gilbert Koskamp

Editing:
Benedetta Rizzo, Jack O’Hagan

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 978-90-83621-03-6