Authors: Gilbert Koskamp, Pierre Jennen, Felix Waechter
Touching Cellulose: Rethink Construction invites readers into a new era of timber thinking, where building with wood becomes an act of design, ecology, and craft combined. Spanning workshops and lectures in Delft, Læsø, and Darmstadt, the book captures how students, makers, and experts joined forces to prototype a more circular and expressive architecture. Through lectures, drawings, and full-scale experiments, it reveals how simple geometry, visible joints, and local materials can deliver beauty, comfort, and carbon intelligence all at once. From reed and hardwood to robotic joinery and living structures, Touching Cellulose celebrates timber as both medium and mindset, a call to design buildings that breathe, adapt, and tell their structural story with honesty and care.
#lecture series #craft #technology
Soft cover: 148 pages / English / 176 x 250 mm
ISBN: 978-90-83621-00-5
€ 24.50
Additional information
Touching Cellulose: Rethink Construction assembles a contemporary timber culture that treats wood as both structural medium and ecological instrument. Across lectures and case studies, contributors argue for “simple” buildings in which geometry, section, and joint deliver comfort with minimal services; hardwood and engineered timber extend this clarity into slender, durable systems when detailed for moisture, fire, and reversibility. The result is legible tectonics, structure as expression, where visible force flow, calibrating details, and craft-informed assemblies align performance, atmosphere, and carbon responsibility. Practice-based chapters translate ethics into method: regional bio-based palettes (reed, earth, thinned forest wood) organized as demountable elements; circular design that values life-cycles and residual worth; local urban timber streams processed close to site; and mass timber offices coordinated through codes, services, and adaptable floor plates. Projects demonstrate low-tech climate strategies, composite slabs, green-wood joints that tighten as they dry, and manufacturer-integrated joinery that keeps timber exposed and didactic. A third thread explores time and technology as design matters. Living architectures (Baubotanik) choreograph growth; robotic fabrication and CNC joinery bridge furniture precision and building scale; cellulose, from paper to laminated veneers, becomes a platform for full-scale prototyping. Together these experiments recode the architectural “alphabet” toward reversible detail, standardized but open kits, and digitally guided assembly. Finally, the book documents a multi-site workshop in Delft, Copenhagen (Læsø), and Darmstadt that couples discourse and making. Precedent analysis, shared digital tooling, and 1:1 prototypes forge a common grammar across contexts. The collective message is clear and actionable: design with wood to make structure speak, draw at 1:1 to make circularity real, and align material intelligence with social and climatic purpose to make timber’s ethics and poetics structurally self-evident.
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
Powered by:
PEFC, TU Delft, Ssse|OvO
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.
© 2025 (First Edition)
ISBN 978-90-83621-00-5