Description
Book SynopsisThis book weaves a much needed and transformational narrative about making architecture through paying close attention to cross-laminated timber as a material for today. The material becomes the site of experimentation, innovation, and research in search of specific meanings of CLT in architecture at various scales by selecting the “CLT Blank” as the building unit. The structure of the book brings together work and texts from a diverse group of theorists and practitioners, who make material central to their inquiry, to suggest design approaches that will broaden the cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry.
The outcome focuses on materiality through fast slippages between art, architecture, and science, that we hope will invigorate and expand new discourse to act as an antidote to the current conversations about the material, that is fixated on its making and mass production, disappointingly portraying it as a bland and lifeless product—a notion we want to be distant from in preference to seeking areas we feel were not yet conceptualised or theorised. The potential to see the spatial properties of its use and what kind of world that might suggest is shown in the book, with selected striking visual materials, to reposition its architecture though new forms of representation and responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics. Aesthetics of CLT with a connection to wood and art practice is a central thread though the book.
Table of ContentsBlank Towers Prologue: Built-in Sprezzatura - Erika Naginski After Timber Trends, or Speculations on the Cross-Laminated Timber Blank - Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara Blank Houses Endless Lamellae and Finer Grains: A Brief History of Better Wood - Erin Putalik Essential Planes - Christopher C. M. Lee On Blankness: Courtney Coffman Blank Panels Blank Shots: Monolithic Desires and Laminar Inevitabilities - Nader Tehrani Ten Points on CLT Models and Public Performance - Yasmin Vobis Wood Grain Models Constructing the Supergraphic: A Drawing of a Wall as Much as a Wall - Sam Jacob Cut-Out - Nelson Byun Lauren Halsey Surface Tensions - Victoria Camblin Jennifer Bolande Exploded Blanks Switcheroo, Blanks Everywhere - Jennifer Bonner Blank Characters: Elisions in Artistic Practice and Domestic Spaces - Sean Canty Pervasive Structural Analysis Dialogues of Material - Hanif Kara CLT Forecasts Contributors Image Credits Acknowledgments
