Our research investigates how to increase the amount of durable products from timber per unit of raw material, maximise the materials potential as Carbon sink and allow for new expressions for design and engineering.

Increasing the use of wood in construction helps to lower the carbon footprint of buildings and is a first step towards a biobased economy in construction. However due to the industrial logics of timber production, where every piece of wood needs to live up to set quality standards, up to 70% of input forest material is in traditional workflows lost during the production of timber for buildings, as it is declared low quality or cut or milled away in process.

Our research probes whether computational techniques can create a new link between the highly variant qualities and appearances of the natural grown material of wood in nature and timber construction in buildings, where predictability and performance within set specification are key. We pursue a holistic approach, which establishes a flow of data between the currently separate areas of processing trees into timber and the use of it as elements in buildings. For this we need to extend the usual top-down design processes in timber architecture with a bottom up dialog between existing material qualities and design performance requirements. 

Our development combines material and computational systems to acquire data from the tree, a custom design system, which analyses the data and generates specification for the cutting of boards and the lamination of the elements.