In recent years, a huge amount of architectural interest has been placed in the potential for timber frame and mass timber as the future of construction, not only because of its ecological potential but also because of the fascinating avenues for creativity it provides.
Many modern office buildings and homes are designed with the incorporation of more natural materials in mind, and so-called “plyscrapers” of ever-increasing size are starting to appear in the skylines of cities, with the most ambitious of these being the W350 Project in Tokyo.
A lot of modern technologies have been used to maximise the strengths and benefits of mass timber, but experiments in weighing up timber’s potential to make modern buildings have been attempted by architects for nearly a century.
One of the most important pioneers in this regard is Alvar Aalto, one of the most influential architects of his era and an unsung hero in the world of timber architecture.
Wood, Architecture And Total Artwork
Mr Aalto was a man of many talents, working not only with architecture but also with paintings, sculptures, textiles, furniture and glassware.
This was due to his firm belief in Gesamtkunstwerk, the mixture of different artistic forms to create a coherent whole. Mr Aalto himself described his painting and sculpture work as “branches” of an artistic tree whilst architecture itself was the “trunk”.
The use of a tree metaphor is appropriate given that Mr Aalto’s biggest achievement was the development of a more organic form of modernist architecture, rather than one defined purely by the use of steel, glass and reinforced concrete.
To that end, many of his projects from the 1930s onwards started to experiment with the capabilities of wood, particularly through the use of novel techniques to bend it into unique shapes whilst retaining its flexibility and sturdiness.
One of his first notable achievements in that regard was the Viipuri Library Auditorium from 1935, built in Vyborg, Russia back when it was occupied by Finland and only appreciated as a pioneer of timber construction eight decades after its construction.
An even greater example of this experimentation with different types of wooden materials was found with the Villa Mairea, a blank canvas homemade for some of his friends that allowed him to test several different concepts he was exploring but could apply to other projects.
Deeply inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece Fallingwater to the point that
Mr Aalto attempted to convince his clients from the famous Ahlstrom family to build the home over a stream, the design focus is to merge interior and exterior design concepts.
To this end, the wooden columns are built with different diameters and spaces to reflect the forest the home was built in, and wooden beams and other structural elements were mixed with stone, brick and other materials.
His exploration of breaking the limit of what was possible with wood as a structural material would be more widely celebrated after he died in 1976, and a lot of the structural elements seen in his most notable projects and his own experimental house project Muuratsalo have influenced modern timber frame housebuilders.