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Blank: Speculations On CLT Edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara - Harvard Graduate School of Design
Blank: Speculations On CLT Edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara - Harvard Graduate School of Design
March 1, 2022
by Edwin Heathcote
Departments
Department of Architecture (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/architecture/)
When I began studying architecture in the 1980s, students would often get asked at crits what, exactly, those blank white or beige walls
indicated on their drawings or models were intended to be made of. The answer, almost inevitably, was “concrete.” Concrete was the wonder
material, the realizer of dreams. The reliable, universal one-word answer. The staff would, inevitably, roll their eyes. But that reliance on a
blank material rendered as an abstract surface has been threaded through the history of the last century of so of architecture. In the beginning,
even architects themselves could only dream of abstract planes of concrete. Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and the others built walls of brick,
rendering them so they would appear as concrete—smooth, featureless, as if drawn rather than built. They made concrete through
manifestation.
A century on, with the world more aware of impending climate crisis, that one-word answer of “concrete” might be dumber and even less
acceptable than it was then. The response now, however, might well be “CLT.” Even more than concrete, big panels of cross-laminated timber,
cut in a spotless factory by robots, far away from the mud, sweat, and swearing of the construction site, looks like the future. Prefabricated,
clean, as much drawing as material, rendering as reality, it represents the new wonder material of our eco-aware, guilt-burdened age; the world-
saving, carbon-soaking, multifunctional stuff sent to salve our consciences in the creating of new buildings we know to be wrong, in attempting
to make architecture at all.
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Blank: Speculations on CLT edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara - Harvard Graduate School of Design 27/3/22, 7:42 PM
The book’s title, Blank (https://www.appliedresearchanddesign.com/product/blank/) (Applied Research and Design Publishing/ORO Editions, 2022), hints
at this emergent identity, the still-unformed nature of a material that is both lumber and number, wood and data, a slab that exists between the
forests and the digital. In one way, CLT is nothing new. It’s a close cousin of the plywood which emerged as a mass-market material a century
or so ago and became a staple building product after having been adopted from other industries including aviation.
Clearing my parents’ old house out the other day, I took an ancient Singer sewing machine to the dump. Heavy as hell in cast-iron, it came in its
own vaulted carrying case. I’d guess it was from the 1920s and that curved wooden top was probably the product that propelled plywood into a
mass-market material. Singer’s slice of the market was so huge in the early 20th century that their adoption of bent plywood for their sewing
machine cases gave this new wonder-material the scale to become an accessible material, one that subsequently came to define varying strands
of modernism, from Aalto’s and Breuer’s ergonomic loungers via the streamlined bars and railway carriage interiors of Deco to the spartan
studio-interiors of Case Study houses and artists’ studios.
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Plywood however was mostly a surface rather than a structure. It’s true there were all kinds of laminated beams and ply products but we still
probably think of it as a surface, a sheet. CLT is surface, too. But also structure. It is wall but also floor, ceiling, roof, insulation, internal finish,
and the rest. Its versatility is almost comical. It holds, perhaps, a similar status in our age as not only concrete did to the modernists but as
plastic did in the postwar era. It looks like the future; a total, wraparound environment.
left: Lauren Halsey, the Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture_, 2018. Installation views, Made in LA, June 3- September 2, 2018.
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Page 162, Blank..
Right: Lauren Halsey, The Liquor Bank, 2019. Hand-carved gypsum on wood, 47 5/8 x 47 5/8 x 1 7/8 in, Page 163, Blank.
On the other hand, it also smells like the past. It might be high tech in its manufacture but CLT is still lumber. Its future should seem assured
then, particularly in the US, where the history of housing has been one of adopting the cheapest, easiest timber construction techniques. The
American house is already an all-timber affair: the balloon frame, timber windows and doors, shingles, log cabins, lodges, sticks of timber
nailed together. It should be simple to segue into CLT construction in which all of that comes in one package.
The writers here outline possible histories and futures, their texts interspersed with designs— plans, models, cutout kits of parts, propositions
for a new language of architecture constructed around the capabilities of a material that does so many things at once. Along with the optimism,
there is a sense of feeling a way toward new modes of expression. If the designs can look a little familiar, shot through with elements of
deconstruction, wiggly walls, Swiss seriousness, and parametric ambition, many of the texts consider what the shift means. This kind of mass
timber, Hanif Kara points out, is now being employed in ways more akin to how concrete is currently used in construction. It’s an odd shift—
the move from the formwork leaving its imprint on the structure to the timber being employed directly—the return of the uninverted grain.
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It is also, as Elif Erez (March ’21/ MDes ’22) points out in her essay for Blank titled “Deadpan CLT”, impossible not to think of the scene from
Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, featured above) in which the facade of a house rips away from its walls and falls on the deadpan
comic in the most perfect way so that his form is accommodated by an upstairs window. The scene was resurrected in Deadpan (1997) by
British artist Steve McQueen, who subtly subverted it as an echo of the invisibility of the Black body in 20th-century popular culture. That
delaminated elevation is a cipher for CLT, a thing both seriously substantial and comically weightless, sign and signified. There is something
slapstick about an entire elevation built from a single sheet as it appears here (though of course this was frame and shingles). It reduces
architecture to the condition of a stage set, a flat, something fake built only to represent reality and enable the suspension of disbelief.
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Installation shot of Steve McQueen’s Deadpan (1997) at the Steve McQueen exhibition at Art Institute Chicago, 2012. Image courtesy of Art Institute
Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/1613/steve-mcqueen) .
Other contributors, including Jennifer Bonner, point to the condition of the blank as something already fully assimilated in fine art (she singles
out Mavis Pusey; perhaps she might have also alighted on Richard Woods or even Roy Lichtenstein) who used the “plank-ness” of timber as a
shorthand for materiality. Elsewhere Gehry, Rossi, Mies, and Corb appear, sometimes as plywood pioneers, at other times as adopters of the
blank slab which could be concrete or marble—but why not CLT next? Even Lewerentz makes a guest appearance (in Nader Tehrani’s essay) as
an architect who adopted one material—brick in his case—as if it were a contiguous surface, in often surprising and surreal ways, anticipating
the way in which CLT is employed as a total environment, a laminated bubble.
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corner view of light wood architectural model with many windows and shingles
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Photograph of grassy field with light wood pavilion featuring a central stair with expansive views of Lake Michigan.
Mass timber is, in its way, the architect’s dream material. It is (relatively) sustainable, a renewable resource, prefabricated, digital in its milled
manufacture, precise, warm, and able to elude the requirements for the endless layers of finish and insulation which have made a mockery of
Victorian and early modernist calls for “honesty” in construction and the show-and-tell approach to elevations. But perhaps sometimes, when
we get what we dream of, we don’t know quite what to do with it. Regulation is still catching up, the notoriously conservative construction
industry is still not quite convinced, and planners remain, despite endless screeds about sustainability, stuck in concrete.
Every new material, of course, provokes its own reaction. CLT’s super-sustainable halo is now being questioned by some for its liberal use of
glue. Dowel-laminated timber (DLT) is occasionally touted as the next next big thing, avoiding petrochemical adhesives entirely. But it looks
like CLT is, for the moment at least, here to stay. Blank is as much a comment on its newness, the lack of imprint on the culture, as it is on the
character of those enigmatic slabs.
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9 black and white building frames arranged in a grid; varying degree of windows and detail on each building
The construction of the American balloon frame house, which still seems so simple, fragile, and astonishing to Europeans, was a result of a
number of factors. First the availability of cheap timber, second the abandonment of the guilds and master carpenter networks of Europe which
prescribed long apprenticeships and complex jointing techniques (along with the propensity of people to build their own houses using limited
skills), and third the mass production of the nail as a machine-made and abundant good. The construction industry since then has become
specialized and exclusive, though the framing technique remains.
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left: model of timber tower with undulating facade and circular opening at top; right: close up of circular opening
TOPICS
Fabrication (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/topic/fabrication/)
Materials (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/topic/materials/)
Sustainability (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/topic/sustainability/)
RELATED
With Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect, Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara speculate how wood might recapture the
American architectural imagination (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2020/11/with-mass-timber-and-the-scandinavian-effect-jennifer-bonner-and-hanif-kara-
speculate-how-wood-might-recapture-the-american-architectural-imagination/)
Excerpt from Harvard Real Estate Review: “Transitioning Cross-laminated Timber to an American Context” by Ian Grohsgal
(https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2021/08/excerpt-from-harvard-real-estate-review-transitioning-cross-laminated-timber-to-an-american-context-by-ian-grohsgal/)
Radical geometry: With Haus Gables, Jennifer Bonner proposes a new urban typology (https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2019/07/radical-geometry-
with-haus-gables-jennifer-bonner-proposes-a-new-urban-typology/)
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left: Lauren Halsey, the Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture_, 2018. Installation views, Made in LA, June 3-
September 2, 2018. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Page 162, Blank..
Right: Lauren Halsey, The Liquor Bank, 2019. Hand-carved gypsum on wood, 47 5/8 x 47 5/8 x 1 7/8 in, Page 163, Blank.
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Installation shot of Steve McQueen’s Deadpan (1997) at the Steve McQueen exhibition at Art Institute Chicago, 2012. Image courtesy of Art
Institute Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/1613/steve-mcqueen) .
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