6 Heavy wood construction

I began to ask myself what it would mean to make something out of wood, where the substance of the wood — the elements of the wood, the actual pieces of wood themselves — had feeling, and a living field of centers appeared in the very wood itself.

We soon began to realize that a building made of heavy timbers would have a life of perhaps several hundred years, compared with 30 or 40 years for a stud house. The apparent cheapness of the stud house was false; the cost of wood in a heavy timber house would actually cost less per year, if calculated per year of its expected lifetime — and would put less of a drain on timber reserves than continued use of small timbers.

When we began these works [at the Eishin campus], I sketched each of these trusses intuitively, in response to the latent field which existed already in the building design (most visible in the cross section). Using finite element methods to work them out, these sketches were almost at once confirmed, and encouraged use of unusual and sometimes startling configurations as structural designs. Even the designs intuitively sketched were efficient — because the intuitive placing of members to create a field of centers produces results in which the forces are beautifully distributed.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/16 Continuous invention of new materials and techniques#