Wood 2.0 reaches for the skies as digital techniques give it a new lease of life
In March, when Austrian architects announced they were going to build an 84-metre skyscraper out of wood, there were mutterings about whether this was the right material for the job. The reservations were not about its strength, but that the material doesn't embody modernity, and so these wooden skyscrapers might seem anachronistic. Wood suffered this bias throughout the 20th century as new materials such as metal alloys and carbon fibre composites offered not just better properties but something even more alluring: newness itself. The story of how wood regained its edge encompasses the development of aircraft, modernist furniture and digital fabrication.
Wood is a porous material comprised of cellulose fibres that give it strength and stiffness, and lignin polymer that effectively glues these fibres together. The density and arrangement of the fibres gives wood its grain, which is determined not just by the biology of trees but also by their growth environment. Thus the grain varies from species to species and from tree to tree. The upshot is that, like us, each piece of wood has an individual character, which is one of the reasons we love it so much. Wood is strong across the grain but has a tendency to crack along it. This is useful if you are splitting logs for a fire, but if you are building a house, a chair, a violin or pretty much anything out of wood it presents a design problem. The thinner the piece, the more cracking is an issue, which is why solid wooden furniture can be quite bulky and heavy. Counter-intuitively, the answer to this problem is to make very thin wafers of wood called veneer.
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