How biomaterials bring us together socially and ecologically.
I have -lately- been thinking and building almost exclusively in
wood. I might just keep going for the rest of my life.
My fellow wood architect Michael Green, from Vancouver,
argues that construction materials should have the same kind of
labeling as processed food products, indicating their nutritional
value in the feasts we prepare for our clients. Volatile resins
and carpet glues are about as good for us as sugary bubblegum
made from old car tires; concrete has been cooked at colossal
temperatures and has various dodgy byproducts; aluminium has
traveled across the world (most likely from Australia and China)
onto your plate, picking up a few food miles on the way, like
Kenyan green beans in midwinter.
Wood, however, might very well sprout next to your
building site: chop it down, cut it to size and serve, perhaps
seasoned with a drop of oil. Chances are there will be a good local
wood chef, decreasing transport, improving your immediate
economy and creating social bonds between ‘farmer,’ carpenterchef,
designer and inhabitant-consumer. The local chef is always
at hand for some repairs or modifications in due course, and
you can even try your hand directly: wood is perhaps the most
democratic material. It’s conditional, inviting, open: wood
would like to please, to be maintained, to be improved, to be
taken in hand, to start a conversation. A formerly living thing,
it’s not just a metaphor to say that it has character: it stands
before us as a witness of time and growth, we identify with it,
it reverberates with our personality, it is a correlative for the
human. It’s no accident that theatre-makers from Shakespeare
to our time have warmed to its presence: it sets the scene, brings
life and energy and a sense of possibility. It is of the present and
the past, dead and alive, solid and light, possessing in its knots
and grain the chameleon, elastic time-character we examined
earlier in the theatre.
It gets better: before you serve it up it has been faithfully
sucking carbon dioxide out of the air all its life, to the equivalent
of half of its adult mass. By using it in construction -rather than
burning it or letting it fall and rot- you are actually improving
matters, capturing the carbon as you create shelter. Even for a
tiny building like my Elizabethan Theatre this is a big deal: the
net benefit of our 400 cubic metres of spruce and larch is the
mirror equivalent to driving in a diesel car twenty times around
the planet’s circumference.
