Architecture Books – Week 4/2025
Critical mass for mass timber
This newsletter for the week of January 20 features a new book with case studies of mass timber in the home. In addition to featuring Against the Grain by William Richard as “Book of the Week,” I dig out a couple older books “From the Archive,” both focused on mass timber: Solid Wood: Case Studies in Mass Timber Architecture, Technology and Design and Shigeru Ban: Timber in Architecture. The usual headlines and new releases are in between. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Against the Grain: Mass Timber in the Home by William Richards (Buy from Schiffer Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
For good reason, mass timber — engineered wood products made by laminating layers of timber into thick panels — has been having a fairly extended moment, thanks to, among other things, the International Building Code (IBC) allowing tall wood buildings up to 18 stories as of 2021, exhibitions on innovations in tall timber, and increasing calls to shift to wood from steel, concrete, and other carbon-intensive structural materials in the face of our climate crises. Not surprisingly, with the nearly insurmountable scale of climate change, attention over mass timber tends to focus on building tall and building big, as with the HoHo Wein by RLP Rüdiger Lainer + Partner, which tops out at 275 feet, and Shigeru Ban’s large, sinuous Swatch Omega Factory, one of many mass timber buildings around the world designed by the Japanese architect. Books, in turn, have tended to focus on building taller, as in Michael Green and Jim Taggart's Tall Wood Buildings: Design, Construction and Performance, or presenting bespoke creations for office, educational, and institutional clients, as in Ban’s book at the bottom of this newsletter. Cognizant of this, writer William Richards has focused on single-family houses with his latest book, as a means of examining how mass timber can find “creative, stylish solutions for smaller residential projects that retain the material’s carbon-capturing and strength benefits,” per the book’s blurb.
Against the Grain, released last month, consists of twelve residential mass timber projects completed over roughly twenty years, a fairly low number compared to other surveys of architectural typologies, where numbers like 50 and 100 are the norm. It’s a good number, as it allows for more pages per project (12 to 18, to be precise) and therefore more photos, longer texts with commentary from the architects, and the inclusion of floor plans, which are a must with books on single-family houses. Thankfully, twelve projects still allows for a diversity of contexts, sizes, styles, and geographies. To wit, six are in Europe, five in North America, and one in Australia. While all of the houses are modern, a few of them feature gables and other sloped roofs rather than flat roofs — Jennifer Bonner’s Haus Gables, shown here, for instance, as well as Amin Taha’s Spruce Apartments and Susan Jones’s CLT House — making them “good neighbors” in their urban or suburban contexts. And even though most of the houses are large, like other architecture books on the typology, a few of them clock in below the US average of around 2,500 square feet, pointing to a synergy between reduced carbon footprint and reduced physical footprint. There are even examples of adaptive reuse and extensions, including Aaron Schiller’s Brooklyn Mass Timber House and Fiona Dunin’s CLT House, the latter of which graces the cover and is, surprisingly, a second-floor addition to an old ranch-style house.
Unlike other books on mass timber geared to architects, Against the Grain is not highly technical, be it in language or in drawings. It is nevertheless informative on each project, going beyond the usual PR text readers can easily find online, thanks to interviews Richards conducted with the architects, who sometimes doubled as clients. As accessible as project features in Dwell magazine, Against the Grain therefore seems targeted as much to potential clients as to architects looking for inspiration. This commendable focus comes across in the texts and the photographs/captions, but unfortunately I found the floor plans are lacking, especially if we consider that clients cannot read floor plans like architects. Although the architects contributed drawings that are clean and readable, and the publisher put them atop colored backgrounds that work with the book’s overall graphic design, the drawings are not consistently labeled, be they the plans themselves (first floor vs. second floor, etc.) or the individual rooms; architects can navigate these omissions, but I’m guessing non-architects might get frustrated. Nevertheless, this oversight does not greatly detract from the book’s quality selection of mass timber in the home — a welcome typological trend that will hopefully increase in the coming years.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
The New Sustainable House: Planet-Friendly Home Design by Penny Craswell (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “With a fresh focus on design ingenuity and innovative technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks.”
The Craft of Place: Mork-Ulnes Architects edited by Casper Mork-Ulnes (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Craft of Place is Mork-Ulnes Architects’ first monograph. In a reflective manner structured around themes of materials, traditions, sustainability, scale, and light, this book explores the firm’s approach to integrating architecture within diverse environments.”
Drifting Symmetries: Projects, Provocations, and other Enduring Models by Weiss/Manfredi by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Presented in this comprehensive volume of projects and parallel research, [Weiss/Manfredi’s] work demonstrates a multidisciplinary approach that invents new settings for public life by exploring the gradient between nature and architecture.”
Greatness: Diverse Designers of Architecture by Pascale Sablan (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “GREATNESS: Diverse Designers of Architecture is a call to action for architects and designers to create inclusive, sustainable, and responsive environments that foster community, dignity, and a sense of belonging for all.”
The Hero of Doubt: Selected Writings by Ernesto Nathan Rogers edited by Roberta Marcaccio (Buy from The MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first English anthology of the writings of the British-Italian architect, editor, critic, and educator Ernesto Rogers (1909–1969), The Hero of Doubt showcases the intellectual power and scope of one of the most influential yet, paradoxically, unrecognized exponents of the modern movement in Europe.”
On Arrows: Essays in British Architecture and Its Environments by Laurent Stalder (Buy from The MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A series of original essays on the history of British postwar architecture through the concept of performance—and the ubiquitous (but elusive) image of the arrow.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
The World Architecture Festival (WAF) finally has the winners of the Architecture Book of the Year Award 2024 on its website, one month after the awards were announced. This is the second iteration of the annual book award organized by WAF, The Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects and the Temple Bar Trust.
Over at Architecture AU, Richard Francis-Jones pays tribute to Gervork Hartoonian, “a dedicated teacher, prolific author and internationally acknowledged scholar in the historiography and theory of architecture.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an interview with curator Abraham Thomas about Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, both the exhibition and the catalog.
“Rhapsody of Cities: a Conversation Between Peter Eisenman and Ma Yansong,” in which Eisenman speaks about, among other things, the numerous books the 92-year-old architect, professor, and theoretician has juts finished and is in the process of writing.
From the Archives:
In 2015, I wrote an article at World-Architects about Joseph Mayo’s Solid Wood: Case Studies in Mass Timber Architecture, Technology and Design, which was released by Routledge the same year. Before presenting a handful of case studies from the book, I wrote this brief introduction to the book:
Mayo, an architect at Mahlum Architects in Seattle, wrote the book after winning an Emerging Professionals Traveling Scholarship in 2011. Sponsored by the local AIA chapter, the annual scholarship asks entrants to focus on issues relevant to the Seattle design community. Seeing Kaden + Partner's E_3 housing project in Berlin, and considering the potential for similar construction in the well-forested Pacific Northwest, Mayo became interested in timber systems and decided to look at innovations in solid wood construction in Europe for his winning scholarship. Following his travels, which consisted of visiting buildings but also speaking with architects and others involved on the projects, he lectured and then put up a gallery show in Seattle. Later, seeing that most books on the subject were more eye candy than useful technical advice for architects, Mayo wrote Solid Wood: Case Studies in Mass Timber Architecture, Technology and Design, which was recently released by Routledge.
While obviously geared toward architects, given the voluminous technical advice in its pages, Solid Wood is hardly an esoteric read. Following an introductory section where Mayo gives a short history of building in wood, speaks about the carbon-sequestering benefits of mass timber construction, details various solid wood materials and concepts, and addresses concerns of building with wood (structure, fire, etc.), he then presents the case studies in eight geographical chapters: England, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, North America, and New Zealand and Australia. For each case study he clearly describes each project's details, aided by numerous illustrations: photographs of the completed buildings, construction photographs, floor plans, detail drawings, and diagrams. Too many books limit themselves to the first (glossy photos of finished buildings), so Solid Wood is a valuable book for architects interested in designing with wood.
One of the three monographs included in “Three Lessons from Three Monographs,” a post on my blog in February 2023, was Shigeru Ban: Timber in Architecture, edited by Laura Britton and Vittorio Lovato, and published by Rizzoli in 2022. Here’s what I wrote about it:
In 2009, Rizzoli published Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture, a monograph on one aspect of the Japanese architect's creations. While I'm not sure if that book was planned as a series, it makes sense that a series of material-focused monographs on the built work of Shigeru Ban would start with paper — think of the cardboard tubes he has used for emergency shelters, temporary exhibition venues, etc. — before moving on to other materials, most notably wood and bamboo. The time certainly wasn't right for Timber in Architecture back in 2009, but the numerous buildings Ban has structured in mass timber over the last decade make the new book more than welcome. These years saw Ban designing museums, office buildings, and other non-humanitarian projects almost exclusively in wood — or at least parts of each building in wood. A notable example is the Tamedia Office Building in Zurich, whose monolithic, dry-fit, highly expressive timber frame I saw under construction in 2012 and then behind glass in 2013 (seeing a giant wood-frame construction in a city center was jarring, I'll admit, though also a good sign of things to come). More architecturally daring is the Centre Pompidou-Metz, […] a melding of "the structural form of Frei Otto's cable net roofs and the architectonic qualities of a traditional Chinese hat," per the description in the book. Presented in project form in Paper in Architecture, the museum was completed one year later, in 2010.
A monograph, series or not, focused on a single material means providing information that goes well beyond a typical monograph. While neither the paper nor timber books are as technical as the earlier Shigeru Ban monograph by Matilda McQuaid (each chapter in that 2003 book, it should be noted, corresponded with one of Ban's frequently used materials: paper, wood, bamboo, etc.), each provides highly illustrative axonometrics whose coloring clearly shows the extents of the title material. [Those] axons range from small-scale exploded views free of notes to highly detailed assembly diagrams that label the various parts required to enable the construction. Without these diagrams, born in part from a cognizance of the importance of mass timber in 21st-century architecture, this monograph would be less valuable […] With them, the book provides information that exceeds what is available on Shigeru Ban's website, and it gives architects interested in mass timber inspiration for using the material in their projects.
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