PS29 Building with Timber: Beyond Global Material and Regional Culture

By the 1830s, fires became a major concern in Valparaíso, a city mainly built from timber. This architectural condition, amongst other characteristics, resulted in the increased risk of fire in the city. To address this problem, especially after a major fire occurred in 1843, local authorities established several architectural and urban regulations. This regulatory process involved the discussion and establishment of “fire” laws and codes between 1844 and 1906. This paper analyzes the architectural adaptations enforced in the city to face flammability. It discusses the cultural value of timber and local craftsmanship and, most importantly, explores the progressive construction of the notion of the risk of fire. Therefore, beyond a binary analysis of modern “safe” codes and traditional “unsafe” building techniques, it explores the tensions that emerge along with the notion of the risk of fire, with an emphasis on timber. Timber architecture, thus, is also related to concepts such as risk, vulnerability, prevention and mitigation. It is also interpreted as a cultural artifact that expresses local craftsmanship, diverse cultural and economic values and social interactions in a city confronted with a high level of flammability. Fires, therefore, are not exceptional shocks interrupting the course of “normal” history. They are fundamental elements of the city’s history through which environment, spaces and architecture are constantly reinterpreted. 

The paper is based on sources recovered at Chile’s National Archives, and local archives of Valparaiso such as construction codes, laws, decrees, inter-institutional correspondence, and technical support documents. Based on these, I examine construction and architecture regulations, emphasizing the relationship between timber and the risk of fire. It uses construction inspection procedures, judicial fire cases, press, fire departments and insurance companies’ documentation to show, in practice, the way that local inhabitants socially incorporate the built environment, timber, and the risk of fire.

In announcing the reorganization of its Architecture Department around a new “Architectural Laboratory,” MIT turned from William Ware’s founding emphasis on form and sentiment towards a focus on materials and construction. This reorganization would bolster scientific credentials while appeasing industry and professionals. Young Maine engineer Frank Kidder would head the lab. His research in materials, together with his architectural education at Cornell, MIT, and Ware’s office with Henry Van Brunt made him ideal for the task. Though the laboratory foundered shortly after its 1881 launch, Kidder funneled its research into what became the leading reference book for American architects.

Despite MIT’s stated intentions, Kidder’s career illustrates not the elimination of sentiment but its tabulation, the quantification of concerns over resources and markets into data arranged in tables. Following the depletion of Maine’s white pine forests, his 1879 thesis on the “Strength of Southern and White Pine,” reads as both a rearguard defense of local industry and the acknowledgement of a new national market. His 1881 experiments on small spruce beams likewise sought to grapple with the ravages of industrial logging by exploiting formerly worthless trees. Kidder’s life’s work would involve detailing lumber’s properties in ways that mediated between new landscapes of scarcity and codified municipalities.  

The pathos of deforestation in MIT’s announcement exposed a new strain of nationalism. In the introduction to his 1875 translation of Viollet-le-duc’s Discourses on Architecture, Van Brunt emphasizes American architecture’s distance from Europe, save for wooden architecture, infamously identified with the Aryan people.   For Van Brunt, the development of wooden construction in America’s material and social conditions provided the foremost candidate for national style. In this way, then, the myth of the frontier would endure within Kidder’s Architectural laboratory.

Timber is thought to be a quintessentially Norwegian material, often associated with stave churches and traditional log cabins. This paper, however, looks at the industrial use of timber in mass-produced modular architecture of Moelven Brug, a company formerly specialised in oil-cooked wheels, that expanded its hand-craft based facilities into one of the most technically advanced prefabrication systems in Europe. Specifically, it investigates industrial Moelven modules that grew from a Norwegian tradition of self-construction and amalgamated international practices of standardisation and rationalisation with a local approach to timber, centred around flexibility and change.   

By the 1960s, timber production at Moelven Brug was rationalised according to the best international industrial practices. Factory-made sections and elements worked as a life-sized Lego-set that could be refigured to cheaply accommodate new facilities of the expanding Norwegian welfare state. Moelven products ranged from hospitals and schools, to city halls, swimming pools and prefabricated barns. While a single user was substituted with state agencies, prefabricated modules that evolved from a local tradition of element-based timber construction retained choice, flexibility and a potential for change at their core. The system allowed to customise each project, reflecting a particular Norwegian pragmatism, concerned with individual choice, budget optimisation and long-term sustainability.

As this paper suggests, flexible Moelven system was neither a result of a linear evolution from craft to industry, nor of a simple juxtaposition between the local and the global. Instead, it amalgamated international ideas of rationalisation with local practices of timber construction, offering a modern take on tradition within the context of industrial innovation. Without the international ideas of production optimisation an updated tradition would not be possible. Conversely, local context and understanding of materiality enriched international timber modernism with concepts of flexibility and growth, generating a unique Norwegian case of timber systems architecture, not possible anywhere else.

When the roof of Notre Dame burned in April 2019, French preservationists noted that it could not be rebuilt in its original form because there were no longer trees available in France of the size of the original timbers. (Dunn, 2019) Architecture is always enmeshed in material culture. And timber architecture is enmeshed in forestry, planting, thinning, managing, and harvesting of trees for cultural purposes. While the study of forestry and otimber in material culture tend to be separated, the production of timber has spatial and cultural significance and creates both potentials and constraints for architectural and landscape architectural design. Historically, foresters shaped trees to specific purposes including timber vaults. Today, the timber available is constrained by the industrial dimensions of mills and train cars.

 This paper proposes a framework for understanding forests and forestry within the material ecosystem of design through analysis of the mid-twentieth-century work of Lawrence Halprin, one of America’s preeminent landscape architects of the period. The essay reveals the integration of ecological forestry at Halprin’s Sea Ranch and the deep understanding of forestry that informed his institutional and urban design work. At Sea Ranch and elsewhere, Halprin designed the forest not only as a view or a place, but as a material source, a source of form, and an ecosystem. In his designs, the forest was one element in the choreographed production and exchange of timber, plants, nutrients, and animals.

 Through archival research, forest analysis, and forest mapping, Halprin’s forest management plans are understood as a particularly material approach in the Modern era, rooted in both the long history of forestry in landscape architecture, from Manwood’s Treatise of the Forest Laws (1717) to Olmsted and Pinchot’s eco-forestry experiments at Biltmore (1898), and the then-emerging science of landscape ecology and forest succession.