CATEGORY

Contemporary architects have long overlooked the great versatility of wood as a building material. Now, however, they have begun to adopt wood as the natural solution to a variety of design problems, and as a result, this environmentally sustainable material is becoming increasingly significant in today’s domestic architecture.

Wood Houses, by noted architecture journalist Ruth Slavid, displays the entire breadth of this important architectural movement by covering forty-six recently built homes. The featured houses range from Fernau and Hartman Architects’ Mann Residence in Sonoma County, a timber-frame house with a strikingly decentralized plan, to 24H Architecture’s Arjang House in Värmland, Sweden, a reindeer fur-lined, cedar-shingled lakeside retreat. Each house’s profile is illustrated with not only the architect’s own plans and elevations but also numerous full-color interior and exterior photographs that highlight the intrinsic beauty of wood.

Slavid explores the background of the present wood-house renaissance in an introduction that covers topics as wide-ranging as timber-frame construction, the use of wood in an urban setting, and fire prevention. She goes on to illuminate significant trends in the field of wooden home design, such as timber’s popularity as a construction material for vacation homes and the evolution of deliberately austere aesthetics from wood’s innate qualities. Other topics include the liberation of wood from its familiar associations to serve as the basis of modern design and the current status of wood houses as part of a larger urban or suburban development. A helpful appendix features project credits and a glossary. This beautiful volume will serve as both a reference and an inspiration for anyone who designs, builds, or simply lives in wood houses.