Timber City at the National Building Museum

Architectural Review (October 13, 2016)

After 19th-century construction codes limited wood’s structural use—a response to devastating fires in Boston and Chicago—it seemed the future of cities’ skylines would belong to concrete and steel. But as a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum (NBM) demonstrates, wood deserves renewed consideration in the design and construction of large edifices, and engineers and architects are starting to explore the possibilities.

Looking to dispel myths of wood’s robustness when compared with concrete and steel, Timber City shows that wood not only holds its own, it frequently bests those material juggernauts in both performance and environmental benefits, from better strength-to-weight ratio, to greater thermal efficiency, to less manufacturing waste and energy use. And, of course, it’s a carbon-sequestering, single-source material that grows itself. 

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