Point Blank

Timber is popular these days—hailed by some as “the new concrete” and the future of construction. This is mainly due to the environmental qualities, and carbon benefits, of natural wood: trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into various organic materials, including wood, where CO2 remains sequestered so long as the wood doesn’t rot or burn. Additionally, if a tree is felled, and its wood used to build a house on the same spot, the embodied carbon of that wood, when turned into a building material, is close to zero.

The problem with wood is that, as often happens in nature, trees tend to all be different from one another, so when we chop one down we cannot tell in advance what kind of timber we will get out of it. Artisan builders of old knew how to deal with the random variability of natural materials; they also knew how to adapt construction to the materials they would come by. Modern engineers, on the contrary, worki…