Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara’s new book, Blank: Speculations on CLT, offers a combination of thought-provoking essays and speculative design projects to “reset” the conversation around CLT, or cross-laminated timber. A collaboration between Bonner, an architect, and Kara, an engineer, the book originated in a design studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, called “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect,” that they co-taught in 2020.
Much of the current interest in mass timber has to do with its sustainability, as one of the only rapidly renewable materials capable of lowering the building industry’s carbon footprint. But, Bonner and Kara are quick to note, “we believe the CLT ‘blank’ can and must be conceptualized beyond its sustainability.” As a large-scale modular panel, the CLT blank offers structural capacity as well as a “ready-made” finish material, with the potential to affect both the embodied energy of buildings as well as their aesthetics. The book’s contributors see it as a material system with significant expressive potential, akin to the liberatory logics of Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino.
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