GAD Editorial · Published ·
Modernism taught architects to worship strong materials: steel, concrete, glass. A quieter counter-tradition has spent the last thirty years asking what weak materials can do — timber, paper, wood — if you take their weakness seriously instead of hiding it. Three buildings make the case.
Shigeru Ban's Tamedia office building in Zurich, completed in 2013, is the purest statement of the idea. It is a seven-storey timber frame — some 2,000 cubic meters of glued laminated timber — assembled with no metal connectors at all. The joints are traditional Japanese timber joinery, scaled up to the size of a corporate headquarters and wrapped in a glass skin. There is no decoration and no apology: the structure is the architecture, and the architecture is a demonstration that wood can do the work of steel if the joinery is intelligent enough. It is also, pointedly, a building for a media company — an industry built on ephemera, housed in a material that admits it comes from a forest.
Ban's Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, dedicated in August 2013, applies the same ethics to an emergency. After the February 2011 earthquake destroyed the city's Anglican cathedral, Ban — working with Warren and Mahoney — designed its replacement from 98 paper tubes, eight shipping containers, and a polycarbonate roof, seating 700. The tubes are coated and structural; the geometry follows the plan of the lost cathedral. It was meant to last decades, and it has outlasted "temporary" by every measure that matters. The important thing is not that it is made of cardboard — it is that the cardboard is not disguised. Like the Tamedia joinery, the tubes are left visible, doing their work in the open. Weakness, honestly shown, becomes a different kind of strength: the building does not pretend to be eternal, and so it is allowed to be loved.
Sou Fujimoto's Musashino Art University Museum and Library, completed in June 2010 in Tokyo, takes wood in the opposite direction: not as structure to be expressed, but as atmosphere to be inhabited. The library is a single spiral of bookshelf walls, nine meters high, in light wood — a forest of shelves that is also the building's enclosure, its circulation, and its furniture. The timber here carries almost nothing; the steel frame does the real work. But that is precisely the point. Fujimoto treats wood the way a novelist treats paper: not as the thing that holds the building up, but as the thing that holds the reader. The spiral makes the collection into a landscape, and the landscape is made of the same material as the books' shelves — the container and the contained, one continuous wooden thought.
It is worth noticing who each building is trying to convince. Tamedia had to convince a corporate client, a building authority, and an insurance industry that a seven-storey wooden office would not burn down, fall down, or cost too much — and it did, which is why the glass skin matters: the timber is on display, performing its respectability. The Cardboard Cathedral had to convince a grieving city that paper could be sacred — and it did, which is why the tubes were left unpainted and undisguised. Fujimoto's library had to convince no one of anything structural; it only had to convince students to stay, to wander, to get lost among the shelves. Three audiences, three rhetorics — the engineer's proof, the mourner's consolation, the student's invitation. The material is the same family; the persuasion is entirely different.
Three ways to honor a weak material. Ban the engineer proves timber can replace steel if the joints are smart. Ban the humanitarian proves paper can replace stone if the need is real. Fujimoto proves wood can replace walls if the idea is clear. The common thread is not sustainability, though all three can claim it — it is honesty about what a material is. None of these buildings clad themselves in something stronger and pretend. They stand, literally, on what they are made of. In an industry addicted to the performance of permanence, that is a radical act.