Notes on the Nature of Building with Wood

Images, Alex Baxter, Tom Stark, & Baillie Baillie
Words, Colin Baillie.

“Each post and beam has its own particular story and once grew free.” From Wildwood, by Roger Deakin.

It seems like a banal observation, but sometimes we forget to acknowledge that the wood we use for our furniture, tools, and buildings, was once a living tree. Perhaps this is because we manipulate, smooth, laminate, CNC, and generally over perfect much of the timber we use, until it no longer communicates its origins. Plywood has it’s place, but it does little to evoke woodland, forest, or landscape. Wood, it feels, can quickly become abstracted. 

This complete metamorphosis can be beautiful in its own right, but it could also be seen as something of a loss. Reading the book ‘Wildwood’ by Roger Deakin recently I was reminded by his detailed recounting of the oak frame forming his historic Suffolk Farmhouse, that green wood structures in particular, very directly convey a sense of wood as a living thing. In part because the timber is hand tooled, with patches of bark or sapwood visible in places where it didn’t require to be planed off. But also because these buildings are designed to work with the inevitable little twists and movements of tree and earth, which these days would be more likely to lead modern building projects into a courtroom. Or as Deakin puts it, they are made.. ‘to sit lightly on the sea of shifting clay like an upturned boat and ride the earth’s constant movement’. Doesn’t that sound enjoyable?

We’ve built using some fairly chunky Douglas Fir posts and beams recently, and even as new, freshly felled and milled timbers, I’ve been surprised just how much significance they command in a space. The little cracks that appear along the grain as they settle into place, and the knots that were once lesser branches. When you register the proportions of a big section of timber, you can’t help connect it to a substantial tree. In that sense it already brings with it a sense of time, and as Deakin says ‘it’s own particular story’.

With this acknowledgement, we’re finding ourselves pulled further away from the abstraction of white minimalism, towards embracing the softness and warmth of buildings that resonate with their origins in nature. Not a game of perceived simplicity, but a genuine expression of a structure’s material truth. Not to be dogmatic about structural ‘honesty’ (a loaded subject in architecture), but because it feels like a rich and enduring way to build.