The time around we're spanning eons—from the world's oldest forest in our own backyard, to a potential fix for a present-day social ill, and into the future with some genuinely innovative joinery.
Along the way we're stopping in the here and now to appreciate some wonderful wooden architecture.
Happy Holidays.
Enver Ishmametov (1916-1985), Skiing
Work That Inspires Us
In addition to the massive supporting trunk members for its main building support, the marvelous new Children's Museum in Eau Claire, Wisconsin showcases a network of whole-tree bowstring trusses. On the one hand the project is a throwback to primitive, log-style construction; on the other it's a feat of modern engineering that looks wholly modern.
The colorful museum designed by Steinberg Hart Architects features Structural Round Timber (SRT) engineered by WholeTrees Structures in Madison, Wisconsin. The company's stated mission is to reduce construction carbon emissions by integrating regenerative solid timber products.
WholeTrees CEO and cofounder Amelia Baxter says unmilled trees are structurally superior to cross-laminated timber (CLT). When left with their outer fibres intact, such "whole" trees are "fifty percent stronger than sawed timber with the same cross-sectional properties.”
The organic, irregular forms of SRT require some innovative sourcing and engineering solutions, including 3D modeling and a proprietary grading process that permits skinnier trees to carry heavier loads and span wider spaces.
With its enormous chalet windows, spacious decks and outdoor fireplace, this maple- and birch-framed boathouse in the Denali National Park & Preserve affords sweeping views of Otto Lake and its surrounding forests, tundra, glaciers, and snow-capped mountains.
Part of a development spanning fifty acres, the building also serves as a staging area for tour departures. Beneath a soaring ceiling, its grand interior seats two hundred for indoor presentations and educational programming.
The boathouse features 41,000 board feet of prefabricated Douglas Fir—sanded, finished, and shipped by barge from our shop to the Alaskan site.
With the wealth of recorded European and Asian histories, it's sometimes easy for North Americans to overlook the fact that our part of the planet is as old as any other. One reminder is found in a recent paper published by Current Biology, in which Cairo, NY, is revealed to be the site of the world's oldest forest.
In that Catskills hamlet, just behind Dawn's Bakery on Rte.145, paleontologists have found on the floor of an abandoned quarry the oldest known root impressions, converging at a single point: the birthplace of one of the very first trees on Earth.
The root system dates back nearly 400 million years, to a time when the largest land animals were spiders and arthropods, and most plants stood no taller than a few feet.
The trees at the Cairo site (Archaeopteris), however, were able to reach heights of up to thirty feet. On the evidence, this was on account of an unprecedented root system.
The finding is surely a point of pride for residents of Cairo, as it takes the title of so-called "first forest" from nearby Genoa, New York, whose tree fossils are of a more recent vintage—two million years younger.
Upwards of 55% of harvested wood is left unused for lumber, on account of damage or irregularities—much of it chipped, tossed away, or processed into pulp. But what if something more could be made of it?
That's the question architects Kyle Schumann and Katie MacDonald have attempted to answer with their project "Tangential Timber," which grew out of their research into what they call “non-linear wood masonry.”
Previously, their firm After Architecture created the award-winning installation “Homegrown," a small room built from invasive plants and yard waste, which is now on exhibit at the Knoxville Museum of Art. This time, in coordination with students and faculty at the University of Virginia, they have developed a “low-tech, parametric digital imaging workflow” for photographing wood rounds and converting them into 3D models.
"This process means that we can work with hundreds of pieces of digitized material in the same file with ease," Schumann tells Inform magazine. "It’s the digital version of Incan stonework." The process enables the wood rounds, or "cookies," to be arranged in a grid, ultimately resulting in a newfangled—and ecologically sound—type of joinery.
Experts believe a conventional building boom is unlikely to redress the ongoing housing crisis: the increased construction costs which price out all but high-income renters. Once again, it may be that part of the solutuion lies in mass timber.
By locally sourcing and milling the wood that comprises cross-laminated timber, some innovative builders intend to significantly reduce the shipping and labor costs that keep prices high.
And one such outfit, Timber Age Systems in Colorado, is going a step further. Their modular CLT parts, sourced from wildfire-prone areas, are produced in-house alongside insulated enclosure systems, resulting in a entire, “forest-to-frame” passive house package. Modular CLT houses also require fewer workers on the building end, bringing down those labor costs.
For more on this hopeful development, visit Cascade Joinery's Resources page.
What We're Reading
Phaidon, the renowned publisher of handsome coffee-table books centering on art, architecture, and photography, has just made a splendid new addition to its catalogue.
Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World compiles more than 300 richly colored photographs and artwork reproductions, depicting giant sequoias, cherry blossoms, palms, poplars, ginkgoes and other species found across Earth’s forest biomes, in a wide-ranging selection of visuals dating from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Curated by an international panel of botanists, naturalists, and art historians, the lavish doorstop volume presents everything from illustrated Norse myths and Edo-period woodblock prints to contemporary installations and AI-assisted digital paintings. With works by Ansel Adams, Cézanne, Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Andy Goldsworthy, Frida Kahlo, Grandma Moses, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the book is a fine holiday gift for the dendrophiles (tree lovers!) on our list.
As the year winds down we've been busy with a project for the Four Winds camp on Orcas Island. Founded over a century ago, Four Winds is an electronics-free respite for kids with an interest in outdoor adventure, and we're proud to be working on the camp's new lodge with frequent collaborators Dowbuilt, fabricating and installing a mix of solid sawn and glulam timber.
We'll be celebrating the holidays at a company party this week, grateful for the warmth of old and new faces that together make working at Cascade Joinery such a fulfilling experience. Here's wishing you the same for the holiday season and in the New Year.
And that's the latest from Bellingham.
Let's stay in touch.
What is PARTNER?
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Partner is the Cascade Joinery newsletter our creative team publishes on a quarterly basis. We use it to share news about our current and recently completed projects, and on exciting developments in the timber framing industry and related areas. Keep an eye out for the next issue in March, And if you find any value here, please forward to a friend.
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