Image© Filippo Bolognese

未来的材料：4位建筑师的交叉层压木材测试
Material of the Future: 4 Architects that Experiment with Cross Laminated Timber

由专筑网邢子，小R编译

本文最初发表于《The Architect's Newspaper》，标题为“建筑师将最先进的制造、设计和可视化技术应用于古老的木材”。

每隔一段时间，建筑领域就会出现某个“奇迹建筑材料”。混凝土使罗马帝国得以扩张，使钢铁致密的城市达到了以前无法想象的高度，而塑料则使建筑内部和建筑经济得以重振。

但却有这样的疑问，为什么在21世纪，木材经历几千年的沉寂后又重新被赋予了奇迹般的地位？尽管其粗糙的表面和独特的组装方式看起来似乎与当前全球大量的建筑发展需求相反，但木材的耐用性、可再生性和封存碳的能力引发了建筑业者的关注，并大量投资于未来。

交叉层压木材（CLT）是一种高弹性的工程木材，通过将固体锯材层粘合在一起而制成，最早于上世纪90年代初在欧洲被开发使用，但直到2000年代才普及，于2015年在引入时被纳入《国际建筑规范》。尽管世界各地的中型到大型公司都在竞争建造最大或最高的木结构以证明其与混凝土和钢的可比性，但实际上许多独立建筑师也一直在尝试通过最新的制造方法、计算设计技术和原始材料的可视化软件，去合理应用这种材料。在这里，AN展示了当前的一些案例，并相信木材可以成为未来的混凝土、钢和塑料。

This article was originally published on The Architect's Newspaper as "Architects apply the latest in fabrication, design, and visualization to age-old timber."
Every so often, the field of architecture is presented with what is hailed as the next “miracle building material.” Concrete enabled the expansion of the Roman Empire, steel densified cities to previously unthinkable heights, and plastic reconstituted the architectural interior and the building economy along with it.
But it would be reasonable to question why and how, in the 21st century, timber was accorded a miracle status on the tail-end of a timeline several millennia-long. Though its rough-hewn surface and the puzzle-like assembly it engenders might seem antithetical to the current global demand for exponential building development, it is timber’s durability, renewability, and capacity for sequestering carbon—rather than release it—that inspires the building industry to heavily invest in its future.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT), a highly resilient form of engineered wood made by gluing layers of solid-sawn lumber together, was first developed in Europe in the early 1990s, yet the product was not commonly used until the 2000s and was only introduced into the International Building Code in 2015. While mid-to-large range firms around the world have been in competition to build the largest or the tallest timber structures to demonstrate its comparability to concrete and steel, a number of independent practitioners have been applying the latest methods of fabrication, computational design techniques, and visualization software to the primordial material. Here, AN exhibits a cross-section of the experimental work currently being pursued with the belief that timber can be for the future what concrete, steel, and plastic have been in the past.


AnnaLisa Meyboom


Courtesy of David Correa

2018年秋季，不列颠哥伦比亚大学（UBC）AnnaLisa Meyboom教授的15名学生，滑铁卢大学的David Correa、Intelligent City的Oliver David Krieg以及22位参与者设计并建造了第三届年度Wander Wood 亭子，这是一个由不同的组件组成的扭曲的格子木质结构。

利用UBC高级木材加工中心提供的先进制造资源，包括CNC铣床和多轴工业机器人，该项目既是其设计团队的学习机会，也是向广大公众展示木材是一种比现行材料适应当代制造技术的材质的绝好契机。亭子的一端是可容纳两个人的长凳，由社会机构测试结构本身的强度和耐用性。

虽然展馆只需要三天就可以在现场进行组装完成，但是要花大量的时间和精力来做前期准备工作。因此建立了严格的设计工作流程，使迭代设计过程与快速的几何输出平衡，从而解决了装配排序的逻辑问题。最后将亭子的每一块进行铣削以互锁到位，并用金属铆钉进一步固定。

该项目旨在教给学生在应用新型材料时，缩小数字设计与物理制造之间差距的策略。鉴于此，Meyboom表示，在整个制造过程中都使用了标准的工业机器人，并“专门设置用于木材的加工整合”。

In the Fall of 2018, 15 of professor AnnaLisa Meyboom’s students at the University of British Columbia (UBC), along with David Correa at University of Waterloo, Oliver David Krieg of Intelligent City, and 22 industry participants designed and constructed the third annual Wander Wood Pavilion, a twisting, latticed timber structure made up entirely of non-identical components.
By taking advantage of the advanced fabrication resources available at the UBC Centre for Advanced Wood Processing, including a CNC mill and a multi-axis industrial robot, the project was both a learning opportunity for its design team and a demonstration to a broader public that timber is a more than viable material to which contemporary fabrication technologies can be applied. The pavilion forms a bench on one end that’s large enough for two people, a public invitation test the structure’s strength and durability for themselves.
While the pavilion only required three days to fabricate and assemble on-site, a significant amount of time and energy was spent ensuring its quick assembly when the time came. A rigorous design workflow was established that balanced an iterative design process with rapid geometric output that accounted for logical assembly sequencing. Every piece of the pavilion was then milled to interlock into place and be further secured by metal rivets.
The project was devised in part to teach students one strategy for narrowing the gap between digital design and physical fabrication while applying a novel material. In this vein, a standard industrial robot was used throughout the fabrication process that was then “set up with an integrator specifically to work on wood,” according to Meyboom.


Gilles Retsin


Image© Filippo Bolognese

伦敦建筑师兼巴特利特建筑学院教授Gilles Retsin长期尝试设计新颖的制造方法，而最近对木材的关注使他的实践朝着大胆的新方向发展。例如，2019年初在伦敦皇家学院安装的巨型木结构是建筑师通过使用微软的Hololens将增强现实技术应用于模块化木材结构的首次尝试。 “我们使用AR将指令直接从数字模型发送到现场工作的团队。” Retsin解释说。，“因此，AR帮助我们了解全自动化的模型构建过程，数字模型与现场人员和机器人进行直观的沟通。”

在最近在德国纽伦堡举行的国际比赛中，Retsin将目光投向了更大范围，建造世界上第一个机器人预制的木材音乐厅。该方案是与建筑师Stephan Markus Albrecht、工程咨询公司Bollinger-Grohmann、气候工程师Transsolar和声学专家Theatre Projects合作设计，利用了该区域木材丰富的优势，同时兼顾了该材料的应用所面临的独特建筑类型。建筑物的形式是在大堂空间上使用30英尺的锯齿形CLT预制模块，从而展示材料的轻度，由于采用了无缝玻璃围护结构，这些模块将清晰地暴露在外。

Retsin说：“用木材设计不仅意味着更加可持续的未来，而且使建筑师从头开始彻底地重新设计建筑。这是一项具有挑战性的创新任务，我们从建筑的基础部分开始设计，这是一切的基础。”

While Gilles Retsin, the London-based architect and professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, has long experimented with both computational design and novel methods of fabrication, a recent focus on timber has propelled his practice into a bold new direction. A giant wooden structure installed at London’s Royal Academy in early 2019, for instance, was the architect’s first attempt at applying augmented reality to modular timber construction through the use of Microsoft’s Hololens. “We used AR to send instructions directly from the digital model to the team working on-site,” Retsin explained. “AR, therefore, helps us understand what a fully-automated construction process would look like, where a digital model communicates directly with people and robots on site.”
In a recent international competition set in Nuremberg, Germany, Retsin set his sights on a much larger scale for what would have been the world’s first robotically prefabricated timber concert hall. Designed in collaboration with architect Stephan Markus Albrecht, engineering consultancy Bollinger-Grohmann, and climate engineers Transsolar and acoustic specialists Theatre Projects, the proposal takes advantage of the site’s location in a region with an abundance of timber while envisioning the material’s application to a uniquely challenging building type. The building’s form exhibits the material’s lightness using 30-foot sawtooth CLT prefabricated modules over the main lobby spaces, which are exposed from the exterior thanks to a seamless glass envelope.
“Designing in timber not only means a more sustainable future, but also has architects profoundly redesigning buildings from the ground up,” said Retsin. “It’s a challenging creative task, we’re really questioning the fundamental parts, the building blocks of architecture again.”


Casey Rehm


Courtesy of Casey Rehm

对于SCI-Arc教授Casey Rehm而言，与木材合作意味着挑战建筑领域的许多问题。鉴于在运输和制造方面大量的时间和材料成本，在洛杉矶很少使用木材作为建筑材料。 “但现在。” Rehm说，“材料业正在着力将它们压成面板，然后切割使用。”但他认为，如果木材废料本身被用作建筑材料，那在全球范围内的成本效益可能会更高。

尽管木材已用于在世界范围内建造越来越大的结构，例如多层房屋和办公楼，但Rehm认为，该材料可以合理地适应小型规模建筑，以便快速建设。本着这种精神，Rehm一直在与他的学生一起研究，以生产廉价的CLT面板，并且在洛杉矶这个房屋短缺明显的城市建造属于无家可归者的房屋和附属住宅。

然而，除了具有成本和材料效率方面的潜力外，建筑师甚至将木材用于最具探索性的设计工作。 NN_House 1是Rehm于2018年在加利福尼亚沙漠平原上设计的庞大单层房屋，部分使用3D神经网络进行设计，以建立房间之间的划分，并模糊内部和外部之间的界限。AI经过现代主义建筑师的训练，产生了自己的特质，以用于开发具有多个空间功能的居住场所。

For SCI-Arc professor Casey Rehm, working with timber has meant challenging many issues in the field of architecture at once. Timber is a rarely-considered building material in Los Angeles given the high time and material costs associated with its transportation and manufacturing. “Right now,” Rehm said, “the industry is manually laying up two-by-sixes into industrial presses, pressing them into panels, and then manually cutting window openings.” But if timber waste itself was adopted as a building material, he argued, the material could be far more globally cost-efficient.
While timber has been used in the construction of increasingly large structures around the world, such as multistory housing developments and office buildings, Rehm believes the material can be reasonably adapted to a smaller scale for quick deployment. In this vein, Rehm has been researching strategies with his students for producing inexpensive CLT panels for the construction of homeless housing and accessory dwelling units in Los Angeles, a city with a, particularly conspicuous housing shortage.
But aside from its potential as a cost and material-efficient material, the architect has applied timber to even his most exploratory design work. NN_House 1, a sprawling single-floor home Rehm proposed in 2018 for the desert plains of Joshua Tree, California, was designed in part using a 3D neural network to develop ambiguous divisions between rooms, as well as to blur the divide between interior and exterior. The AI was trained on the work of modernist architects—while producing idiosyncrasies of its own—to develop a living space with multiple spatial readings.


Kivi Sotamaa


Courtesy of Kivi Sotamaa

作为在芬兰执业的建筑师，Kivi Sotamaa一直研究木材建造的广泛可能性，而他也绝不是该研究中的独行者。但是，他正在对其在国内的应用进行更为新颖的研究，重新构想如何将木材用作房屋建筑的主要材料。

Meteorite是建筑师在赫尔辛基附近设计的三层住宅，完全由本地生产的CLT建造，采用建筑师戏称“the misfit”的组织策略进行设计。按照Sotamaa的定义，该建筑创建了由两个不同的系统生成的间隙空间，这些间隙空间同时充当建筑物的隔热层、存储空间和外壳。 Sotamaa阐述道：“从美学上讲，该策略允许在外部设计大规模的整体形式，以体现出一定的类似森林的规模，并在内部进行复杂的人类活动的空间布置。”建筑师估计，这些房屋的CLT板总共从大气中隔离了59488千克（约65吨）二氧化碳。

Sotamaa希望将其他可视化技术应用到木结构的设计和生产中，包括增强现实技术，使建筑商能够在现场实时查看装配说明。Sotamaa解释说:“当碎片在现场有序摆放并有明确的指示时，三维的组装就可以快速有效地进行，这与传统的施工过程相比，可以节省能源和物资。”

As an architect practicing in Finland, Kivi Sotamaa is certainly not unique in his community for his admiration of the far-reaching possibilities of timber construction. He is, however, producing novel research into its application at a domestic scale to reimagine how wood can be used as a primary material for home construction.
The Meteorite, a three-story home the architect has designed near Helsinki constructed entirely of locally-grown CLT, was designed using an organizational strategy the architect has nicknamed ‘the misfit.’ This system, as Sotamaa defines it, creates two distinct formal systems to generate room-sized interstitial spaces that simultaneously act as insulation, storage space, and housing for the building’s technical systems. “Aesthetically,” Sotamaa elaborated, “the misfit strategy allows for the creation of a large scale monolithic form on the outside, which addresses the scale of the forest, and an intricate human-scale spatial arrangement on the interior.” Altogether, the architect estimates, the home’s CLT slabs have sequestered 59,488 kilograms, or roughly 65 tons, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The Meteorite was developed and introduced to the client using virtual reality, and Sotamaa hopes to apply other visualization technologies to the design and production of timber architecture, including augmented reality that could allow builders to view assembly instructions in real-time on site. “When the pieces are in order on-site and [with clear] instructions,” Sotamaa explained, “the assembly of the three-dimensional puzzle can happen swiftly and efficiently, saving energy and resources when compared with conventional construction processes.”