ABSTRACT
From great double-tapered white pine swingle beams and stout hemlock knees to sinuous willow withies and conoidal black locust pegs, a pre-industrial timber barn contained a great variety of elements, differentiated by shape, by size, and by species. Over the industrial era, the palette of structural carpentry was gradually reduced to universally rectilinear materials, available in a few middling sizes only, of generic materials such as the No. 2 spruce-pine-fir categories ubiquitous in North America. In a parallel development, the biodiversity of the forest which gave rise to the formal and material richness of the traditional barn has been reduced to the monochromic and mono-cultural plantation demanded by the trade in industrialized timber. Reduction in formal elaboration and in material, dimensional, and formal variety all constitute a reduction of physically embodied information. This depletion of information - whether in buildings or in woodlands - is due to the inversion of production constraints that constitutes the industrial revolution. Briefly put, in the pre-industrial era, energy was largely limited to muscle power and was thus unimaginably precious. Yet the brainpower available to govern each unit of work done was large, and the survival value of applying it was significant. Builders and foresters located closeto-net-form trees as near to a particular site as possible and then extracted tapered, angled, forked, and curved members as the project required. Proximity both to site and to final form saved vital work that could be spared for foraging or farming. With the advent of machines, as imparting energy to material became many times cheaper, so the cost of imparting information to material became relatively more costly. Depletion of information became visible not only in timber building but in all kinds of standardization and mass production. Wrought iron, quite often explicitly biomimetic, was replaced with continuously rolled steel. One-off lost-wax castings were replaced with foundry castings serially replicating the permanent pattern. Landscapes were mechanically flattened and planted, and their biological homogeneity maintained with petro-
ABSTRACT: The formal and material variety of timber elements in pre-industrial buildings reflects the bio-diversity of available forests and of the craft knowledge to exploit it. Industrialization diminished the formal richness of wood buildings, woodlands, and woodwork. How? This essay characterizes formal elaboration and variety as physically embodied information. Historically, as machines made it cheaper to impart energy to materials, their speed and their geometric limitations made it harder to impart information. The essay sketches out basic categories of embodied information, and describes the impact of industrialization upon each. Today’s information tools enable us to engage, once again, in certain formal elaborations, but in ways that cost energy and that strip further information out of our cultivation and our culture of wood. The final section of the paper explores what truly post-industrial wood building might look like, and the pragmatic challenges it would face.
