ABSTRACT
Environmental considerations are helping to restore or establish the legitimate use of timber in our cities’ constructions on a scale unprecedented since many centuries. Timber construction demands interdisciplinary approaches, involving architecture, civil engineering and material science. The research subject ‘timber fabric’ is in itself an act of invention, since civil engineering structures typically rely on robust elements as constituent parts of a bigger integral unit in order to achieve load-bearing qualities. A new generation of timber derived structures is also an act of creativity within the field of architecture and specific contemporary architectural approaches. Traditional design and development strategies of structures are largely based on the concepts of stiffness and efficiency. The expression ‘textile’ is not used in the standard sense of the field of architecture. Instead, the research focuses on the structural description of textiles and their woven aspects in general.
