From the earliest human settlements, wood has been the foundational material of an architecture shaped by necessity and proximity to nature. Readily available and easily worked, it provided the means through which humans first established a constructive and symbolic relationship with their environment.
This primordial bond was given theoretical form in the eighteenth century through Marc-Antoine Laugier’s notion of the primitive hut, articulated in his “Essai sur l’architecture“ (1753). In the elementary shelter of trunks and branches, Laugier identified architecture’s archetype: a system reduced to its essential components, inherently linked to timber construction.
Across history, wood has occupied shifting positions, contingent on cultural, climatic and technological conditions. In the traditional architectures of East Asia, it underpins a constructional logic founded on modularity, adaptability and the reversibility of structural systems. In Europe, by contrast, timber asserted its presence through half-timbered structures and the monumental roof trusses of Gothic cathedrals, where craftsmanship and structural ingenuity converged. A decisive moment in the modern trajectory of timber architecture emerged in North America in the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of the ‘balloon frame‘. Originating in the United States around the 1830s – expanding city of Chicago following the opening of the Erie Canal and the growth of internal trade networks – the system was employed by George Washington Snow as early as 1832 in warehouses and residential buildings. Its effectiveness lay in the industrial production of standardised timber elements, assembled on site according to principles of speed, economy and repetition.
Yet from the latter half of the nineteenth century, and with the advance of industrialisation, wood gradually receded from the architectural foreground. Urban densification and the recurrence of catastrophic fires in historic centres fostered a perception of timber as an unsafe material, accelerating the adoption of supposedly more fire-resistant alternatives. Simultaneously, the rise of steel and reinforced concrete offered new structural possibilities aligned with the ambitions of modernity, further marginalising wood, despite its early engagement with prefabrication and standardisation.
In the early twentieth century, steel and reinforced concrete came to embody technological progress and the promise of overcoming established structural limits, enabling the vertical expansion of the modern city.
From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, however, wood has been subject to a sustained reassessment.
Long confined to decorative or interior applications, it re-emerged as a structural material through the development of glued laminated timber in the 1950s and, more recently, Cross- Laminated Timber (CLT) from the 1990s. These innovations have addressed many of timber’s historical limitations, while reviving the legacy of the ‘balloon frame‘– its lightness, seriality and rational logic – within a technologically refined framework.
As evidenced by the contemporary projects featured in this issue, wood has once again become central to architectural thinking. As a renewable material with a low environmental impact, it offers a compelling synthesis of sustainability, technological innovation and formal expression. In doing so, contemporary architecture returns – critically and consciously – to Laugier’s intuition: an architecture grounded in essential principles, in which wood reasserts itself as the foundation of a responsible practice, rooted in history yet oriented towards the future.