Touch Wood

Coming from the highly proficient publisher of Braun in 2008, Touch Wood examines a wide spectrum of the contemporary architectural industry. While not the most comprehensive in its details on each individual project, the book does successfully cover a large percentage of the globe, and so there is a gratifying variety in the different architectural styles, materials and buildings shown within.

Touch Wood focuses on wood as a textural material – each of the case studies is said to use wood not only for its visual and/or structural properties but also for its tactility. This is maybe a stretch in some cases, with not every inclusion utilising wood specifically as a touchable material, but there are certainly several that do such as the ILMASI School (104) or the Element House (208).

The major strength of this book is in its wide range. With 63 separate case studies, what is lost in focus on each individually is gained in the variety of buildings and structures. There are four overarching themes that the book is divided into; ‘Construction’, ‘Skin’, ‘Rural’ and ‘Sculpture’. Each examines houses and structures from all around the world, predominately Europe but ranging to the Americas, East Asia and Australia. Each section runs swiftly through a large number of case studies, devoting between two and four pages to each. There is a high focus on photos and floor-plans, with only one or two paragraphs of text for each.

The buildings from the ‘Construction’ section have a very noticeable focus on the exterior, with many showcasing particularly unique cladding or frameworks that envelope the structure. They are also quite performative in their designs, using spacing between the skin and the building for thermal regulation or providing usable space that blurs the distinction between the interior and exterior. There is a wide variability in the purposes of each building, ranging from Kupla – the Bubble from Helsinki (30) providing a simple yet distinctive lookout that includes no extraneous services to the Espace Gruyère in Switzerland (56), an enormous construction housing an ice rink and space for fairs, exhibition or cattle markets.

The second of the sections also looks at the exterior, but here the focus is less on weighty constructions. Instead, the inclusions tend towards smaller residences. The major difference with the first section is in the intermediary space of the ‘skin’, as the title of the chapter would suggest, with those here having a much more impermeable façade. The Svartlamoen Housing structure (100) showcases a light wooden exterior, highly fenestrated but with creating a distinct barrier against the outside. Another similar building is the Fire Department and Cultural Centre in Hittisau, Austria (130), a renovation that creates a fire-resistant lookout over the centre of town. The vast majority of structures from this section come from European alpine countries.

The section ‘Rural’ is exactly as it sounds, examining structures surrounded by the natural world. The sizes of the buildings is reduced even further from the previous sections and there is even less steel, concrete and glass used in their construction. There is also a move towards wood that is rawer in its appearance, bringing in the tactility that this material, more than others, is able to bring. A notable example can be seen in the Steger House from Italy (154) which also has a playful combination of an old farmhouse with a new, modern structure that encompasses it. The Wolfgang-Meier-House (184) is effectively the opposite, being a new parish centre constructed within an older barn structure. The rural-themed buildings in Touch Wood are notably less traditional and have a strong sense of play about them.

The final section ‘Sculpture’ is somewhat of a catch-all, covering a very wide variety of different buildings. This does lead to the section seeming fairly unfocused, with much more disparate differences between the inclusions. That being said, as this is the section for structures that do not really fit within the other sections, it does mean that there are some really interesting inclusions here. The Element House from South Korea (208) brings four small cubic spaces into four intersections with a larger cube, each of the smaller spaces having one of the classic elements as a theme. One of the only Australian inclusions in the book, the Huski Hotel (230), modulates the facings of each room along the façade to increase the access to light and ensure privacy for the inhabitants.

Touch Wood does not provide a large amount of detail on all of the included buildings, but through spending only a small amount of space on each it enables itself to go over a large number of case studies. The commitment to wood as a textural material does not come through in all sections, and many of the included case studies do not really align with this theme in a meaningful way, but the book does include some particularly beautiful structures, houses and sculptures and does respect the contemporary work that is done in architectural wood design.