One of the goals of events like the Venice Architecture Biennale, which is celebrating its 19th edition this year, is to go beyond the present. We must ask questions and suggest future possibilities, opening doors that show different paths. Based on this idea, the curators responsible for the Materials room of the Spanish Pavilion, the team of architectural professionals Daniel Ibáñez and Carla Ferrer, propose four agendas or possible futures, utilising wood as part of their proposal. In the exhibition, they materialise in four large totems. Each of them represents one of those agendas that construction and architecture should consider for the future: redensification, industrialisation, biodiversity and monomateriality.
Redensification: cities that grow vertically
“We know that cities today are basically hotbeds of carbon emissions. A nice idea that comes with wood is to turn it around and turn it into a carbon sink”, explains Daniel Ibáñez about this first agenda. If we were to build a city from scratch, in a place where wood is a readily available material, we could simply build wooden buildings, but that wouldn’t change the emissions that would continue to come from existing cities. This is where the idea of redensifying the urban fabric comes in. Because, contrary to the feeling that what is really needed is to shrink cities, urban ecology advocates the opposite.
“The greenest cities are those with high density and high capacity, where you can share many of the infrastructures, as opposed to the sprawling American suburban model, which is dependent on cars and highways”, Ibáñez points out. Although people in the United States build with wood, the benefits achieved through the material are neutralised and surpassed by the large urban footprint of oil and roads, he adds.
But how to redensify? The proposal from the Materials room is to vertically extend buildings thanks to wood. “It’s light. You can often build two or three floors on top of existing structures without having to touch the foundations”, the architect explains. As an example, he mentions Barcelona’s Eixample, an area that has lost a lot of population in recent decades. “Today, 30% of the people who lived there 50 years ago live there, because before, there were large families with eight people living in an apartment, whereas today there’s only one elderly person or a couple”. Adding apartments would be a strategy to “win on an environmental level, have more housing in the local fabric, and take advantage of the better infrastructure we already have”, he concludes.
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Industrialisation: factory construction
The industrialisation of construction — understood here as off-site construction — is not a new concept either, and all the benefits it provides with any other material (speed, precision, less environmental and noise pollution) also apply when what is being manipulated is wood. Its future also seems to be guaranteed by the support and encouragement it is receiving from the Administration. “The PERTE for the industrialisation of housing has been approved these days. It is a strategic resilience plan of the Government of Spain, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda. There is already a lot of public housing, especially in Catalonia, where it is already being built this way”, explains Carla Ferrer, also curator of the Materials room. Of course, the fact that it is already being considered in this way does not mean that it is a majority practice. “We still do almost everything manually, in a very unsophisticated way”, adds Ibáñez.
The totem pole in the room dedicated to this future shows in the model the change in the basic element of architecture. “It’s no longer just a hand and a brick. Now it’s the largest panel and the maximum size it can travel in, which is the maximum size of a trailer”, the architect points out.
Biodiversity: Wood is not something generic
Often, when talking about wood, we tend to refer to it as something generic, as if it were a single entity and it didn’t matter which tree it came from. However, this is not the case. “A slow-growing, native wood has nothing to do with a fast-growing plantation wood”, Daniel Ibáñez explains, referring to whether building with this material is always a good idea. But, beyond the sustainability of wood depending on its origin, different species are also more or less suitable for different uses, something that was taken into account 50 or 100 years ago. “The skis were made from a type of wood that resisted moisture very well and was very flexible. You had furniture made from a type of wood that was very sturdy and held up well to carpentry. There was a much more careful selection”, says Ibáñez.
The biodiversity agenda seeks to put this on the table: each wood has its pros and cons, and architecture “should begin to embrace these specialities” to improve at the building and territorial level. Furthermore, using a single type of wood for everything also has environmental consequences: if there is only demand for pine, only pines will be planted. “Diversifying demand and having more species will also make our forests more biodiverse”, the architect points out.
Regarding the current status of this agenda in Spain, Carla Ferrer explains that, since “we are still using imported materials and technologies and the use of wood is a minority”, demanding the use of different tree species is a complex issue. However, projects such as Life Haya, which promote different uses of beech wood, including construction (they will build a pilot building with a construction system they call Hayabitat), show that, little by little, steps are being taken in that direction.
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Monomateriality: the fewer materials, the better
In their Biennial text, the curators of the Materials gallery indicate that this fourth agenda “speculates on an architecture based on regional value chains, balancing operational needs with embedded footprints through the intensive use of wood in structure, finishes, furniture, and cladding”. It is, in reality, about trying to minimise the number of materials used in construction. Carla Ferrer, who lives in Milan (Italy), says that there she sees how, for example, in Switzerland, parts of that path towards monomateriality in wood are already noticeable. “It’s completely normal for facades —not the cladding, but the facade panels— to be made of wood”, he explains.
However, in Spain, it’s still common for any building to be made of a multitude of different materials. “We come from a paradigm that prioritises taking advantage of the globalised market, regardless of where the materials come from or how many you use”, explains Daniel Ibáñez. But we should go in the opposite direction, understand that this method of construction has a very high environmental toll and change our focus. “If I were able to build a building where 95% of the wood is used, and it’s wood that comes from local sources, is sustainably managed, etc., the benefit would be twofold: not only because I’m using wood, but because I’m not using millions of other materials that have their value chains associated with multiple industries, transportation, and so on”, he notes.
Like biodiversity, this is something that was already done in the past, but with globalisation, it stopped being done. “Since it was previously impossible to bring materials from a thousand places, they built with what they had. A stone house was, fundamentally, a stone house”. In this future of monomateriality, wood is also full of possibilities: it serves as a structural element, as an enclosure, it’s a relatively good insulator, it’s used for finishes, for making furniture… “Wood can do a lot of things very well”, concludes Daniel Ibáñez.
Through these four agendas, these four futures, it is possible not only to imagine, but also to discover what is already being done to decarbonise cities and buildings. As they point out in the text of the Materials room at the Biennial, “in addition to this positive impact on a highly polluting sector, building properly with wood can generate a transformative effect on the territory: an internality”.
