Traveling to summer conferences is always fun. This is especially true if it is held in an Italian resort town. This year, the bi-annual World Conference of Timber Engineering was held at the end of June in Riva del Garda at the beautiful Garda Lake in northern Italy.

This conference is always a great venue to meet people who build with wood or do research in wood. Topics are mostly centered around structural issues but there is typically also a good size architectural component. If you missed this year’s conference but want to stay in the loop on what’s happening in structural and architectural design with wood, feel free to browse the official website (while it is up) – or simply read on and enjoy a quick visual overview.

The first visualization below is a collection of the conference topics as a Wordle. I always find it very enlightening when I have a large amount of textual data to simply copy the raw text and then dump it into the Wordle web site. Since the algorithm behind this service sizes words by their frequency, it is quickly possible to get a feeling of the overall tendencies.

In this case, I copied the presentation schedule, which contained not only the titles but also authors’ names – the result is shown below (common words, numbers and general terms like “wood” have been removed). While it makes sense for an engineering conference that “structural performance” is a central topic, themes like “analysis, composite, glulam, shear [likely as in 'shear walls'], strength” and the always popular “joints and connections” were strong topics. Open the image to its full size to drill deeper into the “fine-print”.

An interactive version is here.

As with any worldwide conference, it is interesting to see where participants came from. As you can see in the two maps below, there was an dominance of European participants – clearly also due to the proximity to the location. Other strong groups came from USA & Canada and Australia & New Zealand. What really surprised me – especially in times of very tight travel budgets – was the strong showing from Japan. The largest single country group was from Japan!

This map drills a bit deeper into where people came from in Europe.

You can explore the raw data here.

So what can we read out of these maps? Due to the nature of the conference audience, the countries highlighted above likely are strong participants in building with wood and conducting research in structural uses of wood. Of course, this is affected also by travel funds availability and other factors but it may serve as an indicator.

One can be tempted now to assume that wood research and construction activities happen mainly in countries that have a large forest resource. To check this assumption, I pulled out the FAO’s (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) forest distribution map (shown below). This comparison now shows that South America, Africa and especially Russia were underrepresented at the conference relative to their forest resources. I am sure the reasons for this are varied and can not only be simplified to “economics” but it is an interesting comparison, nevertheless.

The next WCTE is scheduled for 2012 and will take place in Auckland, Australia. You can already visit their website at http://www.wcte2012.com. See you there!

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The new Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood, provides expanded and updated national standard requirements for producing, marketing, and specifying plywood for construction and industrial uses. Included in this version are revisions which address thickness and labeling in order to comply with national labeling requirements. Advisory appendices dealing with labeling requirements, green building attributes and formaldehyde have also been added.

This brochure replaces Voluntary Product Standard PS 1-07 Structural Plywood, and is available in two sizes. The standard version, Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood, Form L870 contains 72, 8-1/2 x 11 pages and is available for purchase for $4. It is also available as a free downloadable PDF.

The condensed pocket guide version, Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood Pocket Guide (with Typical APA Trademarks), Form L875, contains 88, 3-3/4 x 6-1/2 pages which provide excerpts from the larger version. It is only available in printed form and will be available for purchase for $4 later this month.

PRG-305, Performance Standard for APA EWS Stock Glulam Beams is the newly released standard which provides design properties for APA EWS performance-rated stock glulam beams used in residential or commercial floor and roof construction. Includes terminology, manufacturing considerations, design properties, load/span tables and qualification requirements. Issued May 2010, this publication is available only as a downloadable PDF. Form PRG-305, 19 pages.

Via: June 2010 APA Publication Update

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On a recent visit to Whistler, BC (yep, the place where the 2010 Winter Olympics were held), I had the fortune to be given an impromptu tour of the Austria Passive House, a building constructed for the Olympics and used as “home base” for Austrian media during the events. This 2700 s.f., two-story building is frequently called the “first certified passive house in Canada” and its purpose is to showcase passive-house technology to the Canadian public.

Built by a combination of local general contractors and engineers and a variety of Austrian fabricators (see the website below for a list), this house was also an opportunity to showcase European building technologies and test their feasibility within the Canadian building framework. As a result, it features wood-dowel-laminated solid wood walls, triple-glazed windows, a geothermal heat pump and much more.

While the architecture of the house is a modernized version of the classic wooden chalet, it is a beautiful example of modern wooden house design.

On a side note: It is always interesting to see what happens to a building after some time of use. While this one currently transfers its occupancy from “official” national house to a home for bikers and cross-country skiers, it has apparently received a not-fully-styled wheelchair ramp. Hopefully there will be money available to turn this rather temporary-looking solution into something nicer later.

Pictures

[Show slideshow]

There is also a nice YouTube video that shows the construction process:

Specs

Location: Whistler, BC, Canada

Built: 2009

Architect: Treberspurg & Partner Architekten, Wien, Austria

Engineer: Equilibrium Consulting, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Fabricator: Sohm Holzbautechnik, Alberschwende, Austria

Links

• The official website: www.oesterreichhaus.at
• Austria Passive House – Blog
• Article on Whistler2010

Please note: All information above is accurate to the best of my knowledge. The intent of this presentation is simply to showcase interesting wooden structures that I have photographed. I have not been involved in the planning or construction (unless mentioned above). All images are © A. Schreyer.

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While we are (slowly) preparing for our trip to the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Italy this summer, I realized that I never posted about the two upcoming wood-building -related conferences in Europe. If you have some spare travel money (yep, flights are not cheap this summer) and some time in June, then you can double-dip on two very interesting conferences. Here are the details:

3rd European Congress for Energy-Efficient Construction in Wood

Where: Congress Centrum – Gürzenich Köln (Cologne), Germany
When: June 9-10, 2010
Links: Website | Program

11th World Conference on Timber Engineering (WCTE)

Where: Riva del Garda, Trentino, Italy
When: June 20-24, 2010
Links: Website | Program

I can’t find on the FHB website whether the Cologne conference is offered in English, but the majority of speakers seem to be German. The WCTE, however, will definitely be all-English.

To be regularly updated on wood-related conferences, bookmark this page on my Timber Engineering Reference:
Timber Engineering Reference – Conferences / Trade Shows

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I must somehow have overlooked this one. Apparently since last fall, Canadian Wood Council’s Wood Design & Building magazine has been posting their issues online using a free web-based viewer. If you don’t know this magazine yet – it is a beautifully presented resource for North American wood design and architecture that gets published approximately four times a year.

This online version is already a great step towards making wood design more accessible and giving beautiful design ideas a broader audience. May I suggest as a next step that the entire magazine rack be converted to online viewing. This would pull a very extensive archive out of the darkness of the magazine shelf. Obviously this can very well be funded by ads (see all that grey space around the magazine on my screen – just don’t overdo it). I am looking forward to seeing more!

Here are direct links to the latest issues:

• Winter 2009/2010
• Fall 2009

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These books are always a beautiful reference and source for many inspirations. If you want to get one, follow this link.

I have also been told that students get a 40% reduction on this and other CWC publications in their store.

Want to be in the next book? Submit your project to next year’s 2009 North American Wood Design Awards (deadline: December 7, 2009).

(Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book)

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AGO - Gehry's curvy wood facade

Awarded

Admittedly, award ceremonies come around at all times during the year, but two of the recent and notable awards for wood building and architecture were the UK Wood Design Awards (October 2009) and the Ontario Wood Awards (November 2009, also written up here).

Of all the amazing buildings (and furniture) that have received an award, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s curvy wood-glass facade designed by Frank Gehry (and executed by local engineers Halcrow Yolles and Equilibrium Consulting) is the one I already had a chance to visit. Interestingly, it also won a steel design award. You can see one of my images on the right.

Another structure that caught my eye is the Deal Pier (UK) shown below. Congratulations to the engineers, architects and builders of these and all other winning buildings.

Deal Pier Cafe & Bar

Please Submit

There are still awards to be won. If you have built using wood anytime during the last year, then it may not be too late to submit to one of these:

• 2009 North American Wood Design Awards (deadline: December 7, 2009)
• 2010 California Wood Design Awards (deadline: November 20, 2009)
• 2010 Southeast Wood Design Awards (deadline: January 8, 2010)
• All Canadian awards programs
• All US awards programs

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NEES Shake-table 7-story house test (Image: John van de Lindt, Colorado State University)

This note is a bit last minute but if you have time tomorrow morning (Tuesday, 7/14) at 11:00 am EDT, then you can watch the largest wooden building shake-table test live via webcast.

This building, which consists of a steel story plus six platform-framed wood stories, will be subjected to a nasty (50% increased magnitude) version of the Northridge earthquake. The test will be conducted at a full-size shaketable installation in Kobe, Japan. From the press release:

Visit www.science360.gov/live at 11:00 a.m. EDT on July 14, 2009, to see a live NSF webcast featuring footage from a shake table test from that morning—the world’s largest—and an opportunity to ask questions of the engineers behind the project. Username and password requirements will be waived at 11:00 a.m. EDT for the webcast.

For more information go to NSF’s NEESWood project page. That site also features some interesting videos.

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Dukta Matte

On May 26th, the Swiss wood awards were given out. After the German awards a few weeks ago, these awards highlight more reasons for building with wood such as the custom cut wood slab that transforms into undulating plates (shown above).

More on holzpreis-schweiz.ch.

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