In my quest to make my content more audience-specific, I recently started cross-posting wood-related news, readings and updates to the @timberengineer Twitter account. Similar to what I have been posting already about wood to my @alexschreyer account, I will in the future be posting more wood-related content under the new account. So to make a [...]

In a press release published yesterday, Tom Vilsack, current USDA Agriculture Secretary, laid out plans to increase wood use in buildings. This is of course great news for anyone related to wood research, manufacturing and construction but above all it’s great news for the environment. After all, wood is the only major building material that’s [...]

APA (The Engineered Wood Association) just released an iPhone/iPod Touch app, which gives easy access to its product reports. Another feature is a “click to call” button to reach APA’s tech support. Here’s the official announcement: The first APA App – featuring APA Products Reports®, is now available for iPhone®, iPad®, and iPod touch® mobile [...]

Will this winter ever end? New England has so far surely seen an amazing accumulation of snow this season. Every few days, the Boston Globe reports that we have surpassed the annual average snowfall by yet again a few inches. Let’s see when we will finally see soil again. For now, we have yet another [...]

Now that the year is almost over, it’s time to step back and look at what we all built over the past weeks… Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year! Cheers, Alex P.S.: Yes, it’s [...]

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 [...]

APA, the organization that deals with engineered wood products has recently published updated versions of their product specifications on structural plywood and glulam. Following is their announcement and below is a link where you can download the documents for free. The new Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood, provides expanded and updated national standard [...]

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 [...]

Image: Forum Holzbau 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 [...]

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 [...]