Do we really need engineered timber? Or could we radically simplify construction by using wood in its raw, unprocessed state?
These provocative questions are fueling a growing movement among architects and researchers who want to reduce waste and improve the carbon footprint of the built environment. While lumber already enjoys a relatively green reputation, the path from tree to timber is surprisingly resource-intensive—and inefficient.
The Hidden Cost of Engineered Wood
Wood waste is a major issue. Over 55 metric tons of wood waste are generated annually in the U.S. alone. A significant share comes not from demolition, but from converting trees into processed lumber.
According to a National Park Service Sankey diagram, 34% of harvested timber is lost as logging waste, destroyed trees, and “parts of cut trees left in woods.”
Even after felling, further energy and emissions are embedded in the lumber-making process. Dry-dressed softwood consumes 1,514 megajoules per cubic meter, with drying alone responsible for a third of that energy. What’s more, engineered wood often relies on glues containing formaldehyde and VOCs, raising serious health and environmental concerns.
Rethinking Defects as Design Assets
Engineered timber seeks to eliminate natural inconsistencies—like knots, warping, or bowing—by turning wood into a homogenized product. One key “flaw” often erased is Anisotropy—a wood grain’s tendency to resist force differently along different axes, and is viewed as a defect that must be eradicated (think of plywood).
But what if anisotropy isn’t a flaw? What if it’s a feature?
Tree Form: A Case for Whole Trees in Architecture
That’s the premise of Tree Form, a bold new research collaboration between Kennedy Violich Architects (KVA Matx), MIT, and WholeTrees Structures. On view at Berggruen Arts & Culture’s The Next Earth. Computation, Crisis, Cosmology at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, Tree Form explores how whole hardwood trees—including trunks and branching structures (tree forks)—can support multistory buildings with minimal processing.
The bark is stripped. Surfaces are smoothed. But the tree’s form remains intact.
Using terrestrial LiDAR scanning, the team created digital twins to simulate load-bearing capacities. This enabled pre-construction modeling of various spatial arrangements, including:
· Branching Column Plan – mimicking an evenly spaced forest
· Linear and Radial Plans – suitable for housing or office programs
The Hidden Strength of Tree Forks
Much of Tree Form builds on research by MIT architectural engineer Caitlin Mueller, who found that Y-shaped tree forks excel at transferring loads. “If you take a tree fork and slice it down the middle, and you see an unbelievable network of fibers that are intertwining to create these often three-dimensional load transfer points in a tree,” she notes.
Her team repurposed discarded tree forks from urban forestry projects repurposing the nodes as structural joints in hybrid reclaimed-engineered wood constructions. The researchers developed computer programs to catalog 3D scans of the tree forks as well as determine the appropriate cuts for their intended structural applications. An algorithm matches prepared tree forks to three-dimensional intersections in the intended structural framework, streamlining the design process.
Hooke Park’s Wood Chip Barn: A Sister Project
At the Architectural Association’s Hooke Park campus, students pursued a similar strategy in the Wood Chip Barn. They arranged whole tree forks horizontally to create an exposed central truss. Robotics, digital twin simulations, and local beech trees were all part of the fabrication process.This project—and others like it—proves that non-standard, minimally processed wood can enable architectural forms once deemed too irregular or labor-intensive.
Like the MIT research, the Wood Chip Barn project involved 3d scanning and robot-driven milling of tree specimens. This automated digital twin approach enabled the sophisticated simulation required for the optimal alignment and intersection of twenty trees to construct the Vierendeel-style truss. The ability to utilize non-uniform, hyper-local, minimally processed materials in this way unlocks possibilities for material and energy savings infeasible with traditional industrial approaches.
The Challenges (and Irony) of Raw Timber
Construction
There’s a catch. These pilot projects are labor- and data-intensive, requiring scans, algorithms, and human oversight that don’t yet scale easily. Still, every emerging construction technology—from mass timber to 3D-printed concrete—has gone through a similar phase.
The irony? We now need cutting-edge tools like robotics and AI to make pre-industrial building methods viable again.
Why It Matters Now
In a world facing raw material shortages, climate urgency, and mounting construction waste, returning to raw timber could be a game-changer. According to the Tree Form team, using tree forks and whole trunks in situ can reduce wood waste by 30–40%.
What’s more, this method embraces nature’s inherent structural design intelligence—acknowledging trees as pre-designed structural systems rather than flawed raw material.
