Jennifer Bonner is director of MALL and associate professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is the author of A Guide to the Dirty South-Atlanta and guest editor of a special issue of ART PAPERS on Los Angeles. Her design work, including Haus Gables, a single-family residence in Atlanta constructed of eighty-seven CLT panels, has been widely published and exhibited. Professor Hanif Kara is cofounder and Design Director of AKT II, a design-led structural and civil engineering firm based in London, and professor in practice of architectural technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Hanif has gained international standing in the field of the built environment through practice, pioneering research, and education in interdisciplinary design.
Manufacturers have an overwhelming influence on the design of timber buildings, many of which simply substitute structural wood for steel. As they spell out in their forthcoming book, Blank: Speculations on CLT (AR+D Publishing), Bonner and Kara fear that if architects relinquish mass timber to the control of industry, they will miss an opportunity to create a new architecture capable of meeting the exigencies of the 21st century. --The Architect's Newspaper ...offers a combination of thought-provoking essays and speculative design projections to reset the conversation around CLT, or cross-laminated timber. --Architectural Record