Climate, Culture, and Craft: Reclaiming Timber as an Architectural Signifier ^†

Mass timber has emerged as a sustainable and viable alternative to steel and concrete, offering carbon-saving potential and biophilic qualities. Yet, despite its technological maturity and relevance in addressing the climate crisis, mass timber remains underutilized in large-scale architectural applications. This paper investigates whether internalized aesthetic associations with architectural modernism—and its dominant materials, concrete and steel—may unconsciously inhibit architects from conceptualizing architecture in timber. It hypothesizes that a disruption in the evolution of wood’s architectural signification since the advent of the modern movement has weakened its material and formal causality, reducing timber’s appeal in architectural conceptualization.

To investigate this hypothesis, the study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach combined with philosophical analysis. A definition for architectural signification is derived, building on philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s material and formal causality, which locates origins of form-making in the poetic imagination of the maker, and architectural theorist, Marco Frascari’s dialectic of deriving meaning in architecture from theoretical and epistemological knowledge (epistēmê) and practice, skill, or craft (technê). This is explored in the contextually rich pre-modern Japanese architecture, where material, form, and craft are distinct yet inextricably linked in the production of architectural meaning.

A historical analysis of Japan’s reception of modernism, particularly through the Metabolist movement and major socio-political upheavals, further contextualizes this ruptured evolution. The work of prolific Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is examined through textual and design review as a contemporary corpus that absorbs these aesthetic events and successfully reactivates timber as an architectural signifier, establishing a continuity between pre-modern and contemporary material and formal causality in timber. In Kuma’s words, the “particle aesthetic” refers to the reclamation of this continuity.

In reframing materiality as an expressive and situated act, the analysis calls for a conscious realignment of design thinking and a material-driven environmental design pedagogy—one that recognizes the distinct material and formal causality of timber. The findings suggest that wood as a signifier evokes particle, fractal, and ornamental expressions, which intellectually and morally collide with the modernist aesthetic and its contemporary derivatives. These insights underscore the need for further theoretical and empirical investigations into the unraveled aesthetic tropes of wood’s architectural significance, elevating mass timber from a mere alternative to concrete and steel to an architectural material with an aesthetic agency of its own.