The need to transition towards a more sustainable construction sector has put one of the oldest known building materials back into the focus of research and innovation: Timber. During this career – from a material representing the past, to one playing a major role in the future of construction – the tools for processing, designing, engineering and modelling timber have evolved dramatically, giving rise to a new architectural vocabulary. In parallel, a new interest in traditional craft is developing against this contemporary technological background.

The Branching Out roundtable takes these trends as a starting point to discuss novel, innovative and unusual applications of timber, bringing together diverse perspectives of timber innovators – architects, engineers, educators and researchers –  that are pushing the boundaries of timber construction.

The event will be accompanied by the inauguration of the T.I.T. (Timber in Tension), an experimental structure on the rooftop of IAAC in Barcelona, which was developed during the Data Informed Structures Seminar by students of the Master of Advanced Architecture (MAA01) under the guidance of Manja van de Worp and Raimund Krenmueller with the support of Eduardo Chamorro, Shyam Zonca and Deepika Raghu.

Students: Amandeep Singh Sasan, Christos Trompoukis, Daniel Soiral, Elizaveta Veretilnaya, Hairati Tupe, Jihad Al Ojaili, Laukik Lad, Liang Mayuqi, Matvei Genne, Michelle Bezik, Nan Yin, Pamela Igwehi Inegbedion, Prarthana Sudhindra, Rana Ibrahim, Rosamary Machado, Stefanie Eleonore Thaller, Tullio Polisi, Uri Lewis Torres, Victoria Fedorova, Ziyad Wassef Abdelkader Youssef Ahmed, Ziying Zeng.

The speakers are: Kasper Ax, Director and Founder of AJG Architects Copenhagen; Teresa Cheung, Academic Head of ALICE Y1 at EPFL; Martin Self, Founding Director of Xylotek, Advanced Timber Structures; Manja van de Worp, Director and Founder of YIP Structural Engineering London; Steve Webb, Director and Founder of Webb Yates Engineers; Tom Westwood, Senior Associate at Waugh Thistleton Architects; moderated by Raimund Krenmueller, Advanced Architecture Group Researcher and Fabrication Expert at IAAC.