Back to Foundation
Materials & structure·applied

Timber Structures

Why it matters

Concrete and steel are the two most carbon-intensive materials civilization mass-produces. Wood is the only structural material that grows on sunlight and stores carbon while it works. Every cubic metre of timber in a frame is roughly a tonne of CO₂ locked out of the atmosphere for the building's life. The structure is the climate action. Timber also rewrites construction logistics: light enough to carry up a mountain road in pieces, workable with tools a community owns, fast to assemble, and honest to disassemble. From hand-cut frames to engineered I-beams to cross-laminated panels, wood now spans the whole ambition range from cabin to multi-storey. Contrary to its reputation, engineered timber's fire and durability performance is a solved, certified discipline, not a leap of faith.

Role in 001's holistic picture

Timber is the skeleton the rest of the materials cluster hangs on. It frames the cavities Bio-Based Insulation fills and stands on screw piles to complete the concrete-free structure. The same structure unbolts cleanly for disassembly and prefabricates naturally for replication. Its stored carbon makes the frame itself a head start on net-zero carbon. In our cooling work its mass even earns a thermal role. Night-flushed CLT starts each summer morning cool.

Ukraine and the world

The same material spans three tiers — sawn framing you can build by hand, engineered elements (glulam beams, wooden I-beams) where spans and precision grow, and mass timber, the cross-laminated panels craned into place in days. In Ukraine the top tier has stopped being an import story. CLT Rezult, the country's first and only cross-laminated-timber plant, has been producing in Korosten in the Zhytomyr region since 2020, and expanding since 2023 as a domestic supply of reconstruction material. Panels run up to 18 × 3.5 m, capacity around 91,000 m³ a year by Rezult's figures. And the material is already carrying weight where rebuilding matters most. The upper floors of the Unbroken National Rehabilitation Centre in Lviv are FSC-certified CLT, chosen for lightness and low embodied carbon. There war-injured Ukrainians heal, and more than a thousand prostheses have already been made. And worldwide the top tier has quietly gone vertical. In Brumunddal, Norway, the 18-storey Mjøstårnet rose 85.4 metres on glulam columns and CLT cores. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ratified it in 2019 as the world's tallest timber building. Its hotel, apartments and offices went up without external scaffolding, in a town of a few thousand people. Taller timber towers have followed it since. The old question of whether you can build high in wood is settled.

How 001 engages with it

House 001 is a mostly-timber building on a light steel frame, and its living lab doubled as a component workshop. The market sells the wooden I-beams themselves, without ready-made panels built on them. So 001 designed, researched, and fabricated its own — both the I-beams and the panels. They were proven in prototypes, and their real on-building test came as the floor of a sauna assembled on House 001's walkable roof terrace. That floor did not stay. Walking a loaded roof exposed walls too flexible for the added permanent load: the whole building flexed underfoot. Stiffening them would mean taking them apart. The documented lesson has two edges: fabrication at lab scale is feasible, and the existing structure, not the new component, sets the limit. The structure's contribution to the measured carbon balance is central to the 11 tonnes saved through construction choices. Unity Hub scales the material up: a three-storey community building topped with a geodesic dome. The CLT there was chosen by the project's architectural partner, Geodesic.Life, not by 001. Our part is making that choice work as hard as it can: the published cooling concept explicitly recruits the CLT mass into the night-flush strategy. Structure and thermal mass in one material.

Maturity: applied. Built and inhabited at House 001; in-house I-beam panels fabricated and prototyped by its living lab; at Unity Hub, 001 works with a CLT structure chosen by the architectural partner.

Further reading