Light on Wood

Timber is not only a sustainable material, it also creates warm, welcoming, sheltering spaces that offer an emotional quality to their users. Light on Wood is a very personal story about how to design and build with mass timber. Author Susan H. Jones, a native of the Pacific Northwest with its seemingly endless forests, founded atelierjones in Seattle some 20 years ago. This pioneering practice has since made a name for itself by working to decarbonize our built environment. It carefully investigated the behavior of wood in case of fire, in an effort to rewrite the code, and undertook life cycle analyses to further the body of research on timber. Changes in building codes have since helped to reestablish this traditional building material in many countries. But the office also designed many beautiful buildings, often developed in cooperation with local communities.