BLANK Speculations on CLT

Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara

This book advances a much-needed and transformational agenda for making architecture today through a close reading of crosslaminated timber (CLT) and its material unit, the CLT blank. Both matter-of-fact and multivalent, economical and excessive, the blank has untapped potential for experimentation, innovation, and research in architecture at various scales. Blank brings together texts and work from a wide range of theorists and practitioners who make CLT central to their inquiry and, in turn, suggest design approaches that broaden the material’s cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry.

The book claims new conceptual territory for a material with extensive appeal whose theorization has been stuck in narratives of its sustainability. Slippages between art, architecture, and science help position Blank as an antidote to current conversations about CLT, which are fixated on its mass production and carbon footprint, portraying it as a bland product rather than an enabler of design. The book argues for the material’s aesthetic and spatial potential, conjuring the kind of world that CLT can create. Striking visuals contribute to repositioning CLT architecture though new forms of representation and design responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics.

Authors 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.

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. Kara has gained international standing in the field of the built environment through practice, pioneering research, and education in interdisciplinary design.

Contributions by Jennifer Bonner, Nelson Byun, Victoria Camblin, Sean Canty, Courtney Coffman, Sam Jacob, Hanif Kara, Christopher C. M. Lee, Erin Putalik, Nader Tehrani, and Yasmin Vobis.

ISBN 978-1-954081-02-4

Title: BLANK

Size: 8” x 11” Portrait

Pages: 240pp

Binding: Hardbound

Publication Date: Fall 2021

ISBN: 978-1-954081-02-4

Price: $49.95

World Rights: Available