Along with its tragic consequences, the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy created an opportunity: rebuilding in wood. Rome-based MMSA Studio has initiated and partly completed several timber construction sites in the Amatrice area. Architect Massimiliano Muscio told us what it was like to rebuild in this damaged region.
Why wood?
“Amatrice is a municipality with little more than 2,000 inhabitants, which becomes almost 20,000 in summer. Many of the buildings are the second homes of Romans fleeing the heat of the city. Fortunately, the emergency funds cover 100% of the reconstruction costs even for this type of building, but it was not easy to convince clients, especially private individuals, to choose wood.
“The prejudices are always the usual ones, the fear that a timber structure will not last or that it is vulnerable to fire. But the earthquake itself gave us a hand. Before it, there was only one timber house in Amatrice and, unlike masonry buildings, not only did it not collapse, but it suffered absolutely no damage, not even a crack. Bringing clients to see it was the most convincing argument. Now, some of the first timber building sites are finished and I can show my clients the beauty and the feeling of well-being that wood gives. It is something that cannot be explained in words but can be clearly perceived with the body. Anyone who has been in a timber structure knows what I am talking about. And it’s not just a question of aesthetics.
The fire test
“The other big fear concerns fire safety, but for this too I have found a secret weapon. I make my clients think about their fireplace. Everyone knows, here in the mountains, that if you put too big a log in the fireplace, no matter how hot it is, the log does not burn. You find it the next morning, charred a couple of centimetres on the outside and perfectly intact on the inside. It is the same for a cross laminated timber (CLT) house. Mass timber resists fire much better than a brick wall, and much better than a hollow core slab.
Hardships
“Building in wood is difficult because of the prejudices of clients, but not only that. There is also a lot of resistance from contractors too. There are still very few general contractors that can build directly in wood, so they subcontract to a wood specialist, losing in economic terms what is the great advantage of timber construction: speed.
Contemporary CLT was born in Austria at the end of the 1990s and those who had the foresight to bet on this material from the beginning found themselves one step ahead of the others. One of these pioneers is Rothoblaas.
The company from Cortaccia (Bolzano) has grown along with the technology and has become the benchmark for anyone building in engineered wood, not only in Europe, but worldwide. Today, Rothoblaas offers solutions that make it possible to construct timber buildings of more than twenty storeys, with energy efficiency and sustainability characteristics embedded.
In terms of seismic and wind resistance, for example, the latest addition to the family of hidden connections such as those used in Amatrice, ALUMEGA, allows the beams to rotate following the stresses that come from the pillars. Another connection system for pillars, SPIDER, makes it possible not to use beams at all, but to connect the vertical elements directly to the CLT floors, with significant savings in time and construction resources.
Timber construction has been revolutionised by the innovations of the last thirty years, but the drive to break new ground is still strong. Rothoblaas is also highly active in this regard and encourages its clients and partners not to be satisfied with what has been achieved. The ‘Build the (Im)possible’ competition, goes precisely in this direction, and rewards the most ambitious timber construction projects worldwide.
The future of construction will increasingly be a meeting of different techniques, a hybrid approach that is as attentive to performance as it is to sustainability. There are construction sites around the world for hybrid skyscrapers exceeding 100m in height. From a theoretical point of view, one can easily imagine hybrid skyscrapers as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Wood is a material with an excellent power/weight ratio, which means that its weight is extremely low in relation to its static properties. But as much as the skyscraper may represent the most compelling design challenge, it should not be forgotten that most buildings, even in cities, are between six and ten storeys high.
The challenge for the building of the future is not so much to get higher, but to build with respect for the human body, the environment and the planet, where earthquakes, floods and climate change exist and whose tragic consequences can be prevented with innovative technologies and forward-looking design.
“Mass timber resists fire much better than a brick wall, and much better than a hollow core slab.” Massimiliano Muscio, MMSA Studio
“Rebuilding after an earthquake also means working with very stringent constraints from a bureaucratic point of view. It is for this reason, as well as the logistical limitations of ancient town planning such as that of Amatrice or the neighbouring villages, that reconstruction work is proceeding slowly. The big breakthrough came when bureaucracy was simplified, especially with the impact of the ‘Consolidated Text for Reconstruction’. We also have strong landscape constraints, linked to the fact that the buildings are inside the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park. We could not indulge ourselves from a creative point of view, but we had to rebuild in wood what was previously masonry, strictly respecting the plans.
“To do this, we chose CLT panels and beams, connected with Rothoblaas joints, in particular we chose ALUMIDI and ALUMAXI concealed joints, for an ideal aesthetic result. We also relied on Rothoblaas plates to anchor the CLT structure to the reinforced concrete base, with WHT hold-downs and TITAN angle brackets.”
More at www.rothoblaas.co.uk
