Ecological Chimera: The Dogma of Timber Construction

Timber has recently been enthroned as the material of salvation. In competitions, in policy papers, and on glossy renderings it appears as the renewable cure to the excesses of concrete and steel. It has become the emblem of an environmental conscience—moralized, celebrated, and, increasingly, unquestioned. Yet this reverence rests on a fragile paradox: the more timber we consume, the faster we accelerate the depletion of the very forests that sustain the illusion of abundance.

The rhetoric of ’naturalness‘ that clings to timber is misleading. Cross-laminated panels and engineered beams are not fragments of untouched nature; they are industrial products, chemically bound, globally transported, and energetically costly. Their ecological aura is more performative than real—an image of sustainability, easily instrumentalized as a token of virtue. To present such artifacts as a ‚return to nature‘ is to confuse technological manufacture with ecological authenticity.

Life Cycle Assessments are often summoned to prove timber’s superiority, but these calculations rarely escape the logic of ‚accounting ecology‘. Depending on assumptions about supply chains, transport, disassembly, or demolition, the numbers fluctuate wildly. Ethics dissolve into spreadsheets; responsibility becomes a figure in a balance sheet. This is the terrain on which green procurement policies and reputational strategies flourish, not genuine sustainability.

The cult of timber risks becoming a smokescreen. It comforts us with the illusion of progress while preserving the growth-oriented paradigms of the construction industry. It does not challenge the cultural addiction to building more, larger, faster—it sanctifies it with a green veneer. Timber is sustainable only in a truly sustainable environment: local production chains, robust technical culture, effective reuse strategies, and above all the courage to resist the fetish of novelty.

No material—timber included—can absolve architecture of its ecological burden. Sustainability will not be achieved through the myth of renewable abundance, but through the discipline of restraint: designing less, building less, and transforming what already exists. Unless architecture confronts these imperatives, timber construction will remain what it increasingly resembles: an ecological chimera, a dogma that hides rather than solves the crises it pretends to address.