Who would have thought there was a new use for wood in architecture? When I think of wood I think of support beams and flooring, but Achim Menges and Steffen Reichert think about it as a fluctuating material that can work with changes in climate, not against it. We all know that wood warps when it gets wet, and that’s typically a bad thing, but Menges and Reichert took wood’s natural response to moisture, the fact that it absorbs moisture when it’s dry and releases it when it’s wet, as well as its physical properties related to grain direction and spent five years researching how they could use that to their advantage in a new building material.
