The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization by Roland Ennos

Author:Roland Ennos [Ennos, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982114732
Google: cOgGEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2020-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

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So far we have concentrated on public buildings. However, as the wealthy and powerful started to build larger private dwellings out of stone, other problems emerged that could only be solved by using wood. Since castles and the palaces and mansions that succeeded them are usually several stories high, the builders had to insert wooden beams into the walls to support the upper floors. You can spot the beam holes when you visit ruined castles; they are always punched into the walls just below the level of the fireplaces that seem to hover on the walls. The builders also gave their palaces lightweight wooden roofs. The great Venetian architect Andrea Palladio was the first to produce designs for simple, efficient roof trusses, and his methods were copied all over Europe. But as Palladian mansions were built farther and farther north, a new difficulty became apparent: the cold. Stone buildings are ideal for the climate of Italy, where the high thermal capacity of the stone keeps them cool on hot summer days and maintains an equable temperature. In the cold, damp climate of Northern Europe the high thermal conductivity of stone meant they lost heat rapidly in winter, and the high thermal capacity meant that once they got cold, they took ages to heat up again. You only have to go to a Christmas carol concert in a stone church to appreciate the problem: churches are notoriously cold in winter, so you should always wrap up well. In the Middle Ages, nobles overcame to some extent the problem of living in cold stone castles by furnishing the inside of their walls with tapestries. In later palaces and mansions, architects replaced the tapestries with wooden paneling. Wood is a far better insulator of heat than stone, largely because of its cellular nature; the innumerable tiny air spaces restrict heat flow. Not only is wood ten times as effective as stone at stopping heat loss, but because the paneling is attached to the stonework via battens, this leaves an additional air space, which provides further cavity insulation. Perhaps the coziest room of all in country houses was the library, which was insulated not only by the paneling and bookshelves, but also by the books themselves. Wood was even used to insulate the windows. In Southern Europe, external louvered shutters kept out the energy from the heat of the sun, while allowing some cooling airflow. In Northern Europe, the windows were instead furnished with folding internal shutters that could be closed over the windows at night to conserve heat and opened in the day to let in as much sunlight as possible.

There is one final way in which wood supports stone buildings—from below. In chapter 7 we saw that wooden buildings are vulnerable to rot if their structure is allowed to touch the soil surface, where the wood can be alternately wetted and dried out. However, wood is not only stable when it is kept constantly dry; it also resists rot well

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