Wood is a beloved, eco-friendly and beautiful material, but historically it had one drawback: a "rectangular" architecture was obtained from wood. We must pay tribute to the architects - they always tried to somehow complicate wooden buildings, to make them more plastic: as a result, six- and octahedrons appeared, or (the most effective way to overcome wood straightness) bulbous domes covered with shingles. Now shingles, or wooden tiles, are also actively used to create curvilinear, so popular in our time, forms of wood.
However, the modern technology of glued timber, if desired, can achieve a much greater effect - and engineers from the Bioarchitecture company, specializing in construction from glued laminated timber, came up with the idea to design a full-fledged dome structure. In which the thrust balances the weight of the material in almost the same way as in the classic, Roman dome - but everything is made not of stone, but of wood: from bent glued beams.
Imagine that an architect in AutoCad (or another familiar program) designs a hemispherical volume, an independent building, or a part of a building - it turns out that it can be made of wood!
For those who are familiar with the technology of construction from laminated veneer lumber, this idea will be quite obvious: the shape of each detail (each bar) is calculated in the project, and the corresponding order is sent to the woodworking factory. There, blanks of laminated veneer lumber are cut from all sides at pre-calculated angles. After that, it remains to fold the parts in the right order - and we get a stable dome structure. According to the calculations of the developers, in this way you can get a hemisphere with a diameter of up to 50 meters.
Having come up with this design, the authors decided to check whether such an idea had been patented before and asked the European Patent Office to do so. It turned out that no such patent had been issued yet. “We were sincerely surprised that such a simple idea did not occur to anyone,” says Roman Pankov, head of Bioarchitecture, “after all, in fact, this is a classic dome structure, only made not of stone, but of wood. And they ventured to apply for the registration of the relevant documents. The new type of timber received the name of the glued profile BHS 160 (patent No. PG2009A0020).
The design is very reliable and durable, as it "holds itself", and the load on the material is minimal. Depending on the shape of the profile of the building beam, the methods of connection between the structural elements can also be selected, individually for each specific project. Starting from conventional "dowels" using a simple rectangular profile, screws, adhesives, etc. for more complex shapes. The location and number of windows is arbitrary: for example, a hemisphere can be dotted with round holes of different sizes, making it look like a planetarium. With a reasonable number of windows, it will be light inside, and the structure will fully retain its stability.
There are countless options for using this idea: you can build a small park pavilion, a gazebo, or you can build a large stage, or even a house. Or you can make a dome by placing a hemisphere on a square, rectangle, oval, or volume of any other geometric shape. You can compose a composition of several of these domes.
Wood is an inexpensive material, readily available, durable, very humanistic, for which many people love and appreciate it. The timing and cost of implementing such a project is only two times more than the construction of an ordinary house from a bar.
Another plus is that such a building does not require additional interior decoration. If desired, it can be dyed or impregnated with special compounds to preserve its natural golden color, although this is completely optional. As for the outer part, here you can use waterproof impregnations, paints, as well as any roofing and facade materials: tiles, metal, even glass.
As we can see, this idea has many advantages. And, probably, the main thing is the unprecedented creative freedom of the architect, both in solving spatial problems and in terms of decorative finishing. The matter is small, the authors of the concept very much hope that there will finally be architects who will appreciate it and take the risk of implementing it in one form or another. But so far, unfortunately, this is only a concept. Although effective and, obviously, quite viable.
