Design and Construction in Wood

By Alfredo Morales, professor at the Faculty of Architecture, UDD.

In 2022, Chile approved the Framework Law on Climate Change, committing to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. This mandates the implementation of strategies and policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and promote sustainability. Within this environmental reality and Chile's robust history of technological development in the forestry sector, wood is the material that most effectively responds to climate change, while also meeting demands and offering structural, thermal, low-CO2, renewable, architectural, climatic, and envelope-related virtues.

Wood design today is highly technological and requires design professionals to work collaboratively, preferably using BIM methodology. "No one knows everything." We have moved from vernacular construction using local sawn timber to laminated and cross-laminated elements that challenge the most stringent regulatory standards for fire, seismic, and climatic resistance.

Height, form, and the use of spaces are no longer obstacles to designing with wood. Therefore, collaboration among structural engineers, forestry engineers, mechanical engineers, operators of industrialized processes, and architects is vital for the development of a wood project. Chilean standards (NCH), suppliers, and construction companies already offer technical and structural calculation solutions based on updates to NCH 789/1:2023, which regulates wood durability, and NCH 1198:2024, which establishes structural design methods for wood products. This provides technical and legal certainty for designing, approving, and receiving wood buildings of 3 or more stories.

This platform of suppliers and companies specialized in wood construction supports the "how" to make it possible by modularizing, industrializing, optimizing, and transforming the wood construction process into an industrialized assembly project. This reduces labor costs, enables execution with low waste, increases precision, and shortens delivery times.

In recent years, major architecture firms, schools of architecture, and engineering schools have embraced wood as a material for study and in-depth exploration for the future and development of our country.

Wood will be present not only in corporate, residential, equipment, or educational buildings but also as the construction system that will enable the reduction of Chile's social housing deficit more quickly, with greater modularity and lower costs.

Wood design and construction from Chile will become a global benchmark if and only if we approach projects from architecture to construction... and not the other way around.

The municipality in theAcoforag Magazine