Control or Affect? The Paradox of 3D-Printed Wood

摘要

As one of the oldest and most pervasive building materials, wood is so commonplace that its unique qualities or capacities are often overlooked. "It is in fact so familiar that we often dismiss it as a 'common' substance," writes Harvey Green in Wood: Craft, Culture, History.1 This perspective is reinforced by wood's frequent replacement with newer, more "advanced" materials in the products it was initially used to make, such as carbon fiber canoes or fiberglass window frames. And yet, wood is hardly the unremarkable substance that this trend suggests. Today, the material is the subject of intense experimentation, and recent research and development endeavors have delivered new qualities and capacities. A prime example is 3D-printed wood (Figure 1).