A year of wood Technology
Over 7000 years ago, Egyptians were known for their outstanding woodworking skills since the beginning of history, actually, most of the ancient Egyptian artifacts were made from wood and wood derivatives, even though Egypt has never been a wood producer, these skills have been developed over the years to be a hub for furniture manufacturing in the region.
For me it was a shock when I first saw the program and syllabus, I didn’t know about such a graduate program before and I thought that it would be odd to study this topic without previous experience in material science, also the chemistry and all complicated terms look like algorithms for me.
“I’m an Architect and this topic can help me to understand a fundamental material to my field” this sentence actually motivates me to look further to see how I can be a better architect, and how my architecture background can be an added value to the course, these are the basic principles that I had to take into account before I finally applied to the program.
The issue we are facing as architects is the ease of use of synthetic materials over natural ones, also natural material treatment has slow rates of development compared to other polymers.
The main issue for non-forest areas, they have limited options for treating lumber and tree parts, it is inefficient to import green logs to process in a different region or country thus, logs and lumber are mostly processed nearby the harvesting sites. For that reason among other things, non-forest regions couldn’t teach similar programs.
After a year of studying wood technology, I can be proud of my choice, the first semester has so many flaws and I was still trying to understand the system but eventually, it ended up will with all stressful moments, and for the second semester I had a better chance to improve my performance and to start working on my thesis project which has a very interesting topic and a good reflection of my field, I’m developing a comparative study for concrete casting wooden formwork panels which is really a thing because I am relating the knowledge and findings to the site work which hopefully will be fruitful.
In November 2020 I was invited by the dean’s office to participate in the future of wood hackathon held in Tartu, I was curious to participate to see the innovations in wood, my team and I had a chance to develop an app for measuring CO2 based on daily behaviors of the users, and we won a special prize from Estonian Woodhouse Association, unfortunately, we did not yet proceed with the idea for some technical shortcoming.
In the end, I highly recommend the program for Architects and construction engineers, I think it is important for artists to fully understand material science in-depth, and also to improve the field with the input of practitioners from different fields, which is highly supported by the program leaders.
Big plans for next year hopefully, wish everyone a warm summer ✨
