Anatomy of Timber celebrates wood as the future of architecture, tracing how designers, engineers, and makers are reinventing building culture through craft, ecology, and innovation. Born from an international forum, the book brings together bold ideas and real projects that show timber’s power to connect forest to city, structure to climate, and design to responsibility. It’s a call to build beautifully, intelligently, and sustainably, with timber at the heart of it all.

This volume presents “Timber for Urban Density,” a TU Delft compendium of graduation projects and research (2018–2025) that position wood as structural method, urban resource, and cultural project. It advances a pedagogy where drawing, prototyping, and full-scale coordination are inseparable, and where reversibility, traceability, and life-cycle literacy shape detail and assembly. The book is organized around built proposals and essays that translate circular ethics into construction logic and city-scale policy. Design theses test timber across climates and programs: intergenerational housing frameworks and adaptable domestic typologies; neighbourhood top-ups that treat the city as forest through modular rooftop extensions; tropical dwellings negotiating humidity, rainfall, and craft; and resilient community infrastructures whose components are graded for reuse. Collectively they foreground demountable joints, stock-aware dimensioning, and serviceable layers that keep structure legible and teachable. Research chapters consolidate the operating system for practice. A “transparent guide” for Dutch timber construction couples maximum carbon storage with minimum embodied energy; a parametric high-rise study shows how layout and material choice drive footprint; bamboo and wood-technology papers extend the palette with moisture-induced joinery and multi-storey tropical systems; additional essays integrate forest ecologies into urban planning and probe acoustic performance in timber interiors. Together they outline standards, testing pathways, and stock-discretion methods that convert irregular urban feedstock into calculable, re-deployable elements. The result is a clear call to action: design to the available stock, standardize where it counts, keep connections reversible, and align architectural expression with ecological accountability.

More than 20% of global carbon emissions are linked with the production of construction materials used in the built environment. The use of bio-materials along with urban densification strategies that avoid demolition and reduce material demand, have been recommended to achieve urban sustainability goals. Addressing these measures, this study compares the life cycle embodied carbon emissions of seven hybrid top-up structural systems composed of concrete, steel and advanced engineered timber products made out of softwood and hardwood species. The life cycle carbon emissions (expressed in kgCO2-eq) were estimated following a cradle-to-grave approach, with a functional unit equivalent to 1 m2 of top-up structural system and focusing on The Netherlands and the city of Amsterdam as main geographical scope. A statistical analysis was included to account for the potential variation of emissions across each life cycle stage, using Monte Carlo simulations for random sampling. The results indicate that predominantly bio-based structures present a staggering 60% lower embodied carbon emissions compared with predominantly concrete, steel and modestly hybrid systems. Preserving the long-term carbon storage capacity of timber elements through high-quality reuse can offset 30–60% of the total positive emissions of the predominantly bio-based systems. Up to 6MtCO2-eq of the national carbon budget in The Netherlands can be saved from a radical uptake of bio-based structures in Amsterdam by 2050. Diversification of material diets with bio-based alternatives is recommended, along with established policy that can guarantee sustainable sourcing and prolonged lifespans through high-end reuse practices.