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.