I was at an architectural products show the other week in SF with the same old stands of windows, paver, doors, lights, cladding, roofing, etc. The thing that hit me the most was how fake and tawdry everything looked. Every roof tile seemed to be a cartoon-version of medieval Tuscany formed out of cement-based Ryevita. Every paver some Martian-dust material divorced from any stone ever found. All pretty depressing. The building industry has converged with the food industry by mimicking the way Cargill and others take low-value corn products and mold them into endless morsels that almost pass for dinner.
And of course my caring credentials go down the drain if I were to 'like' any natural stone from some unsustained source, or favor a timber that doesn't have growth-rings smaller than my thumb.
But of all the mush-together products, I am in awe of Parallam. Several timber manufacturers have created composite timber beams that glue together small thinings of wood into strucutral beams. They're usually used as beams and lintels, hidden in the strucutral of the building, but I love them as they are. Their cross-section is something like Mousaka/lasagna, they're not attempting to be something they're not, they wear their green-credentials on their surface.
Lot's of designers have enjoyed Parallam's qualities too, making stair treads, furniture, woodcarvings, etc. from the beam stock. Let's hope we don't find later that the glue is toxic or the beams fail after ten years......
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