Meet the architect who's tapping into timber's biological programming.

Architect Achim Menges and his team at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction are using computational design to harness the natural properties of wood and create structures that warp perfectly to plan. By predicting how wood will behave within a structure using algorithms and data, Menges hopes to reduce the amount of wood required in construction, making timber buildings more sustainable and affordable. One of their recent projects, the HygroShell, is a self-shaping timber structure that expands and morphs over time, utilizing wood's hygroscopicity to guide its shape. Menges believes that computational design will continue to unlock new ways of building with wood, embracing its natural tendencies rather than viewing them as defects. [Extracted from the article]