TIMBER CONSTRUCTION: 50 YEARS OF PROGRESS

This retrospective traces nearly fifty years of development in the timber industry. Through the subjects captured in the photographs, it highlights the technical, construction-related and regulatory innovations that have gradually shaped the timber landscape as we know it today.

Alongside technological advances, this exhibition looks back at the major turning points that have shaped the evolution of fire safety standards, whose successive adaptations have considerably broadened the scope of possibilities in timber construction.

Long limited to low-rise buildings as well as educational and private infrastructure, timber structures are now used without restrictions on storeys or building uses. Recent, now iconic projects, such as the Tilia Tower in Prilly-Malley or the Children’s Hospital in Zurich, would not only have seemed inconceivable in 1979, but would also have contravened the regulations in force at the time.