Jurriaan van Stigt
Imagine: a young architect at a wooden table, a thick book opened. Cross-sections of facades, masonry details, roof structures. No glossy pictures, but pure knowledge. This is how whole generations learned to build. From the Jellema book series.
For decades, those books formed the foundation of architectural education. Pragmatic, systematic, rooted in practice. This is how you build a wall. This is how you fit a frame. This is how you prevent moisture problems. But that world has disappeared. The challenges of today call for different materials and new ways of building. What we need is not nostalgia, but a new chapter – literally. A new part in which timber construction is central. Not the romantic image of the carpenter with a chisel, but industrial timber construction: CLT, modular systems, CO₂ positive constructions. Just like before, it starts with insight, details, and understanding how a building truly works.
Fast forward to 2025. Again a housing shortage, again industrialization - but now with the climate as an additional factor. The construction industry is responsible for 40 percent of CO₂ emissions. Therefore, the focus is shifting to wood: industrial, circular, fast. The timber construction movement is growing rapidly, but the knowledge is not keeping pace. A wooden wall behaves differently than concrete. Acoustics, fire safety, moisture regulation - everything needs to be reconsidered. And this is currently happening mostly ad hoc, project by project.
It is time for a new canon: Jellema for the wooden century. This time, however, not a thick book, but an open platform, with principles and without dogmas. For designers and manufacturers, for schools and construction sites. The wooden revolution calls for structure. For education. For a shared language.
Jellema did not document rules, but insights. Not loose parts, but coherence. We must do this again now. Only in this way can we ensure that speed does not come at the expense of quality. Only in this way can we create buildings that work, and are smart, beautiful, and human, too.