Architect’s dream sauna challenges the norms of wood construction

Organic, crooked and knotty wood could be used more extensively in Finnish construction alongside sawn timber and engineered wood products. The use of wood in construction should also be increased, as the majority of wood harvested from forests is still burned for energy. 

The load-bearing capacity of twisted, irregular and forked roundwood has now been investigated for the first time at Aalto University in the doctoral research of architect Jaakko Torvinen. The new findings are expected to facilitate the use of structurally diverse wood in construction. 

Torvinen, who also designed the award-winning Pikku-Finlandia, used whole tree trunks in his latest project as well: a wooden sauna built on an island in the eastern Gulf of Finland. 

“Designing a wooden sauna has been my dream project, because a sauna represents a slower world: the trees have grown slowly, the sauna is heated slowly, and people enjoy it at a leisurely pace,” says Torvinen.