reSAWN’s AO shou sugi ban charred cypress was recently in Interior Design Magazine’s Editors’ Picks: 41 Powerful Building Products.  We are proud to be in the company of these other products, including:

RSTco. worked closely with the partners of Fisher Grey Studio to customize this conference room table for MissionStaff in Philadelphia.  The table top is made from locally sourced North American Black Walnut finished with a clear conversion varnish.  The base is blacked steel by RSTco. and incorporates a steel apron and with power receptacles.

COS, an upscale European retailer under the H&M (Hennes and Mauritz) brand, recently expanded into the Canadian retail market.  G architects collaborated with New York-based Office AO to bring to life the brand’s 3-story, 6,700 sf flagship location in Toronto’s fashionable Yorkville neighborhood. The modern façade is clad in reSAWN’s MONOGATARI shou sugi ban charred wood.  Inside the store is light and airy, reflecting the same sparse Scandinavian aesthetic found in the menswear, womenswear and kidswear sold at the store.

Fast Company and the WSJ announced recently that in New York and Portland, two high-rise buildings will be made not from concrete or metal, but a throwback material: good old trees.

from The Architect’s Newspaper … a unique shou sugi ban project in Basel, Switzerland by Seattle architects Olson Kundig

“Olson Kundig combines an ancient Japanese wood-burning technique with 21st-century interaction design at Design Miami/Basel Collectors’ Lounge.”

KEVIN SCOTT

Regional building styles and construction techniques weave a complex history that reflects the qualities, cultures, and narratives of a particular place. Olson Kundig took this to another level when designing Outpost Basel, an architectural pavilion at the Design Miami/Basel Collectors’ Lounge in Basel, Switzerland. The wood construction legacies of several places came together to create a bespoke structure that embodies the global design culture in which we operate.

The architects hail from Seattle, in the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s timber country. They brought their innovative mastery of materials to Western Europe, where companies like the Austrian goliath Holzindustrie Schweighofer are pushing wood technologies forward in new ways. The two worked together in Romania to construct the pavilion out of a wood-block system that is typically used as formwork for concrete and then discarded afterwards. Instead of using the wood bricks to create forms, the architects decided to give them a rich black hue by charring them with a traditional Japanese wood-burning preservation technique, completing the international mélange that makes the project unique.

In the center of the lounge is a large box made from the wood blocks provided by Schweighofer. The designers liked the raw look of the wood blocks, so they left them unfinished. The system is a series of wooden parts that are doweled together, “like IKEA furniture, avoiding screws,” Olson Kundig principal Tom Kundig told AN. The light walls were quickly and easily constructed to form the interior volume, and a series of openings were inserted by shifting the blocks according to the Fibonacci sequence. Once the walls were erected, they were charred using “Shou Sugi Ban,” an ancient technique that has been used in Japan to protect untreated wood against rot and insects. It was also an important way to fireproof villages before modernity. The process involves charring the wood and then using different oils to achieve different effects, while changing the intensity and exposure of the torch to produce varying levels of charring. At first, Schweighofer—who has been a leader in the wood processing industry for more than four centuries—was skeptical of the unusual idea, but eventually executed it at their Romanian compound, treating the blocks before they were shipped to Basel. They used a torch to apply the burn to the surface, and after two coats of torch, they put a sealing oil on the surface which sets the finish and reduces the risk of the black soot rubbing off (on people’s clothes in Basel). The inside of the space was left raw, so that it maintained the warmth of the wood blocks, while the burnt black exterior relates to the rest of the space in which the pavilion sits.

“FOR THE OUTPOST BASEL PAVILION, OLSON KUNDIG INTEGRATED SEVERAL WOOD CONSTRUCTION LEGACIES, FROM A WOODBLOCK SYSTEM IMPLEMENTED WITH AN AUSTRIAN COMPANY IN ROMANIA TO THE ANCIENT JAPANESE PROCESS KNOWN AS SHOU SUGI BAN.”

– SOURCE: http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=8215

To some, four years of design school sounds like a long time. But in the story of “The Accidental Designer,” we learned that Tom Sullivan became a successful designer/builder after spending eight years as a shipbuilder’s apprentice.

CBT specified reSAWN’s STEAMBOAT wide plank character grade white oak flooring throughout this Boston law firm’s offices. STEAMBOAT is part of the RUSTIC MODERN collection which features uniquely prefinished character grade woods for flooring, wall cladding and ceiling cladding.