Annular Archive – Twenty plus years of writings on twenty first century timber

Over twenty years of in-depth timber features from Fourth Door’s Oliver Lowenstein and Fourth Door contributors can be found in Annular Archive. Features, photo-stories, research and many other pieces can all be found using the filters below.

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A few words on Annular and Annular Archive 

Twenty-one years ago, in 2000, I wrote one of my first ‘architectural’ pieces on the environmentally designed rail stations between Oslo and the city’s new international Gardemoen airport for the sustainable building and architecture magazine Building for A Future. I didn’t for a minute think this would turn into an ongoing strand of my writing work. However, over the next years I began contributing regularly to B4AF, and its successor, Green Building, including early pieces on the Weald & Downland museum gridshell in West Sussex, the Earth Centre’s space frame Solar Canopy and one of the first features on BedZED in the UK architectural press.

Many of these pieces were focused on the emergence of wood in construction, and, as the years went by, I began contributing to other magazines and periodicals.  Around 2007 I thought it would make sense if these pieces were put up on the web and began thinking of doing so on a timber, sustainability, and architectural focused website. In 2010 Annular quietly went live, like today, primarily accessible through the Fourth Door site. It was, like today a Word Press site, though unlike today I was trying to do the web design work myself. This was a problem as the design didn’t really work, and despite being thoroughly absorbed by discussions around computers and digitalisation, I couldn’t begin to get the hang of working with them. As a result, what went up looked embarrassingly awful. So in about 2012, I pulled the site telling myself I’d return soon for an overhaul and get it into better shape. That was nine years ago. Nine years later the overhaul finally happened.

That says something about the origins of Annular and Annular Archive, which as it says on the tin is an archive of these articles written on timber and timber related architecture and design over the last decade. The idea is to grow the archive as further articles are finished, and to do so in a way which isn’t limited to only my pieces. 

The archive also includes pieces written by contributors to the early Annular, to Fourth Door Review, and to Fourth Door’s other Unstructured web-magazine. Thank you to one and all once again for your contributions

Oliver Lowenstein April 2021

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