This book weaves a much needed and transformational narrative about making architecture through paying close attention to cross-laminated timber as a material for today. The material becomes the site of experimentation, innovation, and research in search of specific meanings of CLT in architecture at various scales by selecting the "CLT Blank" as the building unit. The structure of the book brings together work and texts from a diverse group of theorists and practitioners, who make material central to their inquiry, to suggest design approaches that will broaden the cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry. The outcome focuses on materiality through fast slippages between art, architecture, and science, that we hope will invigorate and expand new discourse to act as an antidote to the current conversations about the material, that is fixated on its making and mass production, disappointingly portraying it as a bland and lifeless product-a notion we want to be distant from in preference to seeking areas we feel were not yet conceptualised or theorised. The potential to see the spatial properties of its use and what kind of world that might suggest is shown in the book, with selected striking visual materials, to reposition its architecture though new forms of representation and responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics. Aesthetics of CLT with a connection to wood and art practice is a central thread though the book.

Since the firm's founding twenty-five years ago, AKT II have forged an international practice that unifies the cultures and disciplines of architecture and structural engineering. This book is an engine for critical reflection on the scope, potential, and limits of what they have come to define as design engineering. Structured into five discursive domains-scale, variability, attitude, reverse engineering, and the craftsmanship of engineering-the book presents a robust selection of the firm's endeavours, which together demonstrate a vast range of encounters and processes in design. Common among them is a desire to understand and reshape the boundaries of the discipline of structural engineering, along with its links to fields such as philosophy, computer science, and geography. Interlaced with the projects, texts by contributors from varying fields engage the theoretical discussions and social conditions that bind contemporary practice. Matters of Engineering Design: AKT II balances structural concerns that require an equilibrium of internal and external forces, a clear understanding of boundary conditions, and knowledge of the properties of material with the overarching challenges that society faces today, including advances in technology, changing economic orders, and ecological responsibility. With contributions by William Baker, David Basulto, Hanif Kara, Jayne Kelley, Priya Khanchandani, Adrian Lahoud, Lesley Lokko, Ibrahim Mahama, Stephen Parnell, Vicky Richardson, and Ellis Woodman.