Timber Stories examines the timber value chain – from forestry to architectural assembly – and expands on the different scopes and environments that are also affected by each stage in the chain. The film is a design speculation making visible the stakeholders in the timber chain and how ‘building green’ has direct ecological consequences. Timber Stories begins with a territorial map of northern Sweden, taking the viewer through the specific regions surrounding a sawmill in Sävar - just outside of Umeå. This map spatializes the relationship between forested areas, land use, and the sawmill, showing where the wood comes from and what sort of distances are travelled.
The film is part of an installation developed for the Works+Words Biennale 2022, Exhibited at Rundetårn Library Hall, Oct 2022 – Feb 2023.
Forestry is directly linked to the ecology of the forest, land ownership, and territorial politics. Sawmilling is tied to economies of production, technology – i.e. digitization - and the behaviour of heterogeneous organic materials. Important for us is both what is cut and preserved, what is left behind, and what is affected collaterally. In our work, we try to find a place for a wider range of the forest resource in the final architectural object – this is where we leverage digitization (i.e. new imaging techniques) – and through tracing this resource, we come across tangential effects and neighbouring domains of interest. What begins as a look into the introduction and development of specific new digital technologies in sawmilling broadens into larger questions of how digitization is also revealing and linking different contexts that intersect around the timber value chain.
This forces us to pause and reflect on our design and construction practices: these interrelations and collateral relationships with all these different stakeholders and actors within the network surrounding the forest mean that it is harder and harder to dissociate the design and construction of timber architecture from the origins of its material substrate. The digitization of the different parts of the forestry sector provides us with troves of data, which we can exploit to gain a wider grasp of what goes into our built environment and how it does so. Setting this wider domain next to our role in the steering and enabling of the built environment, expanding our remit to include these complex interrelations in the forest can help us make more informed and tactical decisions about the provenance of our buildings – towards a more just, equitable, and ecologically sensitive exploitation of the natural forest resource.
The Eco-Metabolistic Architecture project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019693).
The Eco-Metabolistic Architecture project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019693).