Timber!

Two years ago, Lindsey Wikstrom shared her research on wood-based building material supply chains with Carson Chan, inaugural director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment at MoMA. What Wikstrom asked of timber, Chan wanted to ask about other climate-relevant material conditions. And so Material Worlds was born: a discussion series on the relationship between design and ecology that attempts to expand the discourse about building materials through a critical assessment of their commodified supply chain to arrive at “equitable and resilient sourcing” strategies and “a vocabulary of ecological architecture.” The series came full circle last Friday evening when Chan and Wikstrom discussed the latter’s newly published book Designing the Forest and other Mass Timber Futures. During the conversation, Wikstrom addressed the collateral conditions that might make one skeptical of such futures—deforestation, monocultures, fire protections, cost, codes, shipping logistics, labor, profit—honing in on architecture as process rath…