Making a Beam Social

Making a Beam Social investigates how communities can gather heterogenous waste streams and steer them into load bearing building components. In response to the current wasteful wood practice being single use in the construction sector, there is a need to reconsider discarded wood’s potential. This research project seeks an alternative to relying on uniform traits and economies of scale, proposing novel, high value applications for waste wood. A full-scale loadbearing beam is constructed as an exemplar of alternative interactions between human and non-human agency, forming new social relations between locally salvaged timber artefacts, and community.
Through a hands-on workshop, the project considers three aspects of facilitating local production with waste wood resources:
Archiving the existing traits of found timber pieces by utilising drawing as a means to represent the information of found materials. This situates the salvaged timber as evolving independent artefacts, and not only material resources.
Grading individual timber elements using established indicating properties as a means to predict material performance.
Fabricating the beam parts whilst retaining as much as possible their elemental identities.

The physical outcome is a loadbearing member developed through interlacing the social and the technical. As an architectural element, it works towards a culture of local production.