Timber Stories: Narratives of the Forest Resource

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. 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.