Oregon Timber, & Other Stories.

Abstract

Timber is a protagonist in construction, architecture, land use, and landscape. To engage with it is to inherit a sticky milieu of ecologies, language, and threats. Increased wildfire and housing development, both undeniable companions to Oregon forests, are reorganizing our relationship to these landscapes. So too is our increased hope towards building with more engineered wood products. If we are interested in timber’s continued role in architecture’s future, forestry in Oregon has a story to tell us: the ecosystems from which our materials come from, the social and political networks that make them possible, and the importance of understanding one’s own unique relationship to the world in which we build. These stories offer an invitation into new ways of knowing building material, expanded scales of time, and a regenerative belief in land. This work is my acceptance to this generous invitation. I use it as my way into the questions designers are ripe to ask: where does this material come from, and what is my relationship to it? Fundamentally inspired by the field of environmental history, the essay collection traverses time and place: tours with mill owners, fire risk maps, Indigenous restoration sites, friends I stay with, my uncle’s memories, my grandfather’s ranch, Smokey Bear, the Columbia River, disappeared marshland, reappearing fire. Tales of grief, love, erosion, and growth weave with us. In reading the land its stories, we explore the politics of which architecture and its materiality are deeply embedded, and also of which we each bring to the table as agents in a real environment.