Reclassifying Sustainable and Viable Wood Sources
Team: Dillon Pranger (PI), Joseph Gawle, Devin Lohman
Collaborators: RG Tree (Ruben Garcia)
Wood construction accounts for approximately 93% of new homes in the United States annually, driven in part by the perception of timber as an efficient and endlessly renewable resource. As the global population grows and migratory patterns shift towards urbanization, urban forestry and forest management offers a potential solution to the increased timber demand. However, when it comes to their afterlife, many tree species found in diverse urban ecosystems are still underutilized in terms of viable building applications.
Waste Wood involves an interdisciplinary team of arborists, architects, and consultants, who are interested in considering new “nature-based solutions” for underutilized tree species at the end of their life. While issues such as irregularities in geometry or growth defects often lead to the designation of atypical tree species as ‘waste’, we believe these materials hold a greater potential in need only of appropriate management, analysis, and design strategies to harness them.
Using emerging data collection and material production strategies, this process seeks to reclassify a variety of tree species as sustainable and viable resources available to designers, fabricators, architects, and engineers in urban contexts. Through doing so additional outcomes of the project include not only incentivizing better tree species diversity in urban contexts but will also provide arborists and urban foresters with new data to support on-going maintenance, growth, and stability of urban ecosystems.
