One Piece at a Time – A Co-Creational Speculation on Mass Timber in North America
Location
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Sponors
Timberlyne and Multiple Universities
Partners
Multiple
Students.
When Jonny Cash sang “One Piece at a Time”, he sang about a factory worker who builds a car from individual parts that he steals from a production line. Over several years, he has assembled the kind of car that he would otherwise never have been able to afford on the wages of his job. Like the song, the car is a montage that might help us understand adaptability, resourcefulness and speculative design.
One Piece at a Time – A Co-Creational Speculation on Mass Timber in North America is an architectural assemblage of pieces of mass timber drawn from factories, laboratories, and universities across North America. Composed as an “Exquisite Corpse”, each piece will be gathered during a sabbatical (FDL) study of North America’s “wood baskets” in the fall of 2024. It aims to express, through architecture, the diversity of approaches to forestry, fabrication, and construction in the USA.
The tour will be carried out in parallel with a sequence of lectures on the work of PLAIN Design Build as part of Jason Griffiths’ sabbatical (FDL) in the fall of 2024. It is sponsored by Timberline Group, The Softwood Lumber Board and The College of Architecture at UNL.
One Piece at a Time will conclude as an exhibition at UNL’s Arch Hall in 2026. The exhibition will explore mass timber’s biogenic, technical, and architectural challenges and include documentation on each participating institution’s contribution. It aims to become a shared resource for North American forestry institutions and architecture programs involved in mass timber.
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The installation’s structure is arranged as a “nine-square grid.” An abstraction of the nine-square grid provides a geolocational projection onto the USA (and hopefully Canada). When the final installation is built, it will be orientated north-south so that each participant will be in a position that corresponds to their geographic location.
As the project develops, each component will be inserted within the grid on a “first come first served basis” Subsequent components will have to correspond to institutional neighbors, although all participants are encouraged to provide a point of connection to their neighbor. These connections between institutions will be discussed as part of the overall “co-creational” process.
The broader aim of this project is to provide a synopsis of technological advancement in mass timber. Today, we are beginning to understand the need for architecture to adopt a biogenic material culture in preference to a synthetic one. As we shift our comprehension away from concrete and steel towards biogenic alternatives, we have begun to re-imagine architecture as a form of biomass closely determined by organic production.
Prototype Installation UNL Arch Students