Bringing the Forest into the City: Digital Media Infrastructures, Mass Timber Architecture, and Restless Landscapes / Megan Wiessner

In response to growing alarm about the planetary effects of concrete and steel’s embodied carbon, many architects and several major technology corporations are investing in engineered wood products as alternative structural materials. Imagined as both ecologically and technologically advanced, mass timber architecture evokes the rural forest lands it allegedly protects, even its largely urban uptake is shaped by developments in automated manufacturing and design, computationally intensive modelling, and modular prefabrication. My research explores how mass timber is constructed as a “smart” material: high-tech, climate-ready, and amenable to local economic development. Talk of digital fabrication, VR in construction, and carbon life-cycle analysis software abounds, even as mass timber’s growth is shaped by local histories of patrilineal settler family businesses in logging and milling; tribal assertions of sovereignty; and changing, burning, out-of-control forests. Through a photo essay and accompanying text piece which draws on industry promotional materials, technical documents, and conversations during fieldwork in Oregon and Washington during Fall 2021, I invite viewers to join me in thinking through the curiosities that emerge from this state of affairs. My aim is not to show that the persistence of the rural, tribal, or familial undermines mass timber’s technological sheen, but to suggest that forest products and worlds can become a source of social legitimization for digital tools themselves, and to ask how digital technologies must adapt to different worlds even as they try to smooth them over. 

Bio: Meg Wiessner is a researcher and artist based in New York. She investigates relationships between computational media, design, and architectural materials. Her doctoral research asks how digital technologies shape the emerging political ecology of mass timber in the Pacific Northwest.