rob birch

goldsworthy-tree

As we develop our studio ideas I’ve been following this thread of tree-consciousness. Are trees conscious? In considering what other terms might be appropriate alternatives to consciousness such as thinking and sensing, I am drawn to awareness. Are trees aware of us? And if they are, how do they respond to our activities, our movements, and even just our presence? Trees, as the oldest living beings on the planet exist and operate in a different time. Tree-time. They are slow, silent, and stationary. We, on the other hand, are relatively fast, noisy, and moving. Perhaps in order to understand how a tree responds to our presence we have to slow down to tree-time. We don’t sense a tree’s response to our presence because we aren’t tuned to it. Likewise it’s probable that we are blurred shadows in the tree’s “speed of perception.” In the same way that we as humans can’t discern the nuanced melodies of various birds since they operate in a faster time than us, we operate in a faster time than trees . So how do we reconcile tree-time and human-time in order to understand one another better? This is the question that drives my thinking for now…

Here’s a brief article written by a Harvard grad student who won the 2011 Young Curator’s award at the Canadian Centre for Architecture for an exhibition titled “First, The Forests.” The article is fairly straight forward, but I think the way he talks about forests as “lists, charts, factories, systems, models or assets” is interesting, particularly that through a bureaucratic lens and facilitated by certain ways of documenting, forests can be “deconstructed and reconstructed in the form of a list.” There are lots of links in the article which are worth following. (And lots of other great articles on the site if you have time to do some exploring.)

Primers of Forestry – CCA

ABOUT

This interdisciplinary design studio proposes to use the redevelopment of the historic pin-oak allee at Washington University in St. Louis as catalyst for a project-based investigation of our landscape and resource legacy. With the imminent transformation this cultural landscape, this course will be structured around an historical and ecological analysis and evaluation of an 85 year old oak allee in an effort to offer a window into the greater meaning of trees in our urban ecosystem and cultures. Working with arborists, ecologists, landscape architects, sculptors, dendrochronologists, craftspeople, and poets, students will interrogate the many meanings of one tree — from root to crown, from microbial sub-soil cultures to species habitats in its highest branches, from the monoculture of the 50 trees in the allee to the diverse community in Forest Park and beyond. The class will be organized around the ritual lifting of a single tree in advance of the campus transformation, with subsequent cutting, dimensioning, and drying of the wood forming the material basis for design research.