The One Tree Project

February 1, 2017February 1, 2017

One Tree?

We might do well to argue up front that there is perhaps no such thing as one, single, isolatable tree—trees exist as intensely interconnected organisms that thrive and indeed require a range of mutualist associations through which energy, nutrients, and information is exchanged. An understanding of one tree quickly gives way to an understanding of the community of trees, and throughout the studio we will consistently interrogate the ways that our landscape imaginaries might be tuned to embrace this arboreal collectivity. Throughout the semester, we will use the allee as a laboratory—asking questions of the trees, asking questions of their context, and asking questions of ourselves.

February 1, 2017

Primers of Forestry

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

January 30, 2017February 2, 2017

3D Laser Scan of the Brookings Allée

onetree-laser-scan

We spent the day surveying the Brookings Allée at Washington University in St. Louis by capturing 50 3D laser scans that formulate point clouds with Tomislav Zigo! More to come on where we go from here, but for now, here are our scans and some images of us in action.

trees_smaller

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.