Forest First: Timber Building

This book puts the forest first and offers a detailed immersion into forest history, forest stand dynamics, forest ecology, forest-building carbon dynamics, and possible future forest trajectories as the pretext for thinking about timber building technics. 

The specificity of regional forests suggests much about the prospect of non-extractive building design: building that tends and mends its terrestrial basis rather than takes, makes, and breaks it. How might we design and build in a non-extractive manner?

To address that evolutionary question this book considers the recursive relationship between forests and timber building. It puts the forest first and offers a detailed immersion into forest history, forest stand dynamics, forest ecology, forest-building carbon dynamics, and possible future forest trajectories as the pretext for thinking about timber building technics. The specificity of regional forests suggests much about the prospect of non-extractive building design: building that tends and mends its terrestrial basis rather than takes, makes, and breaks it. Building activity can augment and improve forest conditions as an instance of regenerative design and as a path towards reconciliation, but only if conceived, valued, and practiced in ways distinct from normative design and construction practices.

The future should no longer be a colony of present design practices that treat building as an art and science of extraction. By putting the forest first its conception of timber building technics, this book develops a more regenerative approach to the terrestrial relations of forest-building.

Kiel Kenneth Moe is a registered practicing American architect. Moe has taught architecture and energy at University of Illinois at Chicago, Syracuse University, Northeastern University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.