Lindsey Wikstrom | Mattaforma

What role should mass timber and renewable materials, with their potential to replace concrete and steel, play in ensuring the planet’s survival? 

Retracing wood’s passage from stewarded seed in forest soil, to harvested biomass, to laminated walls in a living room, through to its disassembly, Wikstrom pauses at each step in the supply chain of mass timber to consider the labor and economies involved, looking closely at the way wood is grown, sourced, and transported, and its impacts on the biodiversity of the forest and the health of our ecosystems. Visualized through unique maps and diagrams, these trajectories are considered in the context of work by her architectural practice Mattaforma. 

Drawing from her recent book Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures (Routledge, 2023), Wikstrom explores why histories of extractivism make this approach to design challenging, not only because of the global economy of materials, but also cultural and aesthetic entrenchments. Along the way, common assumptions about mass timber are debunked, including its fire performance, its strength, and its role in carbon sequestration. Having identified contemporary technical, cultural, and spiritual gaps preventing the transition towards a fully timber built environment, she outlines how we must move forward. A more sensitive species-based methodology is essential, where designers are empowered choreographers of carbon, transferring and trading between forest, factory, site, and beyond.  

ABOUT LINDSEY WIKSTROM

Lindsey Wikstrom is the Founder of Mattaforma. She has taught at Columbia GSAPP, Cornell AAP, Syracuse University, and Yale School of Architecture; holding an M.Arch from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Charles McKim Prize, Visualization Award, and Avery 6 Award. Wikstrom is also the recipient of the SOM Prize. Her research on renewable and reclaimed materials has been published in Embodied Energy and Design, Broken Nature, Faktur, Cite, e-flux, Urban Omnibus, and others. Wikstrom is the organizer and moderator of Material Worlds, a speaker series hosted by MoMA's Emilio Ambasz Institute. In 2022, Wikstrom spoke at Prada's Possible Conversation series to launch her book Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures  (2023), published by Routledge, with a foreword by Kenneth Frampton.