Inverting the Unwanted

Text from Zhen:

Inverting the Unwanted explores design and fabrication methodologies to standardize underutilized, small-diameter trees for integration as building components to derive environmental and ecological benefits. By harnessing low-value material streams from forestry thinning operations, this project seeks to invert material value via a technique of quartering, rearranging, and joining roundwood logs to create square, standardized columns.

The research addresses the challenges of working with non-standard roundwood, emphasizing ease of use, aesthetic appeal, and structural robustness. Through iterative processes involving the design, fabrication, and analysis of a set of diverse prototypes, the study hypothesizes scalable methods for integrating these prototypes as structural building elements. Additionally, computational methodologies such as genetic optimization are employed to enhance structural strength and explore the broader design space of these variations.

Recognizing the frequent felling of small-diameter trees as a byproduct of forestry practices like thinning, this research also investigates how the proposed technique can sequester the carbon typically lost through the decomposition of thinning results. Moreover, the study examines the potential socioeconomic and ecological benefits of this approach, including its role in supplementing forestry incomes to enhance the ecological benefits of mature trees.

A total of ten prototypes were built, each an experiment testing different physical and digital techniques, scales of fabrication, building processes, alongside materials and wood species.

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