Charismatic Materials:
WOOD
Our contemporary building walls are a technological marvel. It keeps us warm and dry through a lamination of thin layers, each layer made to do one task very well, rain-screen to keep the rain out, moisture barrier to prevent humidity, structure to keep standing, insulation to keep warm, and a finish layer to hide everything inside and look pretty. This allows flexibility for the architect as they are not burdened on having to think about the basic function of a building and instead can fully think about designing the interior space. However, by hiding all of these materials inside our walls, we have rendered the wall to function as a black-box in which we do not instinctively understand how this barrier mediates the exterior with the interior nor understand where the materials came from. This lack of understanding leads us to our current severed relationship with the environment, perpetuating the cognitive divide between nature and human. To better reintegrate ourselves and our homes to the local environment, we need to find a relationship with materials and to fully utilize their innate thermal, structural, and visual qualities. One way is to build with materials that we can instinctively understand and find affect, resulting in a desire to care for and live together with the material.
I will call this a charismatic material.
Here is a preliminary study on how “wood” can be a charismatic material.
If our walls are built with wood as charismatic materials, we can aim to cultivate a relationship and reciprocity with the environment in which we can reduce CO2 from the atmosphere by sequestering carbon in the building materials, extend our home’s lifespan through the longevity of thick materials, increase the health of our land through forestry practices with consideration with mycorrhizal networks, and reduce energy consumption through the material’s insulative and thermal qualities.
A defining characteristic for a material to be charismatic is to have enough thickness to have a sensory presence beyond just the visual. Similar to forming a relationship with other people, our interactions cannot just be at surface level. When the material has the depth for us to sense the thermal, acoustic, or structural capacity, we can begin to understand and enjoy their existence and begin to form a relationship. Once materials have the dimensions necessary to absorb, store, and release energy (also called thermal mass), we no longer view them as inert and they begin to gain animate qualities. Sensing these dynamic energy flows and understanding it as a form of animacy has been a part of daily vocabulary for different indigenous groups as Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Furthermore, learning and sensing the ways in which materials react can also release their obscurity from being a material science and can become an aspect of our daily lives, where our co-habitation with the materials can let us interact with their properties to adjust our indoor comfort.
However, with this much wood we would need to also consider our relationship to the forest, and find ways of harvesting that will not be detrimental to the health of both the individual trees and the forest at large.
Suzanne Simard, who scientifically discovered that trees share nutrients and communicate through an underground mycorrhizal network, has been conducting research on ways to harvest trees while maintaining the current mycelium composition, biodiversity and healthy growth of newly planted tree sapling. In a paper from 2021 she found two optimal approaches to harvesting douglas fir in British Columbia.
The first approach is Aggregate Retention with less than 60m openings
when harvesting wood from a forest, as seen here with trees at different stages of growth,
patches that are <60m wide are cut.
Replanted with saplings for regeneration.
And left to grow for the next harvesting cycle.
The second approach is Dispersed Retention of overstory trees with 10-20m spacing.
This approach leaves mature trees that can act as hub trees, also known as mother trees,
that can support the new saplings
for growth and regeneration.
In a framework of forming relationships with trees, the newly regenerating trees should be taken care of with a goal of the foresters being able to recognize each tree, just like how we recognize each other. In our current commodity based market, the foresters will harvest the trees to create standardized lumber to sell on the market.
The anonymity of these standardized lumber separates us from the actual material and context in which they are grown. Therefore, in this approach, I propose the foresters will be the point of contact for the architects who are designing a house and guide them to find the right individuals. While I considered a way of categorizing and keeping track of the trees through digital methods, such as a 3D scanned database for the designers to access, but this approach seems difficult to reconcile the conflict I sense between forming a close relationship to the tree and the tree becoming just a better tracked extractive resource.
So I propose that because the buildings built with charismatic materials are intended to form a long term relationship with us, designers should partake in a ritual of meeting the care-takers of the trees and the trees themselves to figure out how to incorporate them with our buildings.
Now, we will design a typical Japanese tea house with charismatic materials.
A Japanese tea house is a space for contemplation and enjoyment of objects and relationships, and is a perfect example for incorporating charismatic materials to add to the bowls, scrolls, and the ceremony.
Trees are chosen from the forest for specific needs and thermal conditions for different parts of the house. South west is the point of the most heat gain and requires thicker wood. North is the cooler point, thus uses the thickness required for thermal insulation, which in Massachusetts is 13 inches of wood for an R-value of 20. The east is for solar heat gain in the morning, and the north-east is physically protected as it is the kimon, the demon gate in Japanese geomancy.
The orientation of the wood is consistent with the orientation in which it grew, increasing the longevity of the tree.
Alcoves are carved out, visually showing the depth of the materials. Moments are cut to show the wood grain at specific location such as where the tatami edge meets the core of the tree. The naturally formed tree perimeters shows significance in form.
The introduction of charismatic materials in our buildings will not immediately solve climate change nor immediately mend our relationship to the land, but it is a call to gradually switch our mentality to not value short-term efficiency and productivity but to cultivate a deeper understanding of our position in the complex network of Earth. To grow enough trees for the large amount of wood necessary to create charismatic building materials, we need to consider the relationships between foresters, trees, mycorrhizal root system, and the lumber/construction market to maintain a healthy forest. For us to live together with charismatic materials, we need to consider the relationship between the person inhabiting the house, the material, the solar movement, the geography, and our idea of comfort. As materiality is relational, it offers us the potential to reconnect with the land beyond the confines of our homes, by understanding where they came from, how they react, and why we need to find reciprocity with them, by being conscious of our relationship to our larger home, the Earth.
Bibliography
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in Braiding Sweet Grass, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 55, 57.
Liboiron, Max, Pollution is Colonialism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
May, John and Koreitem, Zeina, “The Temperamental Interior,” Harvard Design Magazine No. 43 (2016).
Moe, Kiel, “Introduction,” in Insulating Modernism, (Basel, Switzerland; Boston: Birkhauser, 2014), 14.
Picon, Antoine, “Architectural History and Regimes of Materiality,” The Materiality of Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 79
Simard, Suzanne, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)
Simard, Suzanne, et al. 2021. “Partial Retention of Legacy Trees Protect Mycorrhizal Inoculum Potential, Biodiversity, and Soil Resources While Promoting Natural Regeneration of Interior Douglas-Fir.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 3.