The Library is Open: Lindsey Wikstrom

Please note: This event was originally scheduled for September 29 but was postponed due to inclement weather.

Lindsey Wikstrom ’16 M.Arch, co-founder of Mattaforma, participates in the inaugural edition of “The Library is Open” series with a presentation of her book Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures (Routledge, 2023). The presentation is followed by a response from Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP.

This book retraces wood’s passage from stewarded seed in the soil of forests, to harvested biomass, to laminated walls in a living room, through to its disassembly, pausing 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. It explores why historically entrenched contexts of extractivism make such sensitive approaches difficult to cultivate across landscapes and industrial frameworks. 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, it outlines how we might move forward. A more sensitive species-based methodology is essential, with designers as choreographers of carbon, transferring and trading between forest, factory, site, and beyond.

SPEAKERS

Lindsey Wikstrom is the Founding Principal of Mattaforma and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Previously, she contributed to projects with The Living, Studio Gang, ArandaLasch, and Wendell Burnette Architects. She holds 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: Making Architecture between Metrics and Narratives, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, 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 joined Formafantasma at Prada’s Possible Conversation series to launch her book Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures (2023), published by Routledge, with foreword by Kenneth Frampton.

Lola Ben-Alon is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum. She specializes in socially and environmentally sustainable building materials, construction practices, and engineering-architecture collaborations.

Her current work focuses on natural earth- and bio-based building materials, their manual and digital fabrication, life cycle, supply chains, and policy. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the embodied and operational impacts of low-carbon assemblies such as cob, rammed earth, and light straw clay.


The Library is Open discussion series is curated by Andrés Jaque, Dean of Columbia GSAPP, and Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Columbia GSAPP.