Students: Territories of Wood(s)

Thesis: Site-Specific Nurseries: Reconnecting Nurseries to Time and Place Through Ecotypic Bare-Rooted Production

From the abstract: “[This project asks] you to look beyond our hierarchical relationship with plants, informed by our limited capitalist lens and colonial legacies, and reconnect our horticultural system back to time and place.”

Thesis: Wood in Hand: Open-Ended Wooden Play

From the abstract: “This project explores the design of a sustainable, open-ended wooden toy that encourages children’s creativity, collaboration, and physical development, [and aims] to reduce environmental impact and inspire early awareness of sustainable practices through hands-on play.”

Thesis: Tree Story

From the abstract: “In my research, I [seek] to understand a tree’s unique ‘pattern language.’ Trees do not grow in isolation; they exist within a network of wind, organisms, and ecological forces. ... Everything is interconnected.”

Thesis: Grain Shelter: Design Strategies for Sustainable Temporary Shelter from Reclaimed Wooden Pallets

From the abstract: “This project investigates how pallets can form modules of shelter that are easily assembled, disassembled, and adapted to different spatial needs [and] invites a new kind of shelter-making... that is grounded in necessity, yet open to possibility.”

Thesis: Building Ecologies: Maintaining Land, Working with Wood

From the abstract: “This thesis proposes that maintenance of ecological systems is not only necessary but inherently non-hierarchical, positioning humans as collaborators rather than managers [and] suggests that [...] we can create habitats that support complex multispecies futures.”

Thesis: Rooted in Embodied Making: a notebook on process

From the abstract: “This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments—scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials—that [...] serves as a record of showing up, again and again, to the messy, nonlinear process of learning to trust yourself through uncertainty, curiosity, and the support of a caring community.”

Thesis: Fire Fossils: Biomineral Infrastructures in Untangling Climates

From the abstract: “Places, materials, and beings are afterimages. Through alchemical experiments, and multi-scalar imaging, I develop simulations of wildfires, and their profound, reverberating effects. In this thesis, a glass-meets-landscape experimental process enters these obscured conditions and renders new material relations for the built environment.“

Thesis: Adaptible / Modular / Durable / Circular / Scalable

From the abstract: “We need to reach a more sustainable relationship with our interiors [but] can you address the fastness set by the fast furniture industry to satisfy both consumers and producers... all while executing on the basis of sustainability?”

Thesis: Material Values: Black Locust Exploration

From the abstract: “This thesis investigates how we can approach utilizing materials in landscape construction that are non-traditional and can subvert existing highly extractive supply chains. By utilizing [black locust wood] in a way informed by its attributes and understanding its potential [...] I hope to express the range of possibilities material alternatives could bring to our built environment.”

Thesis: Mass to Mineral: Edge Complexity for an Urbanized Floodplain

From the abstract: “This project explores how existing materials can be recalibrated to support strengthened, more complex riparian edge habitats in urbanized landscapes—with attention to the function of flood mitigation and the desire to translate a narrative of site history.”

Thesis: Coarse Woody Debris: Growth & Decay

From the abstract: “My project is a public service announcement about the values of coarse woody debris. Instead of cleaning or chipping up the fallen branches and logs, we should leave them to rot on the forest floor. Coarse wood needs to remain in our forests to maintain a healthy environment.”