Megan Wiessner
Grant Type
Dissertation Fieldwork GrantInstitutional Affiliation
New York U.Grant number
Gr. 10547Approve Date
April 6, 2023Project Title
Wiessner, Megan (New York U.) "Digital Timber: Imagining and Automating Low-Carbon Architecture in the Pacific Northwest"MEGAN WIESSNER, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, was approved for funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Digital Timber: Imagining and Automating Low-Carbon Architecture in the Pacific Northwest,” supervised by Dr. Nicole Starosielski. This project analyzes the rise of mass timber architecture in the Pacific Northwest of North America, showing how attempts to use technology to reform the built environment reproduce and remediate the region’s historic timber economy. Through multi-sited research across the supply chain for engineered timber panels, it traces attempts to transform construction supply chains into socially productive flows of carbon, and the way this vision is shaped by new information technologies and their conceptual priors. Utilizing a variety of methods — ethnographic interviews, site visits, participant observation, archival research, and close engagement with different forest ecosystems — the project shows how new data methodologies, managerial systems discourse, logistical media systems, and computational imaginaries are articulated to the region’s specific history as a resource economy and to current debates over that legacy. It also demonstrates that under current conditions and in relation to earlier forms of standardization developed in the forest products industry, the tools that people use to work with timber incentivize standardization and automation, entangling low-carbon reform efforts with wider industrial imperatives. The project shows how the practices and beliefs that constitute industrial digitization are grounded in specific political ecologies and unfurling in their affective wake.