How can housing construction be durable yet sustainable, technologically advanced yet aesthetically warm and pleasing? Today, as in the 1930s or 1960s, the timber industry and government agricultural researchers have an answer: prefabricated homes made from engineered wood products. Today’s “net zero” mass timber cabins and condos respond to different problems, desires, and anxieties than the plywood houses of the last century. At the same time, these digitally-fabricated dwellings extend the lineage of their predecessors, connecting the technologies of commercial forestry and industrialized housing while building new visions of wisely-managed forests housing the nation. Connecting her ongoing research on the contemporary mass timber industry with a selection of objects from the CCA Collection, Megan Wiessner will expand on the evolving imagination of engineered timber housing as technological innovation in North America.

This event is free and open to the public, no reservation required.

Megan Wiessner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. She researches media systems and the political ecology of the built environment, with a special interest in the role of computation in ecosystem management and environmental design. She received her PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.