Pure Trash: New Woods and Old Claims in Architectural Materiality

Abstract In the twentieth century, a decades-long debate about timber conservation in America began to shift. As opposed to cutting fewer trees and planting more, conversations about sustaining the nation’s forests increasingly circled around the ideal of higher utilization. Fundamentally, higher utilization meant waste reduction, which entailed turning a greater percentage of the harvested forest into useful products. Practically, this meant finding new markets for building materials that were made from what had previously been considered waste: the tops and branches of trees, lower value tree species, sawdust, and the edges of trimmed logs and boards. This essay will trace the strange ways in which publicity for these materials evaded any association with waste reduction, focusing instead on notions of purity and naturalness. In addition, it will demonstrate how these products were assiduously positioned to retain their associations with solid timber, even while leveraging claims to scientific improvement upon and transcendence of “natural” wood’s intrinsic limitations.