In Conversation with Zachary Mollica
BIOGRAPHY
I’m Zac. As of this very moment, I am one of the two Emerging Architect Fellows at the university. I joined the Daniels Faculty in Summer 2022. I’m a kind of funny mix of a bunch of things. I teach in architecture schools and have done so for about 8 or 9 years now. I have a background that includes forestry, carpentry, wood design (among other things). My work spans hands-on research. It’s very analog. It’s very digital. It is fundamentally rooted in trying to make it so that we can look better at trees than seeing 2x4s and plywood. My recent exhibition, and really, all my work at Daniels, is about finding ways to look closer, and using technology to try to look backwards without a rustic view.
I’m Zac. As of this very moment, I am one of the two Emerging Architect Fellows at the university. I joined the Daniels Faculty in Summer 2022. I’m a kind of funny mix of a bunch of things. I teach in architecture schools and have done so for about 8 or 9 years now. I have a background that includes forestry, carpentry, wood design (among other things). My work spans hands-on research. It’s very analog. It’s very digital. It is fundamentally rooted in trying to make it so that we can look better at trees than seeing 2x4s and plywood. My recent exhibition, and really, all my work at Daniels, is about finding ways to look closer, and using technology to try to look backwards without a rustic view.
Facilitated by the Scaffold* Editorial Team in February 2024.
Read the article in PDF form here.
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Figure 1. Digital and analog tools together. Slight adjustments to the positioning of material stock during Robotic Fabrications AA Visiting School, 2016. Photo by Valerie Bennett.
Read the article in PDF form here.
Figure 1. Digital and analog tools together. Slight adjustments to the positioning of material stock during Robotic Fabrications AA Visiting School, 2016. Photo by Valerie Bennett.
Q: In your latest exhibition, you quote, “use as little technology as possible to get the job done.” Can you expand on the importance of this principle and when technology is acceptable in your workflow?
It’s a point I come back to often and I’m never certain everyone understands what I mean. I’m 100% pro-technology, but my pro-technology is technology oriented towards solutions. The perversion within architecture schools is that technology has taken on a role as being an interest in and of itself. For me, that’s more the domain of engineering, which is to say technological development. My work tries to use technologies as tools—tools aimed at completing processes. For myself, there’s a spectrum that goes from a pencil, straight through to robotics and 3D scanning work, in which everything is fair game, but things are only called on if they’re actually needed. I think we often construct processes that have ten times as many tools as needed, and that can be fine for research, but it challenges our ability to just look at what’s necessary. And there’s so many bloody problems to solve that I just feel like that should be the focus.
Q: You mentioned that you work in both analog and digital forms. In what forms do they manifest and how do they merge?
Absolutely. There are some really good authors who point to three points in technology: analog tools, industrial tools, and digital tools. Analog tools are driven by our hands, reactive to humans, not necessarily very powerful, and as a result have to react to material—for instance, draw knives and chisels.
In my work, these are any carpentry tools that would be used often. Industrial tools obviously push that off to the side—we become super, super powerful, but we also lose touch of material. Then we’ve gotten these great new digital tools and if anything, they’ve made us better and better at standardizing materials. And so, the twist of my work, and particularly where 3D scanning is really useful, is in using digital tools to return to sensitivity. The idea being that digital tools should allow us to apply less power and more smarts. And that isn’t typically what they’re being used for. Industrialism sort of wrecked everything. It worked for a while, but we need to be really quick about moving past it. There are lessons from the past that don’t have to be rustic. It’s not about arguing for less technologies, but rather that we can use digital technologies to make our new processes sustainable.
Q: Do you think that the progression of work like yours—looking at the sustainable and situational use of wood—is growing now because of the existence and prevalence of such technology?
There’s been a massive spike both in literature and projects. It’s been a really good last decade to be into trees. Like, there are a crazy number of good books to read. I think our project—the thesis project I was involved with in 2015, the Tree Fork Truss—along with a handful of others, has resulted in weird bits of tree in all sorts of universities. But there have only been a handful of cases where it’s then bridged into the real world. Because it typically requires the trust of either institutions or engineers, and it really doesn’t satisfy a lot of building codes.
Q: Are there any tools you find lacking that you wish you had?
I don’t think there are any tools that are necessarily needed—it’s harder than that. I think that this work, the entire discourse around wood, is about engineered wood products that will allow us to continue to build giant towers and to figure out the problem-solving ways to make trees into that. The piece that I think will allow work like this to proceed and to grow is a change of worldview. A view that takes material limits as potential guides for how big of buildings we need, acknowledges that the way we’ve built cities is bad, and so that just subbing in the materials for the same buildings doesn’t really get there. It’s hard because it requires building code, fire code, people’s comfort with the idea of buildings falling down, and all sorts of stuff to change. But attach that to a worldview that says, the world’s on fire, and we need to act severely if the profession is going to address this.
I wonder how long it will take us to get to that mindset.
Yeah, I keep hoping. I mean, the stats on last year’s wildfires, I’m really hoping will do some of that work. In Canada, our emissions quadrupled last year as a country because of the forests being on fire. I think that in some ways it’s too late for people to acknowledge that. We’re about to hit a cycle of survival being the necessity.
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Figure 2. The Tree Fork Truss is an arrangement of 20 distinct tree forms, 2015. Zachary Mollica.
Q: How has your workflow changed throughout your education and career as a practitioner?
I guess the biggest evolution has been the change from seeing wood as something that comes from a store to wood as something that comes from the forest. I grew up building decks, going to Home Depot lots, and knocking together really simple things for people. That continued through my undergrad, learning at Dalhousie to build fancy sheds, and ultimately very square and rectangular things. And then I arrived in a forest and that kind of changed my life. Hooke Park, where a lot of this work comes from, is a site that has kind of challenged that view since the ‘80s. It’s connected to the idea that wood building has to come out of forestry practices and the processes have to be a bit of a tumble. And so, along the way, what’s changed is my ability to see and to approach material. That it’s about starting first from material, or at least material sources, moving from that to designing things.
Flipping on its head the idea that we start designing things and then look for materials—that to me is the kind of paradigm that has gotten us where we are. It’s far more fun to be surrounded by interesting materials and react to them, but it’s also much lower energy. The evolution has been a sort of set of tools that allow me to work cleverly with material that’s available. In the forest, that’s things like tree forks. It started to extend and become roots and bends and all sorts of other weird stuff that you can find in trees.
Getting back to Toronto was weird, because all of a sudden I didn’t have a forest. I couldn’t just look at trees and say “I’ll have that one. Let’s cut it down.” And so that’s kind of been a whole shift. Circular material from the street, being coincidental about seeing an arborist cutting down a tree and running over to ask if I can have it, has been a really interesting moment of trying to readapt that flow. The piece that’s missed is there’s material everywhere. In the studios that I teach, we have students looking at Christmas trees, wooden pallets, collecting bits of furniture to make different products. None of them are quite ready to change the world, but all of them are attached to finding tools that allow us to work quickly and lightly with stuff that’s already there, rather than shipping stuff in from across the world.
Q: How often did arborists say yes to those trees that you ask for?
Usually.
That’s awesome.
It’s a really interesting relationship. Because for most of them, they know that it’s a waste that they’re about to chip it. Usually they’re going to chip it, and the reason they’re going to chip it is they don’t have anywhere to store it. And so, if you show up and say “I’ll be back with a cart in 15 minutes. This will not be your problem. Will cost you nothing and I’ll take this away...” frankly, I’ve never faced resistance.
Q: So you touched on this a bit, but an important difference between working with trees rather than wood is harnessing their natural state and strengths. How important is understanding how trees behave and function to your work?
Fundamental. From a structural point of view, it’s integral. The way the trees grow greatly governs the way they perform in buildings. When we cut them apart, and build products, and when we use them in an unprocessed form, we can try to capitalize on that. Whereas in an engineered form, we’re typically trying to overcome the issues, so we cut knots out of wood and re-glue them together and put everything back. But we do that to solve problems that we created by cutting them apart in the first place.
And so, a tree in its round form is the strongest it will ever be. Everything else that we have to do is us creating problems that we then have to solve. It’s crazy to me that there’s still tons about trees that we don’t understand, given that the entire course of human history has been in relation to trees. Trees are fundamentally not a homogeneous material. They’ve got direction, they have grain, they have faults and quirks, and a thousand different species in the world of which we tend to build with three, and all of those can make for good buildings, but they take more skill.
Q: Instead of using live trees that have been cut down, which is a much more direct process compared to salvaged wood that has already been processed...how much can you tell about the wood and use its strengths in that state?
It’s a great question. You certainly have to assume that you can’t expect the fullest of it, that there’s certain parts of either degradation or interior flaws that may not be seen. So, in reusing wood, you’re less likely to use it as a primary structural element—unless it’s quite oversized. That said, beams that are coming out of the barn 200 years later are still going to be fantastically strong. But I think a lot of it is attached to a worldview that we build things so much stronger than they need to be. For me, one of the joys is to walk into an old barn and look at the structure and think there’s no way this would ever, ever, ever be approved. And yet it’s been there for 200 years. So, I think there are ways to build structures that maybe don’t need that strength or confidence.
![]()
Figure 3. Preassembly of the rear half of the Tree Fork Truss in Hooke Park’s Big Shed. A carefully planned near miss, 2015. Zachary Mollica.
Q: You already mentioned the difference with working in an urban setting. Do you have more to touch upon in terms of the key differences between working in your forest campus versus in the middle of the city?
You have to be a lot more prepared in the city. I think the big lesson has just been that you have to be constantly thinking 20 steps ahead because there just isn’t flexibility. In Hooke, I was spoiled to have a full time head forester, Chris Sadd, who was a deep collaborator. Despite whatever else he had to do that day, if I said, “we really need to go get that tree”, he would put his gear on and we’d go get that tree. In the city, we don’t have enough trees to treat them all like that, but also just don’t have the logistics from health and safety, and many other points of view.
That’s the hard part. That’s where I sort of dream of that warehouse space. The piece that would change it is to be able to constantly collect and build that material library. Whereas as you all know, with the building here, our storage space is pretty tight. Even though we, as Using Trees, have kind of managed to take far more storage space in the building than most people, it’s still very narrow. Access to storage: it’s an interesting piece that’s just missed all the time. People set up super well-equipped workshops with tons of tools and all sorts of bits. And what’s forgotten is just empty storage space. The key for a lot of these projects is just empty space, to be able to move stuff around, apply tools to it, but in some cases just store it for six months. That’s hard to find in the city.
Q: Do you foresee a future in which selective and more natural building practices are incorporated in large public projects? Is this something you hope for?
There are histories of wood buildings that are big enough that there’s no reason we can’t. And there’s engineering brilliance that’s enough that there’s no reason we can’t. How will it happen and when? I’m not certain. Because it’s going to require a lot of us in academia to get serious about trying to reach outside of research and make institutional, political and cultural change. The piece that’s missed is us going to City Hall to advocate for really boring change and change that facilitates that. I think we’ve shown that it can be done. We’ve shown that even 25 meters of the Wood Chip Barn spans is a very big building. But until we have people’s confidence and until we demonstrate that it can be done more and more as people expect it, it’s always going to be harder and it’s always going to require more skill. But I hope that’s the bigger project. We talk about buildings as though it’s a good thing that buildings can be built by unskilled laborers, rather than decrying the loss of skill and craft and decrying that the reason buildings are not very good for the world is that they aren’t built in skillful ways.
So, I hope that robotics and digital tech allows us to find a middle ground. Not everybody needs to be a French-trained carpenter to be able to put some of these projects into motion. But I don’t know how far away it is. In my teaching these days, I’d like to make you all better at seeing, so that whatever material you approach, it’s done with more sensitivity. It’s done with care. It’s done with seeing opportunism to do more. In some ways, it stresses less about whether it’s tree forks, but hope that it’s low energy, that it’s whatever’s local, it’s a hundred different ways of building materials rather than one next material.
![]()
Figure 4. Material from Shaw Park. This branch would supply a ladle, spatula, candle holder and a table leg, 2022. Photo by Sheri Clish.
Q: You talked a little bit about your collaborators or people that work in similar fields to you, but who and what are your inspirations in terms of colleagues or practice?
There’s an Italian sculptor, Giuseppe Penone, whom I’ve never met. I tried to reach out during my thesis. He didn’t write back. But that’s okay because his work has spoken enough. In my work there’s just a necessary acknowledgement that his arts practice has taught me a way of seeing trees and knowing how they grow. Martin Self was my thesis advisor, a mentor and colleague. A brilliant geometrist, among other things, Martin is someone who changed my brain because he connected the dots for me by seeing that my craft focus, leading canoe trips, and physics, all could tangle together into a weirder world than I expected. Those are two particularly important ones.
Then, I think it’s recognizing Hooke itself. I arrived for 16 months and I came home seven years later. Hooke had a very good habit of being a trap for a certain type of people. We had people that cared a ton about food. We had people that cared about making buildings. We had a ton of people that cared about walking in the woods. Everybody was overlapping and skillful without a very good distinction, saying “that person is the engineer, this person is the builder.” I think what inspires me is people that give a sh*t about something, even though that something isn’t very easy to put a pin on. They have the hardest time doing these things these days. It’s saying that we need fewer people who are easy to describe and more people who are a unique result of whatever weird stuff you’ve gone through and gotten obsessed with. But that’s hard to do.
Q: It feels like you always need to have a specific interest, to just pursue that and that’s the only way you could advance. So that’s also a bit daunting for us students.
Honestly, the best advice I’ve got is to recognize that there’s been some really good luck along the way. But a lot of that luck has been facilitated by saying yes to opportunities. Taking the privilege of your current availability and not having all the commitments of a full adult life and going for it. This has nothing to do with taking internships that don’t satisfy you and has everything to do with taking opportunities outside of practice. I think so many architecture students would benefit from going and working for a contractor for six months, for example. So many would benefit from just being in the wilderness. Obviously, those two are biased from my side. But, I think all of these are things and experiences that shape people and we need all sorts of people.
Q: Are you a tree hugger? Do you ever just go up to the trees and, like, give them a good hug?
I don’t hug trees.
Q: Do you climb trees?
I definitely do climb trees. I touch trees and I like to be in their proximity. I think part of the reason I maybe don’t hug them is I’m more interested in looking from a slight distance. I have climbed some really good trees in my life.
It’s a point I come back to often and I’m never certain everyone understands what I mean. I’m 100% pro-technology, but my pro-technology is technology oriented towards solutions. The perversion within architecture schools is that technology has taken on a role as being an interest in and of itself. For me, that’s more the domain of engineering, which is to say technological development. My work tries to use technologies as tools—tools aimed at completing processes. For myself, there’s a spectrum that goes from a pencil, straight through to robotics and 3D scanning work, in which everything is fair game, but things are only called on if they’re actually needed. I think we often construct processes that have ten times as many tools as needed, and that can be fine for research, but it challenges our ability to just look at what’s necessary. And there’s so many bloody problems to solve that I just feel like that should be the focus.
Q: You mentioned that you work in both analog and digital forms. In what forms do they manifest and how do they merge?
Absolutely. There are some really good authors who point to three points in technology: analog tools, industrial tools, and digital tools. Analog tools are driven by our hands, reactive to humans, not necessarily very powerful, and as a result have to react to material—for instance, draw knives and chisels.
“Industrialism sort of wrecked everything. It worked for a while, but we need to be really quick about moving past it.”
In my work, these are any carpentry tools that would be used often. Industrial tools obviously push that off to the side—we become super, super powerful, but we also lose touch of material. Then we’ve gotten these great new digital tools and if anything, they’ve made us better and better at standardizing materials. And so, the twist of my work, and particularly where 3D scanning is really useful, is in using digital tools to return to sensitivity. The idea being that digital tools should allow us to apply less power and more smarts. And that isn’t typically what they’re being used for. Industrialism sort of wrecked everything. It worked for a while, but we need to be really quick about moving past it. There are lessons from the past that don’t have to be rustic. It’s not about arguing for less technologies, but rather that we can use digital technologies to make our new processes sustainable.
Q: Do you think that the progression of work like yours—looking at the sustainable and situational use of wood—is growing now because of the existence and prevalence of such technology?
There’s been a massive spike both in literature and projects. It’s been a really good last decade to be into trees. Like, there are a crazy number of good books to read. I think our project—the thesis project I was involved with in 2015, the Tree Fork Truss—along with a handful of others, has resulted in weird bits of tree in all sorts of universities. But there have only been a handful of cases where it’s then bridged into the real world. Because it typically requires the trust of either institutions or engineers, and it really doesn’t satisfy a lot of building codes.
Q: Are there any tools you find lacking that you wish you had?
I don’t think there are any tools that are necessarily needed—it’s harder than that. I think that this work, the entire discourse around wood, is about engineered wood products that will allow us to continue to build giant towers and to figure out the problem-solving ways to make trees into that. The piece that I think will allow work like this to proceed and to grow is a change of worldview. A view that takes material limits as potential guides for how big of buildings we need, acknowledges that the way we’ve built cities is bad, and so that just subbing in the materials for the same buildings doesn’t really get there. It’s hard because it requires building code, fire code, people’s comfort with the idea of buildings falling down, and all sorts of stuff to change. But attach that to a worldview that says, the world’s on fire, and we need to act severely if the profession is going to address this.
I wonder how long it will take us to get to that mindset.
Yeah, I keep hoping. I mean, the stats on last year’s wildfires, I’m really hoping will do some of that work. In Canada, our emissions quadrupled last year as a country because of the forests being on fire. I think that in some ways it’s too late for people to acknowledge that. We’re about to hit a cycle of survival being the necessity.
Figure 2. The Tree Fork Truss is an arrangement of 20 distinct tree forms, 2015. Zachary Mollica.
Q: How has your workflow changed throughout your education and career as a practitioner?
I guess the biggest evolution has been the change from seeing wood as something that comes from a store to wood as something that comes from the forest. I grew up building decks, going to Home Depot lots, and knocking together really simple things for people. That continued through my undergrad, learning at Dalhousie to build fancy sheds, and ultimately very square and rectangular things. And then I arrived in a forest and that kind of changed my life. Hooke Park, where a lot of this work comes from, is a site that has kind of challenged that view since the ‘80s. It’s connected to the idea that wood building has to come out of forestry practices and the processes have to be a bit of a tumble. And so, along the way, what’s changed is my ability to see and to approach material. That it’s about starting first from material, or at least material sources, moving from that to designing things.
Flipping on its head the idea that we start designing things and then look for materials—that to me is the kind of paradigm that has gotten us where we are. It’s far more fun to be surrounded by interesting materials and react to them, but it’s also much lower energy. The evolution has been a sort of set of tools that allow me to work cleverly with material that’s available. In the forest, that’s things like tree forks. It started to extend and become roots and bends and all sorts of other weird stuff that you can find in trees.
“It’s far more fun to be surrounded by interesting materials and react to them, but it’s also much lower energy.”
Getting back to Toronto was weird, because all of a sudden I didn’t have a forest. I couldn’t just look at trees and say “I’ll have that one. Let’s cut it down.” And so that’s kind of been a whole shift. Circular material from the street, being coincidental about seeing an arborist cutting down a tree and running over to ask if I can have it, has been a really interesting moment of trying to readapt that flow. The piece that’s missed is there’s material everywhere. In the studios that I teach, we have students looking at Christmas trees, wooden pallets, collecting bits of furniture to make different products. None of them are quite ready to change the world, but all of them are attached to finding tools that allow us to work quickly and lightly with stuff that’s already there, rather than shipping stuff in from across the world.
Q: How often did arborists say yes to those trees that you ask for?
Usually.
That’s awesome.
It’s a really interesting relationship. Because for most of them, they know that it’s a waste that they’re about to chip it. Usually they’re going to chip it, and the reason they’re going to chip it is they don’t have anywhere to store it. And so, if you show up and say “I’ll be back with a cart in 15 minutes. This will not be your problem. Will cost you nothing and I’ll take this away...” frankly, I’ve never faced resistance.
Q: So you touched on this a bit, but an important difference between working with trees rather than wood is harnessing their natural state and strengths. How important is understanding how trees behave and function to your work?
Fundamental. From a structural point of view, it’s integral. The way the trees grow greatly governs the way they perform in buildings. When we cut them apart, and build products, and when we use them in an unprocessed form, we can try to capitalize on that. Whereas in an engineered form, we’re typically trying to overcome the issues, so we cut knots out of wood and re-glue them together and put everything back. But we do that to solve problems that we created by cutting them apart in the first place.
“Trees are fundamentally not a homogeneous material. They’ve got direction, they have grain, they have faults and quirks, and a thousand different species in the world of which we tend to build with three, and all of those can make for good buildings, but they take more skill.”
And so, a tree in its round form is the strongest it will ever be. Everything else that we have to do is us creating problems that we then have to solve. It’s crazy to me that there’s still tons about trees that we don’t understand, given that the entire course of human history has been in relation to trees. Trees are fundamentally not a homogeneous material. They’ve got direction, they have grain, they have faults and quirks, and a thousand different species in the world of which we tend to build with three, and all of those can make for good buildings, but they take more skill.
Q: Instead of using live trees that have been cut down, which is a much more direct process compared to salvaged wood that has already been processed...how much can you tell about the wood and use its strengths in that state?
It’s a great question. You certainly have to assume that you can’t expect the fullest of it, that there’s certain parts of either degradation or interior flaws that may not be seen. So, in reusing wood, you’re less likely to use it as a primary structural element—unless it’s quite oversized. That said, beams that are coming out of the barn 200 years later are still going to be fantastically strong. But I think a lot of it is attached to a worldview that we build things so much stronger than they need to be. For me, one of the joys is to walk into an old barn and look at the structure and think there’s no way this would ever, ever, ever be approved. And yet it’s been there for 200 years. So, I think there are ways to build structures that maybe don’t need that strength or confidence.
Figure 3. Preassembly of the rear half of the Tree Fork Truss in Hooke Park’s Big Shed. A carefully planned near miss, 2015. Zachary Mollica.
Q: You already mentioned the difference with working in an urban setting. Do you have more to touch upon in terms of the key differences between working in your forest campus versus in the middle of the city?
You have to be a lot more prepared in the city. I think the big lesson has just been that you have to be constantly thinking 20 steps ahead because there just isn’t flexibility. In Hooke, I was spoiled to have a full time head forester, Chris Sadd, who was a deep collaborator. Despite whatever else he had to do that day, if I said, “we really need to go get that tree”, he would put his gear on and we’d go get that tree. In the city, we don’t have enough trees to treat them all like that, but also just don’t have the logistics from health and safety, and many other points of view.
That’s the hard part. That’s where I sort of dream of that warehouse space. The piece that would change it is to be able to constantly collect and build that material library. Whereas as you all know, with the building here, our storage space is pretty tight. Even though we, as Using Trees, have kind of managed to take far more storage space in the building than most people, it’s still very narrow. Access to storage: it’s an interesting piece that’s just missed all the time. People set up super well-equipped workshops with tons of tools and all sorts of bits. And what’s forgotten is just empty storage space. The key for a lot of these projects is just empty space, to be able to move stuff around, apply tools to it, but in some cases just store it for six months. That’s hard to find in the city.
Q: Do you foresee a future in which selective and more natural building practices are incorporated in large public projects? Is this something you hope for?
There are histories of wood buildings that are big enough that there’s no reason we can’t. And there’s engineering brilliance that’s enough that there’s no reason we can’t. How will it happen and when? I’m not certain. Because it’s going to require a lot of us in academia to get serious about trying to reach outside of research and make institutional, political and cultural change. The piece that’s missed is us going to City Hall to advocate for really boring change and change that facilitates that. I think we’ve shown that it can be done. We’ve shown that even 25 meters of the Wood Chip Barn spans is a very big building. But until we have people’s confidence and until we demonstrate that it can be done more and more as people expect it, it’s always going to be harder and it’s always going to require more skill. But I hope that’s the bigger project. We talk about buildings as though it’s a good thing that buildings can be built by unskilled laborers, rather than decrying the loss of skill and craft and decrying that the reason buildings are not very good for the world is that they aren’t built in skillful ways.
So, I hope that robotics and digital tech allows us to find a middle ground. Not everybody needs to be a French-trained carpenter to be able to put some of these projects into motion. But I don’t know how far away it is. In my teaching these days, I’d like to make you all better at seeing, so that whatever material you approach, it’s done with more sensitivity. It’s done with care. It’s done with seeing opportunism to do more. In some ways, it stresses less about whether it’s tree forks, but hope that it’s low energy, that it’s whatever’s local, it’s a hundred different ways of building materials rather than one next material.
Figure 4. Material from Shaw Park. This branch would supply a ladle, spatula, candle holder and a table leg, 2022. Photo by Sheri Clish.
Q: You talked a little bit about your collaborators or people that work in similar fields to you, but who and what are your inspirations in terms of colleagues or practice?
There’s an Italian sculptor, Giuseppe Penone, whom I’ve never met. I tried to reach out during my thesis. He didn’t write back. But that’s okay because his work has spoken enough. In my work there’s just a necessary acknowledgement that his arts practice has taught me a way of seeing trees and knowing how they grow. Martin Self was my thesis advisor, a mentor and colleague. A brilliant geometrist, among other things, Martin is someone who changed my brain because he connected the dots for me by seeing that my craft focus, leading canoe trips, and physics, all could tangle together into a weirder world than I expected. Those are two particularly important ones.
Then, I think it’s recognizing Hooke itself. I arrived for 16 months and I came home seven years later. Hooke had a very good habit of being a trap for a certain type of people. We had people that cared a ton about food. We had people that cared about making buildings. We had a ton of people that cared about walking in the woods. Everybody was overlapping and skillful without a very good distinction, saying “that person is the engineer, this person is the builder.” I think what inspires me is people that give a sh*t about something, even though that something isn’t very easy to put a pin on. They have the hardest time doing these things these days. It’s saying that we need fewer people who are easy to describe and more people who are a unique result of whatever weird stuff you’ve gone through and gotten obsessed with. But that’s hard to do.
Q: It feels like you always need to have a specific interest, to just pursue that and that’s the only way you could advance. So that’s also a bit daunting for us students.
Honestly, the best advice I’ve got is to recognize that there’s been some really good luck along the way. But a lot of that luck has been facilitated by saying yes to opportunities. Taking the privilege of your current availability and not having all the commitments of a full adult life and going for it. This has nothing to do with taking internships that don’t satisfy you and has everything to do with taking opportunities outside of practice. I think so many architecture students would benefit from going and working for a contractor for six months, for example. So many would benefit from just being in the wilderness. Obviously, those two are biased from my side. But, I think all of these are things and experiences that shape people and we need all sorts of people.
Q: Are you a tree hugger? Do you ever just go up to the trees and, like, give them a good hug?
I don’t hug trees.
Q: Do you climb trees?
I definitely do climb trees. I touch trees and I like to be in their proximity. I think part of the reason I maybe don’t hug them is I’m more interested in looking from a slight distance. I have climbed some really good trees in my life.