We cannot separate the building from the forest if the goal is to use timber for its most sustainable qualities. That conviction sent me to the trees.

Building of Gardens was created in the Spring of 2023 as a visual research project and part of the MDes Open Projects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The film documents the complete journey of timber as a commercial building material: forest, milling, manufacturing, fabrication, construction, and replanting.

What began as an analytical categorization became something else. Narratives across history and politics emerged, with an emphasis on relearning lost knowledge. Native peoples, colonial extraction, the military-industrial complex, timber as agriculture, conservation, and the need to live more sustainably with nature. These are not separate stories. They compete for the same land.

Since the Jamestown charter first called for the harvesting of timber over four centuries ago, practices of extraction, agriculture, and preservation have competed for dominance within America's timberlands. Yet the local knowledge of living sustainably with nature through tending natural ecologies has always existed among Native Peoples. As timber has emerged as a low-carbon solution for the built environment, native practices for sustainable harvesting and land management have resurfaced as contemporary strategies for climate change mitigation.

The film is composed using historical and present-day narratives in voice and music, layered with the visual representation of contemporary industrial processes across multiple sites in Seattle, Portland, and Southern Oregon.