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Material Assemblies 001 - Introducing the Material Library

The first edition of the Material Assemblies workshop and conversation series traced the material circumstances and consequences that follow the felling of a group of trees from the neighboring plot, now a construction site, of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, including a 70-year-old poplarpoplar tree, an oak, a group of ash and a small elm.

A mixed group of students and staff members - almost all of whom had wood related expertise - visited the sawmill of Stadshout in the morning. A guided tour was facilitated by Crisow von Schulz, one of the founders of the organization. During the site visit the group discussed matters and materials related to wood and timber as well as engaged with equipment and residues of the wood sawing process.

The activity continued in the afternoon in groups where participants traced and mapped the materials and their relationships starting from the construction site at the Rietveld Academie through the sawmill and back to the campus again where the timber will be made avaliable to the sudents after drying.

Mariana Martinez Balvanera(MX) an artist, alum of the Sandberg Instituut and initiator of the Collaboratory Kitchen logged in online at 15:00 interjecting the workshop with an in-depth introduction of the Biocultural Living Archive. The practice of archiving and unarchiving was a recurring notion mentioned in the talk emphasizing the two-wayed relationship of the archive that informs and in turn shaped through its encounters with territories and publics.

Workshop Call

A workshop following the material traces of the trees felled on the neighbouring plot of the academy combined with a site visit to the sawmill of Stadshout.

Site visit: Wednesday 19 November, 10:00–12:00 — Ronde Hoep West 25, Ouderkerk aan de Amstel

Workshop: Wednesday 19 November, 13:00–17:00 — Auditorium, 3rd floor BC

For the first Material Assembly, participants will have the opportunity to visit the sawmill of Stadshout, where several trees felled from the neighbouring plot of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie are currently being processed into timber. The wood will be dried over the coming months and years, and will eventually make its way back to the academy as source material to be used by the community. After the visit, participants will attempt to trace and identify not only the material characteristics of the wood, but also the various stages of its transformation, as well as the secondary materials, tools, people, and places involved in the process. The Material Library is currently under development, and as such, this workshop is part of its formative process.

Stadshout

Stadshout is an Amsterdam-based organization that rescues felled city trees and, through its sawmill and local partners, transforms them into usable wood and products.

Material Library

The Material Library is initiated by Márk Redele and co-hosted by Rietveld Sandberg Research and Urgent Ecologies.

Programme:

The activity will take the whole day and consists of two parts:

It is essential that you attend both the morning and afternoon sessions. If you are unable to join both, please cancel your reservation so someone else can take your place.

Outline of the day

09:45–10:00 – Gathering at Stadshout

10:00–10:30 – Introduction by Stadshout founder, Crisow

10:30–11:45 – Guided exploration of the sawmill, gathering information and recording visual and audio material for the Material Library

12:00–13:00 – Travel back to Rietveld and lunch (individually)

13:00–13:30 – Introduction to the Material Library

13:30–16:30 – Collective group work:

16:30–17:00 – Reflection and closing thoughts

It might be useful to bring your laptop to the afternoon session, but it’s not essential.

Sawmill

Crisow introduces the origins of the sawmill to the group and emphasizes the lacking infrastructure for reusing valuable timber from the city and the need for affordable source materials for craftpeople.

00:00:00 Speaker 1

So the neighbours asked that I maybe do something, and I ordered a mobile sawmill, and I had two cubic meters of fine timber.

00:00:18 Speaker 1

For only €250. So that was a little amount.

00:00:23 Speaker 1

And the other thing was, there was a customer that wanted a teak table.

00:00:32 Speaker 1

I go to the trader, the wood-trading company.

00:00:40 Speaker 1

And there I had to pay like €1200 for the teak wood.

00:00:45 Speaker 1

And meanwhile in the shops there were teak tables, lots of them, from Indonesia, for €800.

00:00:53 Speaker 1

So this was really a bit strange. People in Indonesia, they need to make these tables on low wages, and here we cannot live with our craftsmanship, making tables anymore, because they cost too little.

00:01:13 Speaker 1

We threw away our urban trees like garbage, shipped them to the energy ovens. So this combined thing made me think, well, maybe…

00:01:29 Speaker 1

Well, let’s look why this happens like this.

00:01:36 Speaker 1

The thing is actually: the tree workers – well, they are tree workers – they don’t know that trees can be timber. So there was a gap between the craftsmanship and the tree workers. And the gap was the sawmill, actually.

00:01:55 Speaker 1

That’s roughly how I thought: maybe we need to create the sawmill, so trees can be processed into useful wood.

City trees

00:02:17 Speaker 1

We find out a lot of things. For example, in Holland most wood comes out of cities. We didn’t know this. It’s twice the volume that comes out of the forests.

00:02:33 Speaker 2

Because there is no forest.

00:02:33 Speaker 3

Yes.

00:02:35 Speaker 1

If you look at the map of Holland, and you see where all the trees are, then you see the cities, yeah.

00:02:44 Speaker 1

The rest is farmland.

00:03:12 Speaker 1

I think these trees in the cities, they may be even more important than the trees that grow in forests, because it’s a direct link between inhabitants and nature, actually.

00:07:18 Speaker 4

There is a book in the library with historical photos of the construction of the Rietveld, and there are no trees. It’s completely empty.

00:07:25 Speaker 1

It was plain empty.

00:07:29 Speaker 1

Also, this was outside the city, I…

00:07:31 Speaker 4

…think, yeah. Yeah, there was nothing.

Elm disease

00:24:15 Speaker 1

Well, Amsterdam is known for elm. So there’s lots of elm in Amsterdam, and the main three types are elm, linden, maple, ash, and then we have something like cypress. And then there are fruit trees sometimes in streets: cherry, some pear.
00:25:00 Speaker 2

Like, in forests and countryside, there’s like a big trend on making forests climate-resistant, or like planting climate-resistant trees as well. Is that also like a trend coming up within Amsterdam?

00:25:13 Speaker 1

I think they are looking into that, yes, sure.

00:25:17 Speaker 4

But also a lot of these species get very, like, diseased, right? For example elm, right?

00:25:23 Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s really a problem. Because normally in the summer, in Amsterdam there would be like 350 elms that get infected.
00:25:37 Speaker 1

Now we had some hot summers and the amount is growing to about 750 elms last year. So it’s really increasing. So these bugs that fly, they do not do it one time, but make an extra 3 or 4 generations.
00:26:31 Speaker 1

No, the elm has reddish wood. We call it Dutch mahogany. It can be really dark red or more light red. It’s really beautiful.

Beetles and chicken

00:20:03 Speaker 1

[Elms] The fungus comes with the bugs, and they put their eggs between the bark and the wood in the cambium. So that’s why the bark has to come off, and then when they cut down, they take off the bark and destroy it immediately. It’s not transported.

00:20:44 Speaker 1

For this, the bark is directly going to the energy oven.

00:21:15 Speaker 1

For example, on the beech trees they have a lot of moisture. But you can also take colour pigments out of that.

00:21:39 Speaker 5

This is an interesting one. So they like the bugs, right?

00:21:47 Speaker 1

They really like to eat when we are sawing and all the bark is falling down, they eat all the bugs.

00:21:54 Speaker 5

So she’s also part of the chain.

00:21:56 Speaker 1

Yeah, part of the chain, yeah.

00:22:12 Speaker 1

Actually, chickens are really good helpers. They like cuddling and they offer some funny things.

00:22:51 Speaker 1

Well, she has brown ones, it’s there. But normally, most of the time it’s white. Actually, this is really funny: if they have brown ear-lobes, they make brown eggs.

Dendrochronology

00:30:27 Speaker 1

You have quite some… if we really quarter-saw it, we lose a lot of wood as well.

00:30:56 Speaker 1

Why the first… so when the sap stops, it doesn’t grow anymore. And then in the summer the leaves grow back and the sap goes, and then it grows.

00:31:10 Speaker 1

It’s fun: in tropical woods sometimes you cannot see the rings. They are not there because it grows all the time the same.

00:31:24 Speaker 5

And it’s really like a fingerprint, right? You can almost tell which area it’s from, based on the…

00:31:32 Speaker 1

Yeah. And the history as well.

00:31:38 Speaker 1

Now you should read the book of authorValérie Trouet as well, that deals with all this.

00:32:03 Speaker 1

The book is called bookIn the Circle of Ancient Trees. It’s really good to read because you can see how the weather was that year.

00:32:30 Speaker 1

If the ring is really wide here, it will be really wide with another tree as well, so they can see, from the pattern that’s here, where it’s there.

00:32:53 Speaker 1

So then they can make a real timeline, and they go back to… I think 2000 years.

00:33:02 Speaker 5

There is this amazing research, I think about the Batavia ship… they took some of the wood from the ship and they mapped it to where the wood is coming from around the world, just based on the rings.

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