Democratising the Forest

How can a productive landscape transcend the ingrained self-interest that governs human action toward the environment? The project’s response adapts sustainable forestry into a communal responsibility and employs site-specific materiality to create a timber processing centre, enabling visitors to follow the sequence of spaces and the timber’s transition from a raw to a finished and usable product, providing glimpses into the worker’s process while ensuring active industrial spaces remain undisturbed.

At the end of the process, workers work the local timber while visitors can join woodworking and carpentry classes, which use the processed wood on-site to connect the community to Welsh carpentry practices. Finished products are then sold in the complex’s store, which provides good quality timber to the local community for individual and shared construction.

In light of the site’s steep slope, the complex’s circulation areas are staggered on multiple levels, enabling the visitors to experience the existing attributes of the site and framing its views before finally entering Coed-Y-Person. This also utilises the gravity of the steep slope for the lumber’s movement on site. Offcuts and waste material from the processing are burned in the on-site kiln, creating bio-char which is mixed into the buildings’ compressed earth walls as an aggregate and acts as an eventual fertiliser at the buildings’ end of life, while the residual heat is used to warm the inhabited spaces thus lowering the site’s carbon footprint.