For the fifth Make Good symposium, we brought together UK practitioners and experts spanning law, housing, material science, architecture, design and manufacture to talk about how we can grow more climate-resilient, mixed-species forests – and use the timber they generate locally.
The lively afternoon of talks took its cue from architecture practice dRMM’s display Building from Forests at the V&A. To introduce the symposium, director Jonas Lencer spoke about the three-year research project, conducted with partners in science and manufacturing, that underpinned the display.
The rest of the symposium was structured around the topics Materials and Making, Construction, and Civic Infrastructure. Here, we share the recordings from the day.
Materials and Making
In our first session, Marlene Cramer, a wood scientist, took us on a deep dive into the material properties of the UK’s native tree species. Designer and educator Nick Gant spoke about designing for biodiversity and Je Ahn, director of Studio Weave, showed us how the practice works with local resources.
Construction
We then heard from two organisations with ambitions to build at scale using UK grown renewable materials. Louise Rogers from innovation lab BE-ST spoke about the potential for scaling up manufacturing in the country, and Jonathan Smales, founder of development company Human Nature, shared plans to build a different kind of neighbourhood from scratch.
Civic Insfrastructure
In the final session of the day, we invited two practitioners to explore the systemic changes needed to responsibly harvest and build with local, natural resources. Paul Powlesland from Lawyers for Nature spoke on the rights of nature, and Immy Kaur from Civic Square showed us what ecological transition looks like at the scale of a neighbourhood.
The symposium forms part of the fifth iteration of the Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures programme, supported by John Makepeace OBE. The ten-year project launched in 2022 and encompasses an annual display in the Dr Susan Weber Gallery of Furniture, an annual symposium and a programme of acquisitions dedicated to exploring the use of natural, renewable materials in design and architecture at a time of climate emergency.
