The award-winning podcast Words on Wood is returning for its fourth season.
This season delves even deeper into the world of wood, featuring unexpected and timely topics from across forestry, architecture and design, as well as the introduction of new, bite-sized ‘Making Shorts’, which shine a light on different production techniques for designing and building with timber.
Venturing into the world’s forests, sites of timber production, and design and architecture studios, the podcast examines how these industries intersect through material. Each episode is structured around interviews with leading architects, designers, educators, manufacturers, and forestry professionals who live amongst and care for trees on a day-to-day basis.
The fourth season launches with an in-depth exploration of an often overlooked and misunderstood timber product: veneer. Featuring contemporary designers Jorge Penadés and Rio Kobayashi, as well as Cathy Lynn Danzer of timber manufacturer Danzer, the episode explores the design potential of this thinly sliced material and how a new generation of practitioners are pushing it in experimental and playful directions.
Returning to the classroom, the season’s second episode explores what is missing in architectural education when it comes to wood. While timber is a common building material, each species offers different properties – are architects provided with sufficient information about these varied materials in their training? This episode brings together educators Kenn Busch, Hanif Kara and Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno to discuss how to develop more rigorous timber curriculums.
Introducing Making Shorts
Building on the success of previous seasons’ ‘Tree Shorts’, this season introduces a new series of ‘Making Shorts’. These bite-sized episodes zoom into production techniques for timber, providing concise case studies through interviews with designers on the making processes behind specific projects.
Travelling to Australia, the first Making Short of the season focuses on CNC milling, tracing its connections to traditional hand carving methods. Designer Trent Jansen and Tanya Singer and Errol Evans, First Nations woodworkers and artists, explain how they employed high-tech milling machines to create a series of sculptural furniture that tell stories about the climate crisis.
Other highlights include Anna Maria Øfstedal Eng speaking about creating furniture with a chainsaw, and Inma Bermudez and Moritz Krefter reflecting on how making-by-hand opens up possibilities for working with waste timber.
Words on Wood is developed by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) in conjunction with Disegno, the international journal of design.
You can listen and subscribe to Words on Wood on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Editor’s notes:
About American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC)
For more than three decades, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) has been the global face of the U.S. timber industry, championing the performance, sustainability and aesthetic potential of American Hardwoods worldwide. As the leading international Hardwood trade association for North America, AHEC operates a non-profit programme representing thousands of businesses engaged in the production and export of timber – ranging from small family-run sawmills to major flooring manufacturers. Established to unite this wide-ranging spectrum of companies with a single global voice, AHEC has successfully built an internationally recognised brand, marketing more than 20 commercially available Hardwood species and increasing demand around the world.
www.americanhardwood.org
@ahec_europe
About Disegno
Disegno is an international journal dedicated to long-form writing and photography around design. The team behind Disegno also publish Design Reviewed, a title devoted to experiential design writing and long-form reviews, with an emphasis on hands-on engagement. Both journals cover all design fields, exploring the political, social, environmental and industrial impact of the discipline. Each is published biannually. Disegno also publishes a mixture of long-form journalism and shorter news items on its website.
