Architecture transforms places to make them habitable. However, when building, we not only modify the place we are designing, but also alter those places from which we extract the materials with which we construct. For example, in the case of wood, it comes from the tree, the tree from the forest, and the forest is part of the territory. To transform a tree into manufactured wood, the existence of the value chain is necessary, ranging from forestry to the sawmill and the carpenter. Each of these industrial actors possesses knowledge of working with the material, whether it is felling the tree, sawing wood, or manufacturing the wood. The combination of the place where the material is extracted, the material itself, and the artisans (industrial workers) has built the culture of a society in each of the territories that characterizes the land.
From the second half of the 20th century, a slow process of delocalization of materials began, seeking places where extraction and labor were more economical, resulting in externalities in ecosystems and workers' rights. In the case of Mallorca, the disappearance of value chains in the use of wood, stone, and ceramics has led the territory towards a culture of abandonment, both in terms of the land and technical knowledge. In the case of wood, Mallorca currently imports 70,000 tons of wood per year, even though 95% of the island's forests are abandoned.
The proposal suggests using wood from the pine forests of Mallorca for construction while also caring for our ecosystems. The second constraint is to propose solutions built only with wood, without glues or metal, using logs of 2.1 meters extracted from the mountains (this measurement is the width of the truck that transports the logs to the sawmill).
Based on these two premises, a modular system is proposed, consisting of small pieces from which floors and pillars can be constructed. This modular system is composed of ten standard pieces plus wooden bolts to connect them.
From this modular system, a prototype was built at the DHuB museum in Barcelona. It consists of a wireframe structure measuring 9.80 x 4.40 meters, for which the heartwood (the central part of the trunk) of three Aleppo pines was used. The sapwood of the trunk (the high-quality wood on the outer part of the trunk) was used to build the table designed to be placed beneath the structure.
This modular system aims to demonstrate how, by using a local resource and solely relying on this resource, we can construct the structures of our territory's buildings while simultaneously caring for our forests through respectful forest management.
