Tropic of Charlie
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- Christopher Alexander
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Overstory - Stickbuilt 2026
Stickbuilt 2026 - “Overstory” Final Project - In Situ with Study Models in Fore
Understory. Mid-story. Overstory. Oh my! Understory. Mid-story. Overstory. Oh my!
Team | Charlie, Golpar, Bella, Allister, Austin, Lucy, & Maria
Design Build Intensive | Stickbuilt 2026
Facilitators | Will McGarity, Charlie Hunter-Cook, Mary McGarity,
Ty Smith, David Kennedy, Tom Chung, and others
Jurors | Ryan Misner, David Kennedy, and company
Special Thanks | Autumn Allen
Thinnings from the canopy, even the small ones, are a peculiar mix of delicate in appearance and lumbering in material execution, especially when wet. They oscillate akin to the overstory above, but in unison. An oscillation exacerbated by the jumping, climbing, running, skipping, and parachuting it seems to elicit from its visitors. Even just a touch, a lean, a touch of contrapposto, reveals the myriad resonant frequencies of this strange object.
Revealed in its instability and interconnectedness is a precarious state of being. Its existence is inextricably connected to the earth beneath it, but one can feel the potential energy as it moves and tests each one of its connections at a single impulse. Best situated as one of Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,” its current state is the product of this week-long Architecture studio, Stickbuilt, and before that, years of faithful forest stewardship, and so on. This hyperobject “Overstory” is both its own hyperobject and one that, by engaging with it, we too become a part of it. And together, we constitute a hyperobject of the broader climatological hyperobject, all of which are delicate. Nothing can be teased out and set apart. Resonances in one hyperobject immediately engage with all the other ones.
Yes, this work is participatory, and by situating ourselves in and around it, producing and receiving reverberations, and feeling that precarity in latent energy, erect yet unstable, you too are participating in the broader ecological discussion around wood. Wood architecture, a renewable repository for carbon, an attitudinal disposition toward the world and its mechanics, that will continue to resonate with you, in whatever hyperobjects you engage with next.
Walk Thru - 1
Walk Thru - 2