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Stickbuilt: An Exploration of the Creative Process
The Canopy with team - Photo by C.W. Newell
Introduction
If there is one clear takeaway from living in Northern Alabama for the last five years, it is that anything and everything happens in the woods. There is a particular surrealism, a particular charge in the air of unharnessed possibility. Stickbuilt 2026 only galvanized me further in this belief and equipped me with many of the key pieces of supporting evidence that I had felt, but I hadn’t yet seen, discovered, or been able to articulate. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend.
Stickbuilt is all about the use of wood in Alabama, a state uniquely poised to produce, fashion, and construct whole buildings with wood, but how do we expand traditional construction’s narrow optimizations for wood into broader design opportunities and languages? Rather than talking about it, we go camp among the trees, design and build something among the trees, and brainstorm design in a series of lectures from a variety of disciplines given in a modest cabin among the trees. A fascinating architecture Studio / May-Term / Season of Survivor for Architects (CBS has yet to pick it up formally) / Architectural Summer Camp emerged.
Setup and brief
Students and professional architect practitioners were divided into a series of groups of 2 architect participants to 5 student participants (for a total of seven people per team) and asked to assemble an intervention with different sections of Southern Yellow Pine (Loblolly) Thinnings. These groups then navigated a day or so of ideation about a prospective intervention applicable to each relative size and cut of the thinning - our team had the thinner, canopy members, ranging about 4-6” in diameter. We would have a rough 30’x30’ creekside forest on which to place this intervention. Other than the characteristics of the material and the site, we weren’t given much, and our day of design exploration involved trying many ideas and focusing in on something that we felt both met most of the brief and seemed an outworking of the above constraints.
Immediately, I personally found the analog process of design to be a shock. How do we rationalize the wild world of Geometry without digital precision tools? But in a small cabin, in the woods, minus some excellent Starlink and additional power infrastructure, I don’t know how you’d mobilize digital tools, and I see the practical, if not also curatorial, decision to pair it all the way back to trace paper and some pens and pencils. I think this paring down of tools ultimately helped to clarify the objectives, and narrow the discussion to what we were actually looking to design and build.
Things that drew me back out were these activities scattered throughout the day and evening. Nature walks, team-building exercises, meals together, and lectures afterward interrupted this design conversation and offered opportunities for its productive disruption. I particularly enjoyed the nature walk, where a group of us hiked to a few Longleaf pine specimens on the property ranging from cone to sprig to sapling to full-grown tree.
Longleaf Pine Cone - Nature Walk
Sapling Longleaf Pine - Nature Walk
Mature Longleaf Pine - Nature Walk
The creative process
This recounting of the creative process is my best attempt to understand how this group conversation unfolded. It’s biased, and it’s probably not the complete picture. I’m trying to tease out my best understanding of how we arrived where we did, along with the journey along the way. I don’t wish to speak for anyone on my team, and there was no one individual steering this process. It turned out to be quite collaborative at the end of the day.
Much like the forest in which this design-build charrette exists, it’s hard to describe the creative process without a bit of magic. We are given this material reject from the forestry process: Thinnings, and our group got the thinnest of the thinnings: those belonging to the canopy. The internet is spotty, and there is not a computer in sight. We started drawing, as it was raining and that was what was on the agenda.
We drew many, wildly different things and pinned them to a board. We threw out narratives about these, and how a tectonic here might achieve the form drawn here, and might fit the mandates of the studio brief in this or that manner. As we gathered ideas, no clear consensus was reached on day one, and even well into day two and three. I think at the time, we all felt pretty rushed, and on our back foot being constrained to essentially just drawing. But I think we also developed a comfort or a patience with the process that allowed us to ultimately coalesce a design narrative that made sense.
We tore paper, we drew, we took literal sticks and hot-glued them together to see what kind of lattice system results. We also tried a bunch of ideas that didn’t work. One of them was mine, which, after a day and a half and a transformation, ultimately became the project we took on. But another idea was to slice hundreds of thin, chip-like cross-sections out of our members and tie them all together to form a kind of chain-mail-like canopy structure. This particular idea seemed really promising till we started building a small mockup, where the holes for the string connections struggled not to rip apart the whole chip.
I really enjoyed the early process, where we threw out a bunch of kooky ideas and saw what stuck, or what got thrown in a blender and then stuck. This loose ideation really opened the door to the philosophical questions: why are we here? What do we want to do with this limited time? The limitations of the tools also presented themselves over this design process as we assessed overall access, time, and amount of tools and power (one battery-powered chainsaw, versus several corded chop saws). It became clear we needed to minimize cuts to what we needed, and not overthink additional member cutting.
I think it’s important to note that this process was interspersed with all these creative actors right here in Alabama, or at the very least just a state or two over that are really leaning in and exploring all these things in a really good, productive way. It really gets you excited about where you are, and what you are doing, in architecture in Alabama.
I think I felt the reasonable desire for the ability to photograph and post-process, to print, to copy, and to digitally produce. All of these would have been really helpful things to have on the table. But you need a lot of resources for one per person in the digital world because it does take time to process all these things, and I don’t know that it would have radically improved our project. The pairing down idea really did force us to identify where the architecture was in our project and pursue that instead of the noise.
Participation in the broader discourse of architecture
There's definitely some sort of sustainability/craftsman resurgence at play here, and there is certainly something natural about reverting to what we feel are the core tenets of our life and work in the throes of another wave of Modernism. How do we reconcile our need for craft with our set of digital tools that don’t seem to allow those same processes to manifest themselves in an adequately visible way? There is no doubt that a lot of craft—processing and manipulation— takes place in the computer, on the screen, but it rarely informs our perception that there has been any craft applied.
But this is where it is important to define our terms, because I have run into many people who believe that the imperfections of hand drawings are a form of craft, adding that there is a degree of authenticity in a hand-drawn trace of a digitally generated and then printed image, that the digitally printed image doesn’t have. So what does fashioning things out of wood do if we exclude the misconception of craft as imbued meaning by virtue of human touch, memory, and imperfection?
This is where we have to step outside of ourselves a little bit. I’m reminded of a conception of architecture as a series of flows rather than a singular built work that I initially ran into in a lecture at Auburn’s Mass Timber Conference back in 2022, given by Chris and Shawna Meyer when they presented their project: House in a Garden. 1 Timothy Morton's book Being Ecological 2 made an appearance in Stibuilt’s recommended reading. This conception of architecture as flows, as insinuated hyperobjects-to put it in the context of another Timothy Morton book 3 really speaks to an inversion in our architectural thinking that’s taken place in the pedagogy here: If architecture is a series of flows, then we are shaping more places than just where we put the finished building; we are shaping everything in some way back to the source of each material, physical as well as intellectual.
Architecture is inextricably tied to our environment, and has reach that far exceeds any perceived system boundaries we may attempt to place on it. By virtue of removing a thinning from the forest for our project, we also shape that forest, and some of the nature of where that thinning eventually decomposes. In this way, we are foresters, miners, excavators, farmers, gardeners, and everything in between when we pick up a pencil or point and click a wall in our software.
As weighty an idea as the above, this has been true for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, far preceding the invention of Computer-Aided Design Software. It has been elucidated in the process of understanding our ecological place in the world. But I also think it has a key consequence for how we think of the future of architecture and these temporary moments of movement coalescence.
At the top of the Stickbuilt introductory literature there is a quote: “Architecture is frozen music.” 4 This is no doubt a sexy quote. And in the context of the prevailing conception of the discipline of architecture up until the 21st Century, this would fit neatly into how we can understand architecture. Matter is always moving; study models dancing, pencils perturbating paper, noise, until... freeze! Architecture: Frozen snapshot of music. However, if we walk this back to this idea of Architecture as flow or process, our idea of scope and architecture is again inverted. Architecture is the music; it is the flow, the noise, the four-on-the-floor, and the melody, bumping off the screen, into paper, mobilizing a acoustical cacophony of materials from many places and congregating them on site, curating them into building, from which new amalgamations of the lived experience will then resonate outward... and inward as it adapts to its lifecycle, and eventually is demolished and canibalized for a new existence as patinated wall art and dining room tables, or the compounding landfill down the way or the fill dirt to be sifted into the mix for the next building. A new conception of architecture as process, as hyperobject, 2 does not relegate architecture to the physical or the temporal. Architecture is music. If not audible as such, it exists as an underlying resonance we feel beyond the three dimensions of the Modernism of the last century and a half.
Endnotes
2 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019).
3 Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
4 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling, “The Philosophy of Art : Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming,” Internet Archive, January 1, 1989, https://archive.org/details/philosophyofart0000sche/page/n7/mode/2up, 165. I think it’s attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but it appears he merely popularized this idea by Schelling.