What materials do woodlands have to offer, besides timber, and how can we harvest and work with these resources in a responsible way? For the fourth iteration of Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures, the V&A commissioned design and research studio Material Cultures to explore this question. The result of the studio’s experiments is now on display in the Susan R Weber Furniture Gallery, South Kensington.
Material Cultures actively works towards a post-carbon world by innovating and building with natural, renewable materials. To date this has entailed using multi-species timber and hemp-based materials. For this project, the studio directed its research on three underused woodland resources – bark, pine needles and natural glues – and materialised its findings through the most ubiquitous building component there is, sheet material.
In one experiment, the studio worked with silver birch and coast redwood bark in its most natural form, peeled off the tree. The naturally waterproof qualities of the former and the fire-retardant properties of the latter were exploited to make a simple cladding system.
Both types of bark are particularly high in wood’s natural glue, lignin. In a pioneering series of experiments, the studio layered the bark in alternating directions and, working with the fabricator Erthly, subjected it to high heat and pressure. Under these conditions, the natural glues in the bark started to run, binding the bark to itself to form a solid sheet.
Other woodland resources that the studio tested – commercially available spruce bark chips and scots pine needles from the forest floor – didn’t respond to heat and pressure alone. Here, the studio explored the potential of bioresins, mixing different quantities of fibre and resin to develop composite sheets.
These woodland resources are underused, or considered waste, in wood production. Bark from timber mills is sold as mulch, biofuel or composted. It is not currently used to its full potential. Pine needles are left on the ground to decompose after tree felling where, in single-species forests, they can make the soil too acidic. Natural glues, such as rosin and lignin, have largely been overlooked by industries, which favour glues derived from petrochemicals. In these experiments, the studio demonstrates the potential of these underused resources – and the new landscape of woodland goods they make possible.
The prototype sheets, alongside Material Culture’s successful and failed experiments, will be displayed until autumn 2025, alongside a film that further unpacks the studio’s research.
