Wood Talks: Forests + Buildings

November 13 - 14, 2026
10:00 am - 4:00 pm CT

1 HSW CEU Credit will be offered
Thomson Hall (Room 202), Richardson Memorial Hall
Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

This symposium is part of the Fall 2026 Lecture Series and Public Programs: "Emergency: Planning and Adaptation."

SYMPOSIUM CALL

Historically, timber construction across the United States maintained a direct relationship between material availability, regional forestry practices, and architectural form-making. These relationships are clearest in premodern rural buildings, agrarian structures, and industrial facilities, where the material, its source, and its construction techniques were closely connected in both form and proximity. Contemporary mass timber buildings now depend on globalized supply chains and highly standardized wood products. Uniform wood products often obscure the forest's specificity, weakening the connection between the forest and architectural form. These discrepancies raise important questions about how disciplinary valuation of design decisions relates to cultural conventions, economics, regulatory, and environmental forces. 

Wood remains one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring building materials. Its malleability, renewability, and tactile qualities have established a deep relationship between human habitation and the material itself. In many respects, wood should play a more significant role in contemporary construction (beyond single-family structures). Across much of North America, it already does through conventional light-frame construction. Yet the emergence of engineered mass timber products has not translated into widespread adoption within larger and more complex building types, nor has it necessarily fostered a more symbiotic relationship between wood construction materials and the forest. 

Wood Talks is an inquiry into the connection between the Forest and Buildings, considered through the broader models of architecture and design education, professional practice, industry, and resource management. In positioning the symposium, it became clear that architectural education has, in many ways, lost its connection to the fundamentals of construction materials. How can the discipline expect to make informed decisions about contemporary questions of energy and environment without a fundamental understanding of material sourcing, production, transformation, and design? 

The urgency of Wood Talks lies in the rapidly evolving relationship between domestic and global sourcing, resource management, industrial production, and construction's environmental consequences. What role does design education play in connecting architectural thinking to the elemental questions of how buildings are sourced, produced, and constructed? As material supply chains become increasingly globalized, and as economic, political, and environmental pressures complicate domestic production, the symposium asks whether architecture has become too detached from the resources and systems that make building possible. 

Wood Talks brings these questions into direct conversation with architecture and design. The symposium considers how education, practice, industry, policy, and the forest can be understood as interconnected systems rather than separate concerns. It asks how architectural education can prepare emerging architects to make informed decisions about materials and resources, and how practice can develop new approaches to design, construction, and building production. 

The symposium is not intended to present mass timber as a fixed solution or represent conventions. Instead, it asks what wood-based architecture might become, what systems and conventions it might challenge, and how the relationship between Forest and Buildings can contribute to more critical, environmentally responsible, and regionally grounded educational models and architectural practices. 

This program is made possible through Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, ThinkWood, Tulane Center on Climate Change and Urbanism, and special support from NASEM-GRP. The Wood Talks Symposium is organized by Professor Christopher Meyer at Tulane University. 

AIA Continuing education credits are available through Tulane. For complete event details and RSVP information, please visit the event page here or email Sophie Sandlin at ssandlin@tulane.edu. The event is free and open to the public. 

Questions? Please reach out to Ben Neal at bneal1@tulane.edu.