A century ago, the hardwood forests of the eastern United States were little more than stumps and ashes, and next week the American Hardwood Export Council will rebuild a piece of that comeback inside a Copenhagen exhibition hall. Wood for the Trees, the immersive walk-through it has staged for 3daysofdesign, retraces a hardwood’s path from standing tree to finished product entirely in donated US timber.
Step inside and the room becomes an abstract arboreal setting, with materials raised on rotating trunks, seating hewn into the shape of fallen logs, and graphics suspended overhead like the boughs of a forest canopy. Audio-visual displays, environmental data and narrative panels thread between the objects, turning the documentary that inspired the show into a space the visitor walks through rather than watches.
The journey moves through five stages — growth, stewardship, selection, resilience and timber — each opening a door onto the realities of responsible forest management. The early rooms trace how trees regenerate and even clone themselves across generations, the day-to-day and century-spanning labour of tending a forest, and the careful judgement of which trees to fell and which to leave standing.
And later, the focus turns to resilience and how a forest shrugs off climate shifts, pests and disease, before the final stage follows the grain to the point where the forest meets the human world. Drawn from AHEC’s recent documentary Forested Future, which followed the communities whose livelihoods rest on forests, the show widens a Copenhagen platform the council has used in recent years for designer collaborations and sculptural one-offs.
Mitre & Mondays, the London studio of Josef Shanley-Jackson, Freya Bolton and Finn Thomson, builds objects and spaces around reuse, repair and regenerative materials. Benchmark, the Berkshire furniture-maker founded by Terence Conran and Sean Sutcliffe in 1984, built the show from those donated boards, drawing on four decades of working with natural, non-toxic timber.
Behind the spectacle sits a recovery the council returns to often, with the eastern United States hardwood forests rebounding from those stumps and ashes to more than 40 million acres today. They are now growing at twice the rate they are harvested, a ratio AHEC uses to argue that a diversified timber market gives landowners a reason to keep forests standing rather than clear them.
Every plank in the installation was donated by the family-owned sawmills Bingaman & Son Lumber, MacDonald & Owen, Northland Forest Products and Rossi Lumber. Four species carry the room, with American red oak, yellow birch, hard maple and cherry, each chosen to show the range a diversified market can draw on.
