As the forestry industry is engaged in an exponential exploitation of a raw material now marketed for a multitude of end-uses, forests appear subjected to increasing and seemingly unsustainable pressures. Public opinion regularly chastizes the industry’s companies held responsible for the devastation they bring upon Quebec’s forests, this "green gold" now in serious risk of depletion. After decades of modernization and productivity gains, the industry appears to have reached a plateau at which increasing national and international demands no longer can be met. And the ministry, responsible for most everything from planification, silvicultural works, all the way to the planting of seedlings in public nurseries, is now confronted to a paralyzing deficit.

    With entire ecosystems endangered and an industry in existential crisis, it is now urgent to research what is possible to accomplish with our resources, but also how to preserve them. The forestry industry of Abitibi-Témiscamingue is at the core of the wood production sector of the larger region, yet it is at the very end of the chain of stakeholders responsible for the preservation of our forest cover. Meanwhile, the emergence of engineered wood construction raises many questions, among which urgent issues regarding our acclimation to climate change and the lifecycle of buildings. To this is added more architectural constraints, which often require wall-to-wall wood for projects whose construction language is still very much to be defined. Based on these findings, this project explores how an architecture that advocates for wood, while being assisted by the technological advances of industry 4.0, can ultimately contribute to a local democratization of the wood products industry.

    Perhaps it is in researching better ways to use this resource, as well as to ensure its monitoring, that an answer might arise. The recent emergence of sensors to be placed within wood, but also at the scale of forests, ensures a constant monitoring of the tree and its wider ecosystem, affording a better, more fine-grained understanding of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. The present proposal is to develop a forest seedling germination center which would supply the forests of Abitibi-Témiscamingue and their surroundings. The collection of data on the state of forests would therein allow to understand how they adapt and to identify the actions required for its preservation. The germination center, for its part, would in a way closes that loop through the monitoring of its own wood structure which would in effect establish the project as a "data center" dedicated to the analysis of the adaptation of the building to its operations, its lifecycle and the performance of its wood under various parameters. The goal, henceforth, is the demonstrate the possibility of building a center where monitoring would not only concern its stated programmatic functions, but also its own maintenance, thus contributing to the production of further knowledge upon our wood products.

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