82 – UVA Sawmilling

Institutional Forestry Management

Walk through any university or large corporate campus and you will find tree lined pathways and quiet groves for study and contemplation.  Essentially you have a forest concession, but are they managed as such?  In most cases as those trees comes down due to storms or construction expansion I'm afraid they are viewed as waste not a resource.  At UVA Sawmilling they hope to change that as they help the University of Virginia manage its over 2000 acres of forested land and repurpose their trees into useful lumber specifically for the University to use in classrooms and construction expansion.  

Andrew Spears and Tim Victorio were architecture graduate students at UVA and were seeing how trees would come down on campus for one reason or another and started to wonder if those trees could possibly become boards.  Today they run the program and have more student interest and logs than they know what to do with.  In some cases the boards they make end up in architectural students' hands for class projects.  In other instances they have built tables for classrooms on campus.   

But there is still so much work to do.  The two of them have some exciting visions for where they can take the program and make a great model for any university to look to on how to best manage their own resource of trees.  At its core there is an opportunity to transform how students view the lumber supply chain as well as becoming better custodians of the resources of the campus.  

Learn more and follow their efforts on their website or on their Instagram account.  Maybe you can even potentially find a new source for lumber if you are in the Charlottesville, VA area.