Je regarde un documentaire sur Sebastian Cox, un ébéniste ("Furniture Maker") et c'est super intéressant.

Il s'est posé des questions que je me pose également. Sauf qu'il a un peu d'avance et qu'il semble avoir trouvé des réponses.

https://youtu.be/Rwk-toeRL_A

#travailDuBois #woodworking #furnitureMaker #ébéniste #SebastianCox

Sebastian Cox builds Sylvascope treehouse as symbol of effective woodland management

British designer Sebastian Cox has created a treehouse in the grounds of Harewood House in West Yorkshire, in a strategy to make a woodland grove more useful and biodiverse.

Sylvascope is Cox's contribution to the second Harewood Biennial, which asked contributors to demonstrate a "radical act" of craft.

The treehouse was built for the Harewood Biennial 2022, Radical Acts

The Kent-based designer wanted to show how cutting down trees can make woodlands more healthy and also provide a sustainable source of material for designers and makers.

"My radical act is to fell trees," explained Cox during a tour. "We're trying to show the value in bringing woodlands into management."

"It's a conversation we really need to start having in the UK," he continued. "Why are we planting trees and what are we doing with them? We import 90 per cent of our wood, yet our woodlands are largely unmanaged."

[

Read:

"I'm not an enormous advocate of the planting of trees" says Sebastian Cox

](https://www.dezeen.com/2020/07/02/planting-trees-sebastian-cox/)

Cox has developed a woodland management strategy for one particular patch of woodland at Harewood House, a country estate with more than 100 acres.

The Sylvascope treehouse sits at the heart of this grove, with windows that face out towards each of the three zones he identifies in his strategy. It is made almost entirely from wood harvested from the site.

"Our actual piece is the woodland management plan, but we've made a structure in a tree as a byproduct of that," said Cox.

Woven larch forms the walls of the treehouse

In one of the three sections, Cox is cultivating understory development by letting the hardwood trees coppice, while the softwood trees will be interplanted with small species like hazel and field maple.

The aim is to facilitate the growth of brambles and herbs, to create a more biodiverse environment for wildlife.

"We assume a healthy woodland has tall trees and no brambles or undergrowth," said Cox, "but this is not favourable to much woodland wildlife. When we fell trees and let light to the woodland floor, other plants, insects, mammals and birds can thrive."

Windows face the three different zones in Cox's woodland management strategy. Photo is by Amy Frearson

In a second section, Cox is planting more of the same tree species but has sourced seedlings from central France – where the temperature is slightly higher – to build up a resilience against climate change.

For the third section, sweet chestnut will be grown in short rotation coppice, to produce a higher yield of useful wood.

"We're going to see really radical change here quite quickly over the course of the seasons," said Cox. "The whole wood is going to be more biodiverse and more useful."

[

Read:

Sebastian Cox creates subtle treehouse from scorched larch

](https://www.dezeen.com/2021/05/19/sebastian-cox-subtle-treehouse-scorched-larch-uk/)

Cox teamed up with treehouse builders Root and Shoot – who he previously collaborated with on a project in Hertfordshire – to build the Sylvascope structure.

Combining Douglas fir and larch elements, the treehouse showcases a variety of woodwork techniques. Larch strips were woven to create the walls, while the curved strips surrounding the base have a rough bark edge.

The treehouse is fixed to existing trees using cantilevered beam supports, rather than posts that extend down to ground.

Wood used to build the treehouse is a byproduct of the woodland management

The rest of the wood harvested from the site is being sawn into planks, which could be sold or given away to other makers.

"A commercial forestry contractor or timber yard might not be interested in this quality of wood," said Cox.

"It's a little bit scruffy but there is still value in it," he said. "It you're clever, there's a lot you can do with it."

The treehouse is a permanent addition to the Harewood House estate

Sylvascope is one of 18 projects that feature in the Harewood Biennial 2022, Radical Acts, which is curated by Hugo Macdonald, but unlike the others it will become a permanent new addition to the estate.

It is the latest in a series of biodiversity-focused design projects by Cox, with other examples including furniture made from mushroom mycelium and a sculpture made using coppiced hazel.

He previously spoke about his design approach in a live interview during Dezeen's Virtual Design Festival.

TheHarewood Biennial 2022 is on show from 26 March to 29 August at Harewood House in West Yorkshire. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Photography is byEdvinas Bruzas unless otherwise indicated.

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Watch our talk with Bethan Laura Wood, Sebastian Cox and Justin Zoll for No.3 Gin

Dezeen has teamed up with No.3 Gin to host a live talk with photographer Justin Zoll and designers Bethan Laura Wood and Sebastian Cox about how their work uncovers beauty in unexpected places. Watch it from 4:30pm London time.

Titled Design, Detail and Aesthetics, the panel discussion brings together three distinct creatives working across different disciplines to create bright, beautifully crafted and visually intricate work.

Taking place at the V&A museum in London as part of the Global Design Forum series of talks during London Design Festival, the talk sees Dezeen's chief content officer Benedict Hobson speak with Zoll, Wood and Cox about their practice and how their work reveals beauty in the everyday world and materials around us.

Justin Zoll uses a microscope to photograph objects

Zoll is a photographer from Ithaca, New York, who specialises in capturing the microscopic world using a microscope and digital camera.

Recently, Zoll has worked with No.3 Gin to create a colourful, kaleidoscopic artwork (top) by freezing the award-winning gin and photographing the crystals through his microscope.

Bethan Laura Wood's work is known for its focus on detail and colour

Wood has run her multidisciplinary studio since 2009, which is characterised by materials investigation, artisan collaboration and a passion for colour and detail.

Wood is fascinated by the connections we make with the everyday objects that surround us and, as a collector herself, likes to explore what drives people to hold onto one particular object while discarding another. Bethan explores these relationships and questions how they might become cultural conduits.

Sebastian Cox produces sustainable wood furniture

Cox is a furniture designer, maker and environmentalist based in south London.

He founded his carbon-counting, forward-thinking, zero-waste workshop and design studio in 2010 on the principle that the past can be used to design and make the future.

Talk in partnership with No.3 Gin

Dezeen is hosting the talk in partnership with No.3 Gin, which has been voted World's Best Gin four times at the International Spirits Challenge (ISC) and is the only gin ever to be crowned World's Best Spirit at the ISC.

It took two years to get the perfect balance of juniper, citrus and spice in the gin liquid, which Zoll has captured using his microscope to create the colourful artwork.

TheDesign, Detail and Aesthetics talk takes place at the V&A museum in London and will be streamed on Dezeen from 4:30pm on Friday 24 September. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This talk was produced by Dezeen for No.3 Gin as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen's partnership contenthere.

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"We are already carbon negative by some long stretch" says furniture maker Sebastian Cox

Creating furniture from locally sourced wood has allowed Sebastian Cox to make his company and his employees carbon negative, the British designer claims.

Last year, Cox stored 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide in timber products such as furniture, kitchens and treehouses, he calculates. Now, he's on track to "smash" this record in 2021.

"As a company, we emit far less than 100 tonnes," Cox told Dezeen. "So we are already carbon negative by some long stretch, to the point that we're taking responsibility for our staff's carbon footprint, too."

Cox takes a holistic approach to design, taking time to understand his raw materials in a way that is both philosophical and scientific. In an opinion column for Dezeen published as part of our carbon revolution series, he imagined how a tree would view climate change.

Sebastian Cox (top) runs a small workshop in London (above)

"They would surely be enjoying the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, which increases their mass," he wrote, adding that the discovery of fossil fuels was a blessing for them as this "saved millions of acres of temperate forest since our prime energy source switched from land-hungry wood to buried fossil energy".

He went on to describe the principle of hygroscopy by which carbon in the soil can help water retention, which helps woodlands stay cool and fertile.

Cox sees atmospheric carbon as "a resource to regenerate our earth"

"For every one gram of extra carbon in soils, eight grams of extra water can be held there too because of the complex hygroscopic structure of soil carbon," he wrote.

"The design community should be leading the material world into an intense period of re-greening and cooling our planet, and it should start by finding ways to make the excess carbon we have in our skies a resource to be used to regenerate our earth."

Like all plant matter, wood is 50 per cent carbon once the water content has been removed. Like furniture maker Takt and shoe brand Allbirds, Cox has created a lifecycle calculator for estimating the amount of the element that is both stored and emitted by his supply chain and the small London workshop where he employs 12 people.

He has also created a carbon counting spreadsheet for his staff, encouraging them to estimate and reduce the annual emissions they generate in their private lives through everything from flying to eating meat.

Using wood can enable designers to get carbon neutral "very quickly"

This year, with the coronavirus pandemic restricting air travel, Cox expects that his products will sequester enough CO2 to offset the emissions generated not just by his business but by his whole team.

"If you employ solid wood, you're going to be getting towards carbon neutral or carbon negative very quickly," he said.

"This is the wonderful thing about wood. It doesn't require heavy heating, you don't have to melt it, you don't have to boil it," Cox continued.

"You've literally got solid carbon that comes in and with a light bit of working becomes a useful product."

Cox, who founded his studio and workshop in 2010, creates furniture using timber from his own managed woodland in Kent.

The 4.5-acre forest is never cut down faster than it can regenerate itself in order to preserve it as a carbon sink and a refuge for wildlife. Cox bolsters his supply with wood from other sustainably managed forests in the south of England.

By turning this wood into durable, modern heirlooms, the designer hopes to store the carbon that was sequestered by the trees for generations to come, as well as highlighting the untapped potential lying in the UK's 3.2 million acres of forest.

More than 40 per cent of this area is neglected and unmanaged, while 87 per cent of the timber used in the country is imported.

"We need to put commercial value in woodlands"

Commercialising and maintaining these forests through techniques such as coppicing, in which trees are cut close to the base to encourage rapid regrowth while encouraging biodiversity by allowing light to reach the forest floor, would allow them to grow faster and lock away more carbon as well as creating a potential economic benefit of £20 million a year.

"We need to put commercial value in woodlands and therefore give a financial incentive for managing them," Cox said.

"For me, it's not about saying: we've got this bit of land that is now sequestering carbon for us, let's lock it up and throw away the key," he continued.

"It's about saying: we're going to allocate this land to biodiversity and carbon services. Now, what else can we do with it without disrupting those cycles?"

Cox uses wood from his own managed woodland in Kent to make his furniture

Cox was able to create his life cycle calculator purely based on his own electricity bills and numbers he found in online databases, mitigating the cost of working with an external screening company, which can be prohibitive for a small business.

"Most of the information I've got is just from extensive googling," he said.

"I wanted to create something that was entirely self-led, based on research and a spreadsheet, which I adapt as new data is released."

Carbon stored by trees "can vary so much"

Although this means the final figures aren't independently verified, the designer says they help to provide his studio with a workable estimate.

"It's very much guesswork because we're learning now that the carbon stored by different trees can vary so much depending on the amount of water they had access to," Cox said.

"It can fluctuate a lot but we put in a fairly conservative middle-ground figure."

Most of the company's emissions come from drying the wood and transporting it to the London workshop via lorry.

Cox has already managed to reduce this figure by weaning the timber yards he works with off of red diesel, which is a subsidised, dirtier form of the fossil fuel used by off-road vehicles. Instead, he sends them waste sawdust from his workshop to heat the kilns that dry the wood at around 70 degrees Celsius "like a very cool oven".

"The lorry that comes with the wood also takes our sawdust away," Cox explained. "The drying of the wood is carbon neutral because we're drying it with a waste product. We are obviously releasing that waste as carbon but it's not from a fossil source."

The remaining emissions can largely be traced back to the energy needed to power the workshop itself.

Currently, this comes from non-renewable sources via the energy grid as Cox's studio is part of the larger Thames Side Studios industrial estate, where the landlord claims tariffs can't be changed for individual tenants.

Cox uses "very low energy machinery"

But according to the designer, the carbon stored in the wood still cancels out the associated emissions, as for every kilogram of CO2 his machines emit, another eight are stored in the timber they are processing.

"We use very, very low energy machinery to process the wood into furniture," he said. "And if you're working with solid wood, three-quarters of the material never gets worked or machined."

"There's some carbon tied up in things like screws and glue," Cox added. "But really, that's relatively small because the majority of the material we use is wood."

Sebastian Cox is also in the process of becoming certified as a B Corporation, which involves undertaking an extensive self-assessment of the company's impact on the environment, the community and its workers.

"They make you turn around to your suppliers and your customers to say: 'We're making changes. What can you do?'" Cox explained.

"I think that sort of give-and-take relationship is really essential."

Carbon revolution

This article is part of Dezeen'scarbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is byTaylor van Riper via Unsplash.

The post "We are already carbon negative by some long stretch" says furniture maker Sebastian Cox appeared first on Dezeen.

#carbonrevolution #all #design #wood #sebastiancox #carbonnegativedesign

"Carbon can be an ally in a regenerative future"

By understanding the carbon cycle, designers can work hand in hand with nature to develop sustainable new materials, writes Sebastian Cox.

For trees, anthropogenic climate change is a mixed blessing. If they were capable of rational thought, they would surely be enjoying the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, which increases their mass.

Wood is carbohydrate synthesised from CO2; plants thrive in carbon-rich atmospheres unlike mammals, which perform better with greater concentrations of oxygen in every lungful.

Some trees may be finding temperate climates heating up beyond their preferred conditions, which would of course be very bad news for them. But running with the idea of tree sentience, our ent-like friends would be wise enough to have appreciated that man's discovery of coal saved millions of acres of temperate forest since our prime energy source switched from land-hungry wood to buried fossil energy.

What if we could take a tree's perspective and see the extra CO2 as a resource we can work with?

Of course, tropical forests and wildlands suffer today from the developed world’s insatiable appetite. It’s a mixed and messy picture, as all human endeavours seem to be, but viewing it from the point of view of trees might help us understand it better.

Global heating is a threat to life on earth, but pinning all blame on atmospheric carbon dioxide is a narrow view of our problems. We do need to cease burning fuel that should be left in the ground and we should redress the imbalance we have made with carbon in our skies and seas, but carbon itself isn’t the devil. Rather, it is a substance that our hunger for progress put in the wrong place.

We need to switch to renewable energy that isn’t land-hungry, too. Technology has the answers to our energy needs but the solutions for reducing our carbon imbalance are to be found in studying and working with nature’s cycles and systems.

A good way to do this is to try to view our problems from the perspective of organisms or ecosystems: what if we could take a tree's perspective and see the extra CO2 as a resource we can work with?

Carbon from photosynthesis, not from fossils, should as much as possible constitute the fabric of the things we use and buy.

Carbon is, after all, essential for life. We are made of it, and it’s worth remembering that without the miracle of the greenhouse effect, our planet would be around minus 18 degrees Celsius. We’ve knocked a natural cycle out of balance, but all parts of that cycle are still important to the miracle that is life on earth.

I believe that carbon can be an ally in a regenerative future if we view it in two ways. Firstly, carbon from photosynthesis, not from fossils, should as much as possible constitute the fabric of the things we use and buy. If we restructure our built and material environment using photosynthesised carbohydrates like wood while re-growing the plants we use, we can regeneratively intervene in the carbon cycle.

There is an important definition between deforestation and forestry: as long as the land remains woodland or forest, harvesting the trees is not the same as deforestation. But converting the cleared land to agriculture is.

Of course, this switch in material culture would have been coupled with a move away from emissions-intense materials like concrete and steel to achieve decarbonisation. The mass-timber buildings being built today show this is possible.

In natural environments, carbon is released when wood rots or burns in forest fires. This recycles the carbon, making it available for other vegetation to absorb.

Our buildings are perfect silos for carbon in the form of mass timber.

By the happy accident of wanting to inhabit dry, warm spaces, humans have created interior environments where dried plant matter, like wood from trees or linen from flax, can be preserved indoors without rotting, thereby retaining its carbon for hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, our buildings, which we’re going to need many more of in this century, are perfect silos for carbon in the form of mass timber. As long as the forests or crops regrow, carbon is absorbed with each new cycle while the previous crop’s carbon is stored in the object.

This should form a sound base for a regenerative existence, but it won’t solve the problem alone. The vast volume of buildings we’d have to build to balance the CO2 books through sequestration makes the role of architecture and manufacture just one small but very important part of the solution.

It’s important to understand that 95 per cent of the earth’s surface carbon is dissolved in the ocean. As we’ve emitted carbon that was in the ground, the ocean has soaked it up in equilibrium with the sky. As we go beyond net-zero and start to remove carbon from the atmosphere, the ocean will continue to balance, releasing that excess carbon back to the sky.

Excess carbon’s impact goes beyond just the heating of our earth.

Because of this, even with the greatest carbon-negative intentions, it would take several hundred years to return atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels. We must still endeavour to rebalance the carbon cycle since a natural cycle that goes off-kilter causes damage elsewhere.

Excess carbon’s impact goes beyond just the heating of our earth. It also acidifies our oceans. So using carbon as a resource at every opportunity is the brief we designers must set ourselves.

This centuries-long journey to correcting the carbon cycle feels like a bleak picture but there is hope here, yet again in the form of plants. This brings me to my second view of carbon as an ally: it is the foundation of a hydrology system that cools the planet.

It is in fact water vapour, not carbon dioxide, that is the most abundant greenhouse gas that exerts the greatest pull on global temperatures. The water cycle provides 95 per cent of the effect on the heat dynamics of our planet, whereas carbon dioxide’s impact is four per cent. To solve the existential threat of global heating, we should be also looking to the water cycle to cool our earth.

So how could we possibly control atmospheric water movement? It can be done via a process called transpiration, which is the movement of water through vegetation. When water travels through a plant, it uses energy from the sun, creating a cooling effect as it transpires, in exactly the same way that our sweat cools us.

It takes about 590 calories of energy to transpire a gram of water. When we’re talking litres of water, that’s a lot of calories. You will have noticed how woodland is a cool retreat on a hot day. The more water we can hold on land, the more vegetation can colonise and transpire, and the cooler our planet becomes.

You may also have noticed how moist a healthy woodland soil can feel, even when periods of drought have parched adjacent fields. For every one gram of extra carbon in soils, eight grams of extra water can be held there too because of the complex hygroscopic structure of soil carbon.

The double win of locking both carbon and water into soil and plants should be at the forefront of every designer’s mind.

The more carbon we put in our soils through growing plants in healthy soil, the more water they can hold, leading to more transpiration and eventually more rain. Interestingly, it’s the presence of trees that causes rain in rainforests, not the other way round. The reverse scenario can be true too: remove the forest, and you remove the rain, beginning a journey to becoming desert.

To create more climate-cooling transpiration we should, of course, increase vegetation cover at every opportunity and do so with methods that don’t degrade soils. The double win of locking both carbon and water into soil and plants should be at the forefront of every designer’s mind.

And we should develop a nuanced understanding of these core issues. Monoculture maize sown into ploughed earth and reared with chemicals is not going to help hold water or carbon on land. Native woodland, rewilded land and permanent grassland will.

Walter Jehne, a soil microbiologist and climate scientist who is a leading voice in regenerative agriculture, claims that we’d need to return four per cent of the earth’s degraded land to healthy forest to restore temperatures quickly and safely through the water cycle. Given that we’ve degraded 50 per cent of the earth’s land surface, this seems possible.

If we understand that the hydrological system gives us our largest potential agency over the temperature of our planet, then the way we use our land is our most important consideration for tackling our climate emergency. We need to absorb carbon and cease the unnatural release of it, but we also need to vegetate and regenerate to cycle water and cool.

As designers, we have even more agency than the wider population as we influence and shape how our built and material culture operates. We should better understand the habitats our materials come from and shape our material world around solutions to our existential problems.

The design community should be leading the material world into an intense period of re-greening and cooling our planet, and it should start by finding ways to make the excess carbon we have in our skies a resource to be used to regenerate our earth.

Sebastian Cox is a designer, maker and environmentalist based in south east London. He founded his workshop and studio in 2010 under the principle that the past can be used to design and make the future. Trained as a furniture designer and craftsman at Lincoln University, he now produces his own collections of furniture, lighting and home accessories and collaborates with brands like Burberry to create bespoke installations. His work has been awarded a Design Guild Mark (2017) and he was listed in Forbes list of '30 under 30' in 2018.

Carbon revolution

This article is part of Dezeen'scarbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is byTaylor van Riper via Unsplash.

The post "Carbon can be an ally in a regenerative future" appeared first on Dezeen.

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Sebastian Cox creates subtle treehouse from scorched larch

Designer Sebastian Cox has designed a treehouse in the English countryside that features scorched larch cladding, a shingled roof and a balustrade of chestnut branches.

Cox's studio created the treehouse in Hertfordshire for the children of a client, who now have a private play area within sight of the family home.

The treehouse is built on an Atlas cedar tree

Made in collaboration with Root and Shoot treehouse builders and engineer Timberwright, the cabin is made from a combination of English ash, sweet chestnut and larch woods.

It sits on the lowest branch of a large Atlas cedar.

It is built on two cantilevered beams

The designers wanted to create a structure that blended into the tree, so they avoided putting in posts extending down to the ground.

Instead, the 2.5 by 2.3-metre house is built onto two cantilevered chestnut beams that they called "the chopsticks". It is anchored onto the tree at a minimal four points.

The roof is made of cleft chestnut shakes

Inspired by the "flexibility and strength of medieval buildings", the studio created the treehouse's frame from English ash using pegged mortise and tenon joints, which give it a precision look.

It chose the scorched larch external cladding for its shadowy quality, allowing the treehouse to recede into the tree.

Old-fashioned roof shingles are made from shakes of chestnut wood. Because these are cleft rather than sawn, the shakes have a rough finish.

A balustrade made of chestnut branches from a coppiced tree surrounds the balcony. While the house has only small windows, a central light well stops it from being dark inside.

A light well keeps the interior from being dark

"We wanted to produce something simple and measured that felt as though it were part of the tree," said Sebastian Cox studio co-director Brogan Cox.

"We didn't want to create something loud and shouty or something that dwarfed the tree in scale or size."

The scorched larch helps the house to recede into the branches

"The cedar tree is in a prominent position as you approach the house down the drive so we wanted to make something which was subtle and receded into the tree in some way," she added.

"Hence the scorched cladding and subtle windows which are low and relatively small."

Sebastian Cox is known for his crafts-based work and environmental advocacy. His past work includes furniture made from mushroom mycelium and the low-carbon wood installation The Invisible Store of Happiness.

Photography is by Adam Firman.

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