On June 24, 2025, the Weyerhaeuser Company, one of the largest timber producers in the United States, broke ground on a new factory in Monticello, Arkansas. Executives and local officials posed for photos in construction vests and hard hats to celebrate the new $500 million facility that they promise will create jobs and generate property tax revenue. Historically, Weyerhaeuser’s main business has been cultivating trees and milling them into boards, planks, and other products. However, this new facility is not a mill but a factory, one that will use a category of wood called “southern yellow pine” to manufacture a composite building product called TimberStrand. The company has also spent the last several years buying up large parts of forest in the southern part of the country—where different species of southern yellow pine are grown, especially loblolly pine. In parallel, Weyerhaeuser sold its iconic suburban headquarters building, designed by SOM in 1971, and moved its location to a more generic and flexible office space in downtown Seattle. And in 2025, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) created a new futures contract for southern yellow pine (SYP). This new contract is a signal that ratifies the same trajectory suggested by Weyerhaeuser’s new headquarters, new factory, and its investment in a new composite material: an increasing interchangeability of material, space, and experience, or what can be understood as an epidemic of fungibility.
Once a concept reserved for commodities trading and futures markets, today, all manner of things can be employed in place of something else with little noticeable impact. This is, of course, an essential feature of all commodities, and the observation that architecture has been assembled with commoditized elements is nothing new. What is worth exploring further, however, is what happens when a building element shifts categories. Timber was historically resistant to commoditization, but under various pressures, including global economic policies, the industry is accelerating that process. In case of Weyerhaeuser and TimberStrand, the confluence of a new all-purpose timber building product with a new mechanism for profiting from it—and the company’s shift from an iconic building to a generic, commoditized building—is symptomatic of this phenomenon. Moreover, TimberStrand is made from shredded southern yellow pine, which makes it fungible in its application as well, since it can be used for walls, joists, or beams. As a result, architecture is losing a grip on its original logics of assembly (i.e., a “tectonic” approach). What emerges instead is a kind of media-tectonics in which prior hierarchies and sequences are not as relevant. While the global construction industry rapidly pursues total interchangeability, being open to the less pure aspects of this reality can make space for other trajectories.
Futures
Futures are contracts between a buyer and seller for a certain amount of a commodity at an agreed upon price and time. For suppliers, this guarantees a predictable price, and for buyers, it ensures access to the material in question. However, there are substantial dynamics in the trading of futures contracts, as hedgers and speculators buy or sell according to predictions about the performance of a commodity.1 While Chicago was historically the center of the US futures market, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, lumber was not part of this until 1969.2 As William Cronon points out, “For those who marketed it, lumber was bulky, expensive to store, and easy to damage. It had none of the liquid qualities that had allowed grain elevators to transform the handling of wheat and corn. These characteristics all made it difficult to treat lumber quite so abstractly as grain and thus made it less suited to the speculative needs of the futures market.”3 In other words, the specific materiality of lumber—what made it desirable as a building product—made it less desirable as a tradable commodity. Without this commodity status, the industry was unstable, and its growth was haphazard.
One of the issues that prevented the commodification of lumber was the lack of standardization, both in terms of quality and quantity. The variability of unmilled logs made transforming it to boards physically difficult and economically unpredictable. Furthermore, assembling these nonuniform elements required specialized training and experience. Dimensional lumber was developed at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as the need for housing grew along with the US population and its westward expansion. Many of these houses were based on popular pattern books that specified exact dimensions. Sawmills understood this and began producing lumber with consistent precision so that board dimensions could be specified ahead of time and then would only need to be cut to proper lengths. This not only streamlined the logistics of gathering and transporting raw materials, as it is easier to move standardized quantities around. It also significantly simplified construction labor by reducing the skill needed to assemble lengths of standardized dimensions.4 What once required specific joinery skills now required only a hammer and nails.
While the origins of commodity trading were linked to contiguous hinterlands, the deregulation of global trade under the broad umbrella of neoliberalism has changed the way commodities like lumber are bought, sold, and managed. The twentieth-century futures market was relatively straightforward: purchasers who needed wood for a project (e.g., a home developer) could secure that supply ahead of time and then expect to see that lumber at the agreed upon time, location, and price, which a combination of trains and trucks would facilitate. The contemporary situation is not as direct, since a single supplier might be sourcing material from many locations, shipping logs to an overseas mill, and then shipping them back as dimensional lumber or as reconstituted building products.
Historically speaking, the United States has been an importer of softwood, primarily from Canada. As a result, the price of lumber futures has been—and still is—largely connected to supplies from its northern neighbor. However, US timber production has been increasing in the last two decades, largely because of a focus on softwood grown in the south and east of the country—which is generally referred to as southern yellow pine. Typically, southern yellow pine stock is not large enough to make structural elements. But it is abundant, and in suitable qualities can be used as an ingredient to make a range of building products like TimberStrand. The SYP futures contract was created by the CME under pressure from producers to decouple production from international sources and to create more markets for domestic lumber.5
Products
TimberStrand is a construction product in which small strands of wood are fused to create dimensional lumber for framing as well as structural elements like beams and joists. Similar to other laminated strand products, TimberStrand enhances and extends the material properties of wood through the addition of binding materials in the manufacturing process. From shreds of timber emerge a flexible building product poised to replace both dimensional lumber and structural timber. It is strong enough to function in a structural capacity but cheap enough to be turned into framing panels. Its composite nature allows for openings to be created almost as needed, so it can be perforated in ways that steel and concrete cannot. Prior forms of laminated timber would often require either tight coordination of intersections or would predetermine the positions of utilities, soffits, etc. TimberStrand flattens out tectonic hierarchies, and in doing so suggests an approach to material assembly—to the formal, spatial, volumetric, and organizational dimensions of a project—that cares more about performance and format than tectonically driven logics.
Products like TimberStrand are referred to as “laminated strand lumber” (LSL) and are part of a larger family of engineered lumber including laminated products like cross-laminated timber (CLT), as well as composite material like oriented strand board (OSB) and medium-density fiberboard (MDF). By taking small elements, aligning their orientations, and binding them with additives, a new hybrid product emerges. In the language of the market, value has been added through a significant investment of energy, labor, and material. This perceived value is further supported by positive associations with monumental lumber of another era. But while products like TimberStrand are made with wood, referring to them as “timber” is somewhat misleading. Instead, their relationship to wood is mediatic and format-based, in the sense that raw material is being reshaped and reconfigured but still influences its use performance. The linearity, directionality, and seriality of contemporary timber construction start to loosen if we are reminded that the material is only manufactured to resemble timber.
Understanding timber as a medium replaces a kind of tectonic morality with format as the expression of material performance. If one considers an architectural assembly as a configuration of media formats, each containing and conditioning their own forms of information, methods of perception and assembly can develop with more flexibility and with less adherence to prior categories. Buildings, in this sense, are a media format that contain information in a certain state. Their stability, however, is always in flux. They arrest matter in motion for a time before it becomes something else. Because media always contain other media, their “value” changes depending on their format. Increasingly, the flexibility of such formats is desirable so that they can adapt to unpredictable extrinsic forces. In fact, it was a certain amount of inflexibility of Weyerhaeuser’s original building that drove the company to find an alternative.
Platform
Weyerhaeuser, now one of the largest “timberlands” companies in the world, was founded in the Pacific Northwest in 1900. While Weyerhaeuser has been recently focusing on its southern market, especially with the emergence of SYP futures contracts, it remains anchored to its origins in the Pacific Northwest, the historic center of domestic softwood production in the US. Weyerhaeuser commissioned SOM and SWA (formerly Sasaki, Walker and Associates) to design a headquarters for the company that integrated architecture with an idealized first nature and maintained an association between the company and the territories that it manages and cultivates. The building, which opened 1971, itself is situated between two small ridges and flanked by parking at each end but on opposite faces. As arriving by car was a matter of necessity, one would exit the freeway and either turn left past a meadow and into one of the terraced parking lots or continue across the newly created pond to the opposite lot. Both approaches created distance from the building so as to apprehend it as a piece of the landscape, of “nature.” By locating it this way, the building operated as a series of trays shaped in part by their adjacent landscapes. The cross section of the building reinforces this, which is pyramidal in its transverse section but an inverse pyramid longitudinally. It is, as a result, both narrower and wider in each direction. To achieve this, each floor is capped by a projecting zone of steel and concrete capable of holding enough soil to create the green strips that define the exterior.
The site plan and architectural resolution included further efforts to destabilize the architectural object. The design privileges its ambiguous figure: one perceives the building in the context of its site, but once inside, deep awnings and low windows keep the views internally focused. One sees into the building from outside, and then further into the building from the inside. In comparison to the range of corporate architectures being developed in the late 1960s/early 1970s, Weyerhaeuser stands out for the way its boundaries are illegible. Rather than a clear figure in a bucolic ground, as was the case for many buildings of the era, Weyerhaeuser is feathered into its flanking topography, its terraces integrated with the dense rows of trees that define the stepped parking.
In the second phase of the campus, SOM designed and constructed the Weyerhaeuser Technology Center (1978). Situated in the wooded northern section of the campus, the building is a crisp rectilinear figure in plan that includes an office wing and a laboratory wing connected by a pavilion with interior and exterior spaces. While the headquarters used the load-bearing capacity of concrete to support planting and landscape, the technology center is more of a demonstration of Weyerhaeuser’s products, and built from large, laminated timber girders and columns. Clear span requirements driven by the laboratory and testing functions give the elements significant depth, which in turn governs the tectonic expression of the rest of the building. A material hierarchy governs subsequent design elements, like the office trays that hang from the larger structure and the plywood diaphragm roof.6
Weyerhaeuser sold their SOM campus to Industrial Really Group for $70.5 million in 2016.7 The timberlands company was finding the 800,000 square feet of space to be too much for them and relocated to a compact, 150,000-square-foot office building in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle, just south of the downtown core.8 Evidence of the calculative logic of corporate management, the headquarters building was a sterling example of corporate patronage, but not integral enough to the company to insist on keeping it, especially when they needed a more nimble spatial approach.9 IRG has since added two additional warehouses to the northeast of the main building, in spite of outcries from leading figures in the field of architecture and landscape.10
Morality and Fungibility
Commodity futures transform and abstract materials that are unique in origin. The formal process of rendering lumber tradeable on the futures market only happened relatively recently because of the unpredictability of the material itself. However, industry standardization and supply chain developments mean the differences between trees no longer matter as much; the economic utility of the lumber they produce is similar enough to the point of being interchangeable. TimberStrand (and other strand-based construction media) grinds wood into strands, only further reinforcing its interchangeability—indeed, making it more like grain. Construction can therefore be understood as working with a spectrum of fungible to non-fungible materials.
Prevailing approaches to construction also tend to conform to ideas of tectonic legibility, which are fundamentally tied to notions of morality. For example, Louis Kahn’s oft-referenced suggestion that bricks like arches over concrete lintels because there is an imagined purity to that form of expression. SOM’s use of timber on the Weyerhaeuser technical building similarly highlights the rational performance of laminated timber beams and foregrounds its form of expression and architectural identity. TimberStrand, an engineered product made of woodchips, binding agents, and other additives, lacks rational expression. If bricks like an arch and laminated beams like a span, TimberStrand is indifferent.
Combining these two spectra—non-fungible/fungible, moral/amoral—generates a field of pairs that illuminate the implications but also the possibilities of media tectonics. Moral and non-fungible buildings include the unique and unreproducible: a beautiful redwood plank or an iconic suburban concrete headquarters building constructed in a pre-climate disaster imagination that could never be built again. Moral and fungible buildings include standardized forms of construction elements that remain “true” forms of expression, like glulam beams, dimensional lumber, etc. With the emergence of mass timber in the construction imaginary, narratives of sustainable forestry practices can provide cover for industrial timber plantations. As Laila Seewang clearly charts, it is through the arduous work of supply chain stewardship that real progress can be made.11 Amoral and fungible buildings are perhaps the most familiar category—the tilt-up warehouses and serial-produced housing products are driven by commercial demands and demonstrate no aspiration beyond those. Finally, the last category, amoral and non-fungible buildings, can be glimpsed in recent disciplinary interest in dis-assembly and re-assembly, circular construction, etc. Non-fungibility takes material out of circulation and recognizes its value as a unique thing, but one without a “true” or inherent form of expression. Rather than creating narratives of purity, this category admits that hybridity is a precondition. As architecture is pressured to become further entangled in global supply chains and escalating speculative loops, it might look for other pathways to value creation, strands and all.
“Firms engaged in producing, processing, marketing or using lumber and lumber products have been able to hedge their risk exposure… Usually, but not always, hedgers transfer unwanted price risk to speculators. Speculators are investors who hope to achieve profits by buying futures when they think prices will rise or by selling futures when they think prices will fall.” From “An Introductory Guide to Random Length Lumber Futures and Options,” CME Group, 2009, ➝.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) first listed lumber futures in 1969 as “Random Length Lumber” futures contracts. Today, the CME trades lumber futures under the designation LBR, one trade unit of which consists of 110,000 board feet of 2x4s at different lengths (from 8 to 20 feet).
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1st ed (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 178.
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 178.
“U.S. Finalizes 35% Tariffs on Canadian Softwood Lumber,” Forest Data Network, August 23, 2025, ➝.
SOM: Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Architecture and Urbanism 1973–1983 (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje,1983), 92.
“Sale of Weyerhaeuser’s Federal Way Campus Means More Intensive Development,” The Seattle Times, February 9, 2026, ➝.
On Weyerhaeuser’s new building: “Weyerhaeuser Headquarters at 200 Occidental,” JTM Construction, ➝.
“New Roots for Timber Giant: Weyerhaeuser Headquarters at 200 Occidental,” Mithun, ➝.
For the Docomomo campaign: “Weyerhaeuser International Headquarters,” Docomomo US, ➝.
Laila Seewang, “Narratives of Sequestration, e-flux Architecture, December 2023, ➝.
