Resituating timber imaginaries: Learning from <i>Araucaria cunninghamii</i> (hoop pine)

Timber, forests, and plantations are increasingly positioned within global visions of architectural futures as critical to the future of architecture, both materially and discursively. Yet current global timber imaginaries tend to produce aestheticised environmental relations and rely heavily on desituated accounts given to the selection of materials for construction. This article resituates contemporary architectural knowledges of timber, following Araucaria cunninghamii (hoop pine) through a deep-dive case study into a complex web of ecological, historical, colonial, economic, aesthetic, and cultural relations. In thus resituating knowledges of hoop pine, a fuller entanglement with what is materially ongoing within colonial and ecological injustices is revealed, setting out a critical first step towards situated imaginaries in practice.