Understanding the relationship between the College and the land upon which it sits is a simple matter of seeing the forests for the trees.
By John Elder
Photographs by Bridget Besaw Gorman
Whenever I step into McCardell Bicentennial Hall, I'm struck by the prominence and beauty of the woodwork in that grand space. The unusually generous use of wood in the paneling, walls, and wainscoting, and in the frames around departmental display-cases, complements the dark-gray slate floors and brings a warm glow to one of the largest academic buildings on campus. The Great Hall is most immediately impressive, with its rectangular panels of red oak sheathing an atrium that soars for five stories through the center of the building. Yet this fall, when I had the privilege of teaching a class in Bi Hall, I noticed two further aspects of the interior that had previously escaped me. One was the wide variety of woods featured—frequently a different species for each floor. The other was the fact that the boards used here are often marked by dramatic variations of grain and color, and even by knots, in a way one might not expect in such an ambitious (and expensive) facility.
The distinctive treatment of interior wood in Bi Hall reflects a commitment by the College, itself, to use as much sustainably grown lumber as possible in the construction of our science center and other new buildings and to focus especially on wood from our own region and state. The term sustainable forestry refers to the goal of long-term production of timber in a given site, as opposed to the heavy cutting (followed by subdivision) that is currently fragmenting so many forests from Georgia to Maine. A related concept is that of green certification, a set of principles and inspections assuring purchasers of forest products that soils and wildlife habitat are being protected. Both concepts rest on the premise that humans have the capacity to work in the woods in ways that serve our own needs while at the same time showing respect for the needs and integrity of the forest itself.
The College's commitment to sustainability turned out to have many implications—not only for the designs of new buildings on campus, but for the forest ecology and economy of Vermont, and for Middlebury's relationship with the larger community of our state. On the level of design, it meant that Daniel Arons, Bi Hall's architect, was called upon to rethink his original plan to use clear red oak throughout. According to a Vermont Family Forests report, only 4 percent of the trees in Vermont are in fact red oak, and few of those are big enough to provide clear-grained boards. Thus, in order for Middlebury to promote sustainable forestry in the state, Arons needed to adapt his design to what grew here. While red oak would still be used in the Great Hall and west wing, beech, ash, sugar maple, red maple, cherry, and birch would be featured on different floors in the north and south wings. Vermont is a heavily forested state today, but extensive clear cutting in the 19th and the 20th centuries have left many of our trees on the small side. In order to make the most of the available lumber—and encourage long-term planning in our forest industry—it was also necessary to find value "character" wood rather than insisting on clear boards. In practice, this architectural reorientation (quoting again from a VFF report) "allowed for the wood to vary in color, as it often does between the heartwood and sapwood within a single tree. It also allowed for what the grading standards call 'natural growth variations' such as mineral stains or different grain patterns."
The impact of such variation in the woodwork turns out to be spectacular. Rather than just contributing a subliminal element to the overall design, this wood grabs you. I know that I'm often arrested in hurrying down a Bi Hall corridor by the flamed and swirled boards around me, and I've seen any number of faculty members and students pause to study (and touch) these walls in a way that woodwork ordinarily does not inspire. In trying to understand why such heightened awareness of our daily surroundings is valuable, I can't help thinking of the literary formalists at the beginning of the 20th century, who focused on the devices by which literature makes language "strange." They found such an effect valuable (quoting from Terry Eagleton's account) because, "[I]n the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, or . . . 'automatized.' Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more 'perceptible.' By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way than usual, the world which that language contains is vividly renewed." Just so, the surprises and contrasts within the treatment of wood in Bi Hall can inspire greater mindfulness of the relationship between our campus and the forests of Vermont. They can remind us, too, that this connection has an ethical dimension, as well as aesthetic and economic ones.
As President John McCardell said when Bicentennial Hall was being completed, "At Middlebury we define education broadly. Everything we do is an opportunity to educate." And education is always more than a simple transmission of knowledge. It is a commitment to serious dialogue and exploration within a learning community. Middlebury has entered into a conversation with the forests of Vermont, and with the architects, mill-owners, foresters, and loggers who connect us to those forests; and it is a conversation that continues to unfold in surprising ways. In interviewing colleagues about the use of sustainably harvested lumber in our recent major building projects, I've noticed their consistent emphasis on educational and environmental values.
A desire to proceed on a principled basis, rather than to accept more familiar, thus predictable—and convenient—protocols of construction and design, continues to guide Middlebury's building projects. When I walked over to the Service Building to talk about the College's use of green-certified wood with Tom McGinn, Middlebury's project manager for new construction, I found his office piled high with blueprints, maps, invoices, and reports. It would be understandable, amid the many technical and budgeting challenges of a job like his, to be anxious about any unproven approaches. But Tom's comments always returned to the importance of enacting the College's core values in our practical decisions. Such an orientation is certainly consonant with the flourishing of environmental studies at Middlebury and with the College's nationally recognized leadership in conservation, recycling, composting, and other "greening-of-the-campus" initiatives. But Tom was equally emphatic about Middlebury's responsibility beyond campus, as one of the largest, wealthiest institutions in Vermont. Middlebury's choices inevitably have a major impact upon the state and region, he remarked, and one of the central goals, he said, is "to mainstream the idea of using green-certified lumber."
Nan Jenks-Jay, director of Environmental Affairs at Middlebury and chair of the Environmental Council, repeatedly raised a similar question in discussing recent building projects: "How can Middlebury be a catalyst for change in Vermont?" Nan has herself been a powerful force behind using sustainably harvested lumber not only in McCardell Bicentennial Hall, but also in projects like Ross and Atwater Commons, the new recycling center, and the new College library. When Bi Hall was dedicated, she had the idea of holding a reception for as many of the people—the foresters and the loggers and the woodworkers—who had a hand in integrating sustainable wood in such an inspiring way. Bill Torrey, a logger from Bolton who is widely known for the carefulness of his work in the woods, said after touring the building, "I got a kick out of the fact that I could trace the boards back to the woods they came from. It snapped my garter." Nan Jenks-Jay has worked to assure that, in subsequent construction projects, we would use even more wood from Vermont than the 30 percent used in Bicentennial Hall. Such a commitment makes it much more likely that woodlot owners in the Green Mountains will plan for long-term sustainable harvesting rather than take the road of clear-cutting and subdivision of Vermont's open land. The ripples from our policies spread in other directions, too. As was true in the design of Bi Hall, the architects for Ross entered into a creative dialogue with the College's principles. After being shown samples of "character-marked" woods from the Vermont forests, they became convinced to change their original specification of clear cherry from Pennsylvania. In the end, more than 95 percent of the architectural wood in the Ross buildings was sustainably harvested from woodlots in Vermont, while sixty percent was harvested from Middlebury's Bread Loaf forestlands, the same woodland that is used by the College and the community for hiking, Nordic skiing, and scientific research.
As Nan said to me, the architects of Ross learned to see "character-marks" as "a feature, as opposed to a fractured idea." Architect Tai Soo Kim became so fascinated by the stories told in the grain and knots of such lumber that in designing the Ross Commons Lounge he worked with "sawyers, millers, and carpenters to maintain the order in which the wood was sawn and mounted to the walls, creating a visual story of individual trees in each array of horizontal paneling for this room." Similarly, students entering the Ross dining hall pass under photographs detailing the entire process of harvesting and processing the wood for their new living space. One of these shows Middlebury alumnus John Anderson '94 standing beside a yellow birch log, which he is about to haul out of the woods with a pair of horses.
Reinforcing the leadership on campus has been the vision and expertise of David Brynn of Vermont Family Forests. David founded VFF while serving as Addison County Forester for over two decades, and he continues to offer that organization leadership now that he has assumed the directorship of the new sustainable-forestry initiative at the Rubenstein School of University of Vermont. In addition to the dozens of smaller forests linked and guided through VFF (including my own family's sugarbush in Starksboro), VFF has also forged connections with the College's extensive forest holdings around Bread Loaf. These woodlands have long been carefully stewarded by the College Forester Steve Weber, so that large portions of them could quickly be certified under the Forest Stewardship Council and the even higher standards of VFF. Where conventional forestry plans have often started with potential production and have only noted "other" values in passing at the end, VFF standards begin by emphasizing ecological factors.
Planning roads to minimize erosion and soil loss is one critical value of what VFF calls "ecological forestry," while maintaining a large number of standing snags for habitat, carefully buffering streams, avoiding pesticides, favoring native species, and fostering both age and species diversity in the forests are others. In essence, Middlebury has been exposed to a vision of the woods as a living community, not just a supply depot or a mine of raw materials.
In the planning for our new library, this emphasis on community and collaboration took exciting new directions. A well-known furniture company in Island Pond had closed down its factory and moved the operation to China, withdrawing a major source of employment from Vermont's lovely but economically marginal Northeast Kingdom. Many of the skilled woodworkers in Island Pond decided to see whether they could make a go of it as an independent new concern, but it was unclear whether that effort would turn out to be viable. At this moment of uncertainty, the College promised that if the Island Pond woodworkers could manage to be up and going by the time we needed carrels, wooden ends for the bookshelves, and furniture for the library, we would offer them $500,000 worth of contracts.
The results have been splendid. While most new libraries being constructed at such a large scale would aquire shelves from an architectural catalogue, the College's library shelves are distinctively bookended with sugar maple cut from our own land above Crystal Brook at Bread Loaf; Charles Gwathmey, the principal architect for the library, quickly became enthusiastic about the goal of using maple from our land, too, so that it eventually accounted for at least 80 percent of the interior wood in the whole project.
Another notable feature of the library is the furniture, much of which was made by the firm of Beeken Parsons, which is housed at Shelburne Farms and known for its use of "character" woods. Beeken Parsons produced all the chairs and tables in the library and used only maple grown on the College's land in Ripton. The solidity and simplicity of this furniture is a special attraction of the library for me. When I'm trying to finish grading a set of papers, I'll often carry my briefcase over to the library from my Munroe Hall office so that I can work on one of those stately tables. Their deep, rubbed finish and the little knots and curlicues within the rich beauty of the wood encourage me to move ahead with these pressing tasks. I believe that the students studying with me at the same table may feel a similar experience of uplift from the quality of their surroundings. A residential college, after all, is an intentional community. The grandeur of this high-ceilinged reading room, with its distinguished furniture, can foster a greater spaciousness in our reflections and our conversations.
Of course, an important factor in using green-certified lumber is obviously the extra cost incurred by following best practices in the woods and enforcing uniform standards throughout the chain of custody from logs to framing and furniture. Middlebury has been willing to pay a modest premium on such lumber both in the interests of our students' education in ecological stewardship and in order to help bring the sustainable lumber industry in our state to scale. However, there can also be surprising economic benefits, as well. A few years ago, students in Chris Klyza's environmental studies senior seminar did an analysis of the sustainable wood in the construction of LaForce Hall. One interesting comparison was between the actual cost of birch and beech for that project with what it would likely have cost to use the Pennsylvania cherry originally requested by the architect. The trucking, sawing, milling, and drying figures were all quite comparable between the original plan and the decided approach. The actual cost of logging in Vermont, with more and smaller trees, more uneven terrain, and higher standards for roads, buffers, and single-stem selection was at least $10,000 higher than it would have been otherwise. But the lower stumpage costs for birch and beech, along with a significantly lower amount going to middlemen in our system, meant that VFF wood cost $67,661 while the average price for Pennsylvania cherry in the same period would have meant a total of $105,270. Beginning with ecological values, then, we also adjusted our aesthetic expectations in a way that made for a more frugal choice. The architect for Ross Commons and LaForce, Tia Soo Kim, subsequently wrote to VFF, "Your fundamental concern for managed use of and replenishment of our forests is admirable. More Americans need to be involved, particularly those of us who've been rather indiscriminate in our usage. Education is the key. You are teaching us that managed sustainable forest land is not only necessary, but economical."
Indeed, as we read the stories of the forest in the swirl of character-marked boards, we will gain a broad, refreshing context within which to consider our next steps. In walking between the College's new buildings, too, we can lift our eyes to the forested ridges framing the campus to the east and south, and be reminded that our little academic community is part of a broader circle of life.
John Elder is the Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies and the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run. He recently received a Guggenheim fellowship to complete a book about the forests of Vermont.