Interlochen Arts Academy – Forest Thinking and Design Course

Teaching teenagers to chop down trees was not on our bucket list for 2019 or 2020, but it ended up being a highlight of both years. Working closely with the Interlochen Arts Academy we co-created a venture to use a local forest as a place for immersive, hands-on learning, teaching students to understand and use the forest with respect and awe. The confidence, focus and enthusiasm of these students grew with every swing of the axe and stroke of the saw!

Teaching principles of sustainable forest management, design and construction at Interlochen Academy for the Arts

Pilot Projects was hired as the “artist in residence” by Interlochen Academy for the Arts, with support from Wilsonart, to co-create a hands on ecological learning experience for this renowned high school in northern Michigan. Our three-semester program over 2019 and 2020 is taking students on a journey of research, design, prototyping, and finally constructing an outdoor lakeside teaching and learning pavilion made from wood sourced from the campus’s own forests. This fall, students in professor Mary Ellen Newport’s ecology classes established and surveyed the forest to understand its ecology and timber stocks, created a micro-forest management plan, and designed scale-model wooden bridges made from timber they could sustainably harvest from this small forest area. Working in groups they felled, bucked, milled, and dried timber and then fabricated 1:10 scale models of “mass timber” bridges. We are thrilled to see new skills and knowledge being developed through this challenge - for the students, and for us too!  (Stay tuned for more photos on our project page, and the final bridge test results in early February).

The students took trees from the forest, and created “lumber” for their mass timber bridges at 1:10 scale. Bridges were then load-tested in the following semester to great fanfare.

See a video of the project here

This project, while small in scale, encapsulates the global systems thinking approach to integrating ecology, city-building, and design that defines our recent work.

Dr Sarah Wilson leading a DBH demonstration 

Scott Francisco teaching how to fell a small tree - making a face-cut notch to allow tree to fall freely in specified direction

Teams "bucked" their logs into managable lengths for band-saw ripping into speicified lumber sizes.

As teams assessed their material in the shop, the bridge design process continued: species, sizes, strengths, geometry!

Each student team had to buck, mill and dry thier lumber for their bridge construction

The beginnings of a truss bridge from solid-sawn maple members.

Laying up a glu-lam arch on a parabolic form.


Arch carrying the full load via suspender cables supporting the deck. Deck hinge ensured full load transfer.


Segmented arch with mid height deck reduced stress on the arch and thrust at the abutments.

This stepped double glu-lam beam bridge was thickend at the point of maximum bending stress.

This solid-sawn truss was a light and stiff solution. Notches provided strong pin connections to resist shear. 

All of the bridges passed their load tests with flying colours - most exceeded requirements by 100%, some by 200%