Digital Construction Comes to the Pacific Northwest: Timber and the Landscapes of Automation

Automation—understood as a reconfiguration of work and material culture—unfolds in relation to specific histories and ecologies. This article analyzes how recent enthusiasm for digitization in construction intersects with the legacy of the timber industry in Western North America. Drawing on industry literature and fieldwork from the architecture, construction, and forestry industries in Oregon and Washington, the article describes how the use of information technology to automate construction is inseparable from existing political ecologies of resource extraction. Two cases illuminate how investments in digital design, prefabrication, and logistics interface with material flows at landscape scale and with the social terrain on which seemingly unrelated issues—like forestry, wildfire, or housing equity—are negotiated.