Campus trees are becoming benches

Students returning to Cal State Long Beach this fall will find new wooden benches distributed throughout campus.

What they may not realize, though, is that they’ve probably seen these benches before —only, they were trees.

New benches made from diseased and unsafe campus trees will be placed in the Academic Services building by fall, and followed by hundreds more throughout campus, said Ryan Taber, head of the College of the Arts’ wood program.

Physical Planning and Facilities Management said more seating was needed on campus, and they saw an opportunity to get students in the COTA studio wood program involved, Taber said.

“I asked about a possible collaboration on a project to get students more involved in the infrastructure of how things get done in the university,” Taber said.

During winter break, the trees were cut down by arborists who annually trim and cut trees that can no longer be left standing on campus.

PPFM’s manager of grounds and landscaping services, Brian McKinnon, said COTA has been using wood from campus trees for student projects for the past eight years. The bench project, though, will be the first time that wood program students use the trees to create something that will be used by all students throughout the university.

The initial designs and prototypes for the benches will be made with hand sketches and digital rendering by students in the Introduction to Wood class, said Nardeana Nop, a junior graphic design major who is a student in the class.

“We each come up with two or three designs, and then the groups make small models of them,” Nop said. “Our group is incorporating a wave type design to play off of the idea of a beach.”

The initial set of designs will detail future benches for the second floor of the Academic Services building, Taber said. He said the next step for the advanced wood class is to take the designs and create full or half-scale prototypes of the benches.

“What we are hoping to do is create a design … that will get students to really consider this site and how they interact with this campus, metaphorically and literally, as a sort of social ecology,” Taber said.

Throughout the project, advanced and beginning students, faculty members and facility planning managers will regularly update one another in order to find the easiest producible and aesthetically pleasing product, Taber said.

Senior studio art major and advanced wood student Rashid Crisostomo said the project is a good model for real-world experience and a great way for students to build an understanding of the relationship between designers and builders.

“Since two parties are involved in this project, it is not just up to us,” Crisostomo said. “Our designs are not going to be exactly how the outcome will be, so I think it’s an interesting experience for both parties, especially the students.”

If all goes as planned, students will work until the end of April to produce their models, Taber said. The models will then be handed over to the carpentry shop, which is a group of professional carpenters who build and maintain everything from bookshelves to roofs on campus.