I came across some cork that a man­u­fac­tur­er was try­ing to get rid of, so I found myself with three valu­able things: a large amount of mate­r­i­al; my school’s well-equipped stu­dio space; and the time to focus on work from a spec­u­la­tive per­spec­tive. I dis­cov­ered that cork does things that no oth­er mate­r­i­al can quite do. It bends and flex­es and com­press­es. There was also the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect of it. Peo­ple had an emo­tion­al response to an object, because we have a col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of cork, but they saw it used in a way they nev­er expe­ri­enced. I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to change the con­text around objects, which gave me the inspi­ra­tion to keep going. 

At the time, mass man­u­fac­tur­ers had not exper­i­ment­ed with cork, so I quick­ly learned how to design things that were unique to cork as a mate­r­i­al, and which I could man­u­fac­ture in my own stu­dio or with close col­lab­o­ra­tors nearby.

I first got involved with cork in the mid-2000s, about six to eight years after screw caps and plas­tic stop­pers had real­ly hit the mar­ket and under­cut the nat­ur­al cork indus­try. In the past 10 years, nat­ur­al cork has rebound­ed to a pre-screw­caps lev­el, because the indus­try has leaned into the eco­log­i­cal­ly regen­er­a­tive nature of the mate­r­i­al and elim­i­nat­ed the spoilage effect that nat­ur­al cork could some­times have on wine. All that said, the pro­duc­tion of cork wine stop­pers is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to the cork I use, which is waste mate­r­i­al from the pro­duc­tion of those stop­pers. If we can pro­mote the pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al cork stop­pers, we increase the sup­ply of cork build­ing mate­ri­als, there­by low­er­ing their cost. All these mar­ket forces are interlinked.

The for­est can only pro­duce so much mate­r­i­al, and no cork grow­er wants to over­stress the trees. They have to stick to a very strict har­vest­ing sched­ule, and they have to hire skilled and well-paid peo­ple to har­vest the trees. Yet peo­ple who see cork as an excit­ing new mate­r­i­al in archi­tec­ture and inte­ri­ors want to bring the cost down, and one way to do so is to increase the supply.

I col­lab­o­rate with a lot of indus­tri­al part­ners in Por­tu­gal and Spain, and with design firms that are inter­est­ed in using cork on much larg­er-scale projects. I’m also work­ing on a strate­gic project about increas­ing the sup­ply of nat­ur­al cork on the world mar­ket while also heal­ing the nat­ur­al sys­tems that sup­port cork trees: the more I learn about the agri­cul­tur­al sys­tems of cork, the more I real­ize we can be plant­i­ng cork forests through­out the world — and that nat­ur­al sys­tems will ben­e­fit as a result.

I would say that a thriv­ing, work­ing cork for­est has four pos­i­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics, eco­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing. One is the car­bon seques­tra­tion. These forests are sink­ing car­bon from our atmos­phere. The sec­ond has to do with the com­plex­i­ty of the root sys­tems with­in the cork forests, which help to pro­tect soil struc­ture. Three is that, with­in a thriv­ing for­est, you have thriv­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty. And num­ber four, cork trees are nat­u­ral­ly fire-resis­tant. I imag­ine plant­i­ng cork forests in cen­tral California.

The oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty con­cerns reclaim­ing used cork stop­pers. Cork is almost infi­nite­ly recy­clable, and you can recy­cle cork stop­pers into build­ing mate­ri­als. Cur­rent­ly, there is not a robust infra­struc­ture for col­lec­tion, nor a sys­tem for reusing those cork stop­pers. We need to build net­works of col­lec­tion facil­i­ties and pro­cess­ing points.

Peo­ple who work with land look for the quick­est and biggest return on invest­ment. It’s a major threat, because in cork regions where tourism is surg­ing, like Por­tu­gal, build­ing a lux­u­ry devel­op­ment that depletes the water table and dam­ages forests offers quick­er, big­ger returns than stew­ard­ing a cork for­est. I can’t blame a landown­er for want­i­ng a return on invest­ment, but the more that we can com­mu­ni­cate the oppor­tu­ni­ties of cork, the more we can fight against threats.