On a cold January morning, Alex and I ventured into a small wooded area behind the lab where all the HANNAH magic happened to scavenge for fallen branches. The uneven barky skin of the branches was covered in moss and lichen, which were quite lovely. Finding a way to expand, transform and spatialize the material without losing this rawness of its original found state had become an instant obsession.

With the robotic arm in mind, we pretended to be human-bots and ran the logs through a small bandsaw in robot-like motions. The cutting paths curved and bent with the organic contours of the logs, splitting the log into slices that were no two alike and yet each fit perfectly with its neighbors.

As we took the sliced log and attached each cut piece to the next without losing stability, I thought to myself ‘Woah! We stretched a surface out of a solid log!”. Then I heard Alex say, ‘This looks just like bacon. And Small Bacon it is.

— Iris Ma [Wood Research Team Member, M.Arch ‘20 at Cornell AAP]

The type of ash wood we used for prototypes was somewhat dry, giving the outer ring a darker hue with a fairly light core. Slicing the wood trunks vertically created thin strips of tri-colored wood which uncannily resembled bacon… which is to say, it looked delicious! We had successfully baconized wood!

— Alexandre Mecattaf [Wood Research Team Member, M.Arch ‘19 at Cornell AAP]