Edible Schoolyard Tool Barn

Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley, CA • 1998

A radical act of traditional craft, Wowhaus designed and built a post-and-beam barn to support the educational and agricultural activities of the Edible Schoolyard. Students participated in carving tapered, wooden ‘trunnels’ that hold together the post-and-beam framing, and worked collaboratively with Wowhaus to assemble and raise ‘bents’ in an old fashioned barn-raising. The structure is made entirely from the upper 50’ of a storm fallen, 1000 year old coast redwood tree from Humboldt’s Lost Coast. The Tool Barn features infill walls of compressed rice straw from the Central Valley, a flooring substrate of crushed oyster shells from Tomales Bay, and a hand laid floor of blue granite cobbles from the Santa Cruz Mountains.