What happens to a city's trees after they fall?

A tree can leave a building site and return as furniture. At One Holland Village in Singapore, Roger & Sons says it made benches from Tembusu trees that had stood on the development's own ground. The result gives a familiar object an unusually specific provenance: the place where the wood grew is also the place for which the seat was made.

The workshop dates the project to 2023 and describes working with selected designers to realise their proposals.

That specificity is the strongest part of The Local Tree Project. Monocle describes the initiative as using timber from trees felled for urban development in Singapore. Here, local material means more than wood obtained nearby. Its origin can be connected to a particular piece of the city, before that ground acquired its new use.

The benches also have more than one author. A tree supplies material, but it does not supply a design. Roger & Sons' documentation distinguishes the selected designers' proposals from the workshop's work of making them. That division deserves to remain visible. To credit only the maker would lose the design contribution; to discuss only the finished form would lose the workshop that translated it into an object.

A bench brings those relationships into an everyday type of furniture. It is made to be useful, rather than simply to display a fragment of the site's past. The interesting design question is how that earlier landscape enters the new object: through the choice of timber, the form proposed by a designer and the decisions involved in fabrication. Provenance becomes part of an account of how something was made.

There is a related question in Jorge Penadés' Uprooted. Openhouse describes that project as a response to olive trees removed as farming changes in Andalucía. The comparison is between materials left behind by changing landscapes and the work designers make from them. It does not require the two settings to tell the same story. Singapore's development site and Andalucía's agricultural landscape give the wood different histories.

Neither history becomes simpler when the wood finds another use. A bench cannot establish why a tree was removed or measure the consequences of its loss. But the One Holland Village case does make the next set of choices legible: which material is kept, who designs with it and who makes the result. According to Roger & Sons, the resulting benches were made from trees that once stood on the same ground.