Hahen is a museum for secondary hardwood products manufactured in Northwest Arkansas. It is located on the land of a decommissioned military base, Fort Chaffee, in Fort Smith, Arkansas - a site of Asian-American internment in times of political strife. Historically, the site was one of the largest lumber and secondary hardwood product suppliers in the United States. Over-harvesting of materials left the site devoid of any original old-growth or usable materials. Through interpolating historical and material contexts of Fort Chaffee, Hahen becomes a series of units that assemble as a misfit whole.

A secondary function of the museum was to transplant "the last" hardwood tree on the site--a burly, disfigured specimen left behind from the clearings of the past--into a nursery pod and displayed in the longer, North-spanning arm of the building. Upon its death, the entire unit would be hoisted down to a railroad car, taken into the center of the lake the project is nestled in, and lowered into a burial chamber. At the time, I probably imagined this as a dramatized inevitable conclusion of the greater site and its myriad tragedies.

This project was featured in CRITICAL MASS '13, an annual graduate symposium at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.