As I write this, forests all over the world are going up in flames. The climate crisis needs no introduction, but the mass expiring of trees, releasing as they die vast amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere, acts as a mirror image to humanity’s carbon emissions, exposing once again the deep links that connect us all to the forest.
In various times, forests have been portrayed as part of “Nature” but, in reality, they have always been integral to human history.
In various times, forests have been portrayed as part of “Nature” but, in reality, they have always been integral to human history. Giambattista Vico, considered the first philosopher of history, wrote in the early decades of the eighteenth century: “This was the order of human institutions: first, the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.”1 This observation regards the forest as total artifice – a designed entity of the order of a building or a city.
Indeed, when looking at forests around the world, one mostly finds highly artificial environments, where everything is designed to the cell. This is true of course to the hyper-engineered eucalyptus plantations in Brazil, where trees are genetically modified to grow ten times faster than their hardwood equivalents, but also in places known as natural wonders such as the Black Forest in Germany, mostly planted during the nineteenth century, and even the Amazonian rainforest, which we now know is a product of centuries of planting and settlement.2
Fig. 1. Charles Eisen, Primitive Hut, frontispiece of Essai sur l'Architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier
If forest environments can be understood as projects of design, it becomes clear why architecture was frequently fascinated by and yet overwhelmed by the forest. In many ways, the links between architecture and plants were always tricky: Silvia Lavin had pointed out that plans and plants display etymological homology as planta and pianta, leading back to the origins of architecture in Leon Battista Alberti’s writings from the fifteenth century, and to a time in which buildings were understood to grow from the ground up, just like plants.3 Another key moment in the birth of modern architecture, Marc-Antoine Laugier’s fable of the primitive hut, literally takes place in a forest.4 The well-known frontispiece for Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture (1755), drawn by Charles Eisen, depicts a scene in which the construction of this primordial structure emerges out of the sylvan environment, using trees and branches as its building material (see Fig. 1). But upon closer examination we can see that the upper part of the hut is made of a living canopy. In this origin myth, architecture is born in and of the forest as an artifice that is also part of nature. It still grows.
Fig. 2. Piranesi, Temple of Nepton in Paestum, 1777.
The forest is not an observed phenomenon, but a thing based on cultural definitions. It is, in other words, something that we construct in our minds.
The inherent ambivalence in which architecture finds itself in the forest yields countless deceptions and misconceptions. (Fig. 2) One just needs to skim the architectural media to find the many times a building or a piece of urbanism is described as “artificial forest”, a “forest of columns”, “air forest”, or “forest pavilions”, to get an idea about the ubiquity of sylvan metaphors (Figure 3). Tracing these appearances that guide our thinking is crucial. Unlike a rock or a cloud, the forest is not an observed phenomenon, but a thing based on cultural definitions. It is, in other words, something that we construct in our minds, and – to paraphrase David Graeber – this means that we can as easily construct it differently.
Fig. 3. Junya Ishigami + associates, KAIT workshop.
*Parts of this column will be published in the upcoming book Touch Wood: Material, Architecture, Future (Lars Müller, 2022)
Read the entire "The Forest Con" column by Dan Handel.
Bio
Dan Handel is a curator and writer working on research-based projects with special attention to underexplored ideas and practices that shape contemporary built environments. He created forest-related exhibitions for the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal and Het Niewue Instituut in Rotterdam, published texts on the subject in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JOLA), Harvard Design Magazine, and Cabinet Magazine among others, and lectured widely on forests and architecture, most recently at the Prada Frames symposium during Salone del Mobile in Milan. He is currently developing a manuscript on the uneasy kinship between design and forests, to be published in 2024.
Notes
1 Vico, Giambattista, and Thomas Goddard Bergin. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated from the 3d Ed. (1744) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948).
2 First and fortmost in Bertha Becker’s groundbreaking research. See Becker, Bertha K.Amazônia. Vol. 192. (São Paulo: Editora Atica, 1990)
3 Lavin, Sylvia. “Reclaiming Plant Architecture.” e-flux architecture, August 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/280202/reclaiming-plant-architecture/.
4 Laugier, Marc-Antoine. Essai sur l'Architecture (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1753).
Bibliography
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c. 1992).
Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think : Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)
Springer, Anna-Sophie, and Etienne Turpin. The Word for World Is Still Forest. (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2017).