Over the last fifty years, Neoclassical economy created the world many of us live in today. It is a world in which products circulate freely between markets and happy consumers benefit from faraway extraction operations. This abstract world creates abstract forests, and in the scheme of things designers, as Rosetta Elkin warns, are “complicit in repeating an exhausted association with forestation”.1 That is, they run the risk of continuing along the path of merciless tearing up and destructive transformation of sites.
It is no wonder that the heyday of Chicago school economics is also when what we may call “green architecture” begins. This architecture, then as now, channels contemporary environmental anxieties into works that reckon architecture’s broken relationship with nature. The forest made cameo appearances as the ultimate metaphor for this relationship in projects that began to appear in architectural publications in the 1970s such as James Wines and SITE’s Forest Building for BEST products in Richmond, Virginia, or in Emilio Ambasz’s ARCOS center in Fukouka. In Richmond, the trees seem to march through a generic commercial development, turning shopping experience into a transcendentalist poem (Fig. 1). In ARCOS, a massive building is blanketed with thousands of plants and pretends to be a small mountain (Fig. 2). Wines and Ambasz both sought to question the presence of plants in architecture, but both remained mostly trapped in architecture’s parlor games. “My way of doing ornament” Ambasz once said, “was by using nature”.2
Fig. 3 - Boeri Studio, Biomilano.
The later generation of architectural forest projects, while equipped with ecological arguments and fancy carbon sequestering calculations, still draws its misconceptions from the wells of green architecture.
The later generation of architectural forest projects, while equipped with ecological arguments and fancy carbon sequestering calculations, still draws its misconceptions from the wells of green architecture. When Stefano Boeri first presented his vision for BioMilan, he rendered the entire city covered in foliage, proposing a chimera of green design and market development that would contain Nature in vertical forest reserves (Fig. 3). His proof of concept, Bosco Verticale, is branded as the magic leap into the era of environmental awareness and as a model that, after being built in Milan in the form of two towers, can be exported on the wings of enlightened capital to be planted in such diverse climates, cultures, and political systems as Nanjing, Eindhoven, Chicago, and Cairo. The project boasts 800 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 floral plants integrated in its cantilevered concrete balconies (Fig. 4). The resourceful boosters of the project calculated that its plant life is equal to 10,000 square meters of forestland, which sounds impressive enough. But here too, architecture hides itself and pretends to be something that it is not. In reality, Bosco Verticale confuses forest with landscape painting, neglecting to realize that what makes the forest so environmentally useful stems from the soil as much as from visible greenery. As innovative as Bosco Verticale is technically and financially, it reverts to simply hiding its architecture.
Fig. 4 - Boeri Studio, Vertical Forest. Photo: Dimitar Harizanov
As the climate crisis grows ever more present, architecture finds itself in a precarious position. Has it been an accomplice all along in the pollution of the environment and the depletion of planetary resources and, if so, is it moral, knowing what we know today, to continue to play this role?
Perhaps it is not surprising. As the climate crisis grows ever more present, architecture finds itself in a precarious position. Has it been an accomplice all along in the pollution of the environment and the depletion of planetary resources and, if so, is it moral, knowing what we know today, to continue to play this role? The forest provides a tempting way out of these predicaments. If architecture could only become a forest, nobody would be able to question its motivations. But in hiding behind the forest veil, architecture gives up its own patrimony, which includes the ability to reconsider resource extraction and rework the relationships between humans and environments. This may just be the ultimate task of architecture in today’s world. We shouldn’t let out delusions and preconceptions get in the way.
*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 Elkin, Rosetta.. “The Prefixes of Forestation.” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 45 (Spring/Summer 2018): 4.
2 Mays, Vernon. “The Elusive Mr. Ambasz.” Architect (Washington, D.C.) 98, no. 6 (June 1, 2009): 60–65.
Bibliography
Elkin, Rosetta. Plant Life : the Entangled Politics of Afforestation. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Word for World Is Forest (New York: Berkley Books, 1976).
Wines, James, and Philip. Jodidio. Green Architecture (Köln; New York: Taschen, 2000).
