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If You Go Into the Woods: Dan Handel’s Designed Forests
Exploring the kinship between forests and spatial design, Designed Forests: A Cultural History illuminates the profound influence of the forest on architectural culture and practice, stitching global narratives from colonial forest plans in India to the jungle-wars of Vietnam, to the technologically saturated forests in California.

Exploring the kinship between forests and spatial design, Designed Forests: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2025) illuminates the profound influence of the forest on architectural culture and practice, stitching global narratives from colonial forest plans in India to the jungle-wars of Vietnam, to the technologically saturated forests in California. In this edited extract, author Dan Handel introduces the potentials and pitfalls of "forest thinking" for architecture today.

My safe place is a forest. At least that is how I keep recounting the forest stand I stumbled on one summer day in Montreal, which keeps coming back to me since. I was going with my wife to see the Parc du Mont-Royal, the landscape jewel crowning the city’s esteemed piece of rock topography. Heading from the nearby Outremont neighborhood, we were taking advantage of the sunny morning to make our way by foot up the hill. As we meandered toward the direction of the parc, loosely relying on a map, generous suburban lots anchored by early twentieth-century granite homes gave way to a plain asphalt road whose one side was entirely domesticated while the other rose up to form a steep slope and a wall of trees — steep but seemingly navigable — so we decided to cut through in order to avoid the heat that was beginning to accumulate. Into the green wall we went, and there we were: in a forest.

I am well aware that such a beginning sounds familiar. But this was no selva obscura, and we didn’t need a Virgil to guide us through. It was simply the most exhilarating place I have ever found myself in, and its magnificence was amplified by way of its sudden introduction. After a brief moment of low bush, we came upon an area densely planted with even-aged, light-coloured maples. The proximity of the trees to one another sent them up looking for light, forming a vertical composition of grey strokes on a fuzzy green background. Crepuscular rays from above justified their reputation as ‘god’s rays’ by lending the scene a somewhat unearthly atmosphere. Our walking figures wandered strangely out of scale, and all ability to assess distance or speed was diminished. But this was not merely a visual intoxication. The temperature dropped, and the change in heat and humidity made our bodies feel at ease. Acoustics changed too, and our voices were muffled by the soft ground surface and countless sound-diffusing elements that adorned the scene. It was a deeply visceral experience that felt completely out of time, like a shuttle floating in green space.

I took a couple of photos with my Leica (this was in my pre-smartphone era), knowing that the attempt to capture an adequate visual imprint of this was probably futile but trying nonetheless with the optimism of an eager tourist. Later I found that, aptly enough, none of the photos survived due to a clandestine malfunction of the camera. So there are no reproductions of this experience, visual or other — when I asked, my wife seemed to forget all about this place. It exists solely in my mind as a pristine memory of wonder, discovery, tranquility, delight, and other sensations frequently associated with leaving the city behind and venturing into Nature.

Ideal forest plan, from Duhamel du Monceau’s Des semis et plantations des arbres, 1760. Courtesy of BnF

Of course, it was not. My entire forest sortie, immersive as it felt, was simply a set constructed of natural elements, planned to the minute detail by famed landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted as a means to intensify the contrast between what was to be on the top — a generous leisurely civic space and the surrounding slopes that were meant to be mantled in green. So how come I was fooled by this unassuming ensemble of trees to feel like I landed out of culture? Ignorance surely cannot be blamed here, as I was familiar enough at that point with the history of North American forests to know they were mostly man-made. In fact, my excursion to Mont-Royal, besides being an enjoyable weekend activity, was part of a voluntary mission to visit every Olmsted project I could, as I considered him the stepfather of American forestry. Never mind also that a short climb brought us back to an asphalt road and that, minutes later, we were strolling the wide carriageways among the belvederes and the Gilded Age chalet that overlooks the city, a true fin de siècle setting that could not be more civilised an experience. The proximity of this middle-class fantasy grounds to ‘my’ forest did not hold in my mind. Neither did any rationalization of the place I was briefly introduced to: clearly it was only a minor appendix to the park; the trees were too young to be part of the original plan, and the plan was not executed anyway in its original form.

All this didn’t matter. What I knew then and what I know now did not prevent a modest tree space from summoning other dark and not-so-dark forests that are nested in our collective imagination and individual psyche, places in which you can get lost even in broad daylight. The experience made me see more clearly the special connection humans maintain with forest spaces — something that may exist, in some way, in their biological wiring many millennia after they have altered their wooded environments. At the same time, the small, planted patch of trees, transformed in a flash into sylva incognita, highlighted the neural networks that connect forest metaphors across cultures, geographies, and times.

Making appearances in landscape architecture, urban design, or architecture, forests were played out as projections of subconscious anxiety, as inspiration for organisational logic, or as literal insertions of groups of trees in and around buildings.

As I ventured deeper into forests, I began to see them everywhere in my own habitat. Making appearances in landscape architecture, urban design, or architecture, forests were played out as projections of subconscious anxiety, as inspiration for organisational logic, or as literal insertions of groups of trees in and around buildings. Expanding the search to other disciplines, I began to realise that those involved with forests daily, either as scientists or as managers, shared many tropes with spatial designers. They were, in fact, speaking in similar terms: some associated the forest’s ecological behavior with its form, others discussed forest systems as communities or cities, while still others developed theories of how forests can be redesigned to fit our age.

These kinships led to three hypotheses that guide this book: first, that most of the forests we know are designed; second, that forest sciences, forestry, and spatial design share metaphors in ways that make their histories worthwhile to contemplate in relation to one another; and, third, that while these metaphors may appear vague in some expressions, they are, in fact, structuring principles that can be clearly traced. By following these hypotheses, this project became an attempt to circumscribe a cultural history of designed forests.

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Diagrams of old growth forests from Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests, Franklin et al., 1981. ©USFS

It is hardly a provocation to argue that forest environments are the products of human design. If earlier accounts could speak of primordial settings – urwalds that exist somehow out of reach, the charting of most of the earth’s surface, completed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, makes such forests mostly the stuff of fiction. Historical evidence shows that environments that play the role of emblematic untouched forests in the popular imagination, from the Sundarbans mangroves in the Bay of Bengal to the Black Forest in southwest Germany, have long been managed and altered by people. Environmental historian William Cronon proposed that Native Americans in precolonial New England dramatically transformed forest habitats by extensive and systematic burning.1 More recent scientific evidence suggests that pre-Columbian planting is responsible for current-day Amazonian tree species composition.2 The mere notion of the Amazon as an untouched environment was dispelled by scholars since the 1980s, with prominent Brazilian geographer Bertha Becker referring to it as an “urbanised forest”.3 Even under a strict definition of design as a deliberate set of actions with clear organisational and formal prospects in mind, many forests display the traces of intentional human action that shape almost everything, from boundary lines to the structure of cells, thus making sylvan habitats the product of people’s plans, ambitions, and fantasies. And yet Nature, like in my humble encounter in Mont Royal, is never too far out of mind. This inherent ambivalence asks us to pause and consider what really makes a forest.

Many forests display the traces of intentional human action that shape almost everything, from boundary lines to the structure of cells, thus making sylvan habitats the product of people’s plans, ambitions, and fantasies.

A forest is not a rock or a cloud — it is not a thing in the world. Nobody is born with the innate ability to call out the forest from the trees: Is there a minimum number of trees that is essential in order to qualify as one? Does size matter, or is the Sihlwald and the Monteverde Cloud Forest the same in this regard? Does the type of trees have any effect on our definitions? Or do these definitions maybe depend on internal networks? Science tells us that trees communicate through subterranean mycelial highways; that trees may send nutrients to one another, shoot pheromones and aerosols into the air to signal danger, and break the wind to protect their fellows. But how complex should an ecology be to be ushered in the family of forests? The answers to these questions are unfathomable since forest is first and foremost a cultural definition. In many respects, its meaning has more to do with class distinctions than with the taxonomy of trees. Indeed, the English word comes from the medieval Latin foris, meaning “outside”, which leads back to the original function of forests as game preserves for nobles, banned by decree to all but the higher echelons, their weapons, and their hound dogs. This distinction by legal and consequently spatial design was true in medieval Europe as it was in Mughal South Asia and in Qing China.

Paolo Uccello, Hunt in the Forest, c1470

Thus, forests, both as an idea and as real environments, were designed by human activities and human intentions since time immemorial. In one of the most moving forest scenes captured by an artist, The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello (ca. 1465), this idea manifests itself in full force. Uccello, who was, according to Giorgio Vasari, captivated by the attempt to achieve depth in his paintings, created a powerful one-point perspective that organises the entire space of the painting and lends it a dramatic tone, amplified by the high-contrast night scene. While precise and full of detail, Uccello was not seeking to portray an actual scene: at the time hunts were unlikely to take place after dark, and none of the many characters in the painting appears to be carrying a light. Instead, the painting dives into the essence of a complex and symbolic social activity: the nobles on their horses with the crescents on the trappings, their footmen with their spears and decorated daggers, the hound chasing the game, the gazelles being surrounded in their last living moments, and, above all, the dark of the forest, with the glitter of gold flecks in the foliage. What is striking about this work from a forest perspective is how artificial the space is. Anyone familiar with wooded terrains could tell that trees do not grow in such a way when left to their own devices. And indeed, the painting shows, closer to the pictorial plane, some logs which indicate previous human activity. The hunt, then, follows a deliberate and tedious work of design. Of course, design was not the term used in the fifteenth century to describe these activities, and even forestry or forest management would only emerge later as defined fields of expertise, but the anonymous men who prepared the forest for the hunt to take place did not only cut trees. They were aware of the minutiae of this well-structured ceremonial social activity: of how riders move and at what height, of the spaces that are necessary for a chase to be possible, of the limits of the forest that should be invisible and yet defined. In their felling and cutting and clearing, they responded to these specifications and created a total space that was custom-made for a specific activity: it is an entirely designed forest.

Forests, both as an idea and as real environments, were designed by human activities and human intentions since time immemorial.

Proposing that almost all forests are designed to an extent is not the same as suggesting that they have an agreed-on function within spatial design. Architecture specifically has led a fraught relationship with vegetal life. As architectural theorist Sylvia Lavin notes, the etymological homology between plants and architectural plans as planta and pianta is indicative of times in which “new buildings and living organisms, like young trees and seedlings, were implanted in the earth because that was where they were understood to grow and propagate… architecture was itself a plant”.4 However, around the time Uccello was completing his painting, things changed, and the discipline of architecture was enshrined as separate from the craft of the builder.5 The abstractions of plans that were to become buildings, often drawn directly on the ground in preparation for construction, pushed actual plants off the site and out of mind. Almost six hundred years later, this fundamental resentment is safely in place. Notwithstanding the surge of environmental awareness and eco talk, the mainstream of architecture and urban design is still struggling to figure out whether trees are friends or enemies. A common saying among my graduate school peers was “When in doubt, plant a tree”, inadvertently exposing the recklessness of professional disciplines that regard trees merely as objects to be added or subtracted, placing their trust solely in the power of numbers.

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Circular forest church of Weger St. George in the Ethiopian highlands, 2021. ©Google Earth

One possible explanation for this incapacity lies outside of design, within forestry itself. Rooted in the imperative to remove maximum wood material from the land and regrow its timber stock as swiftly as organically possible, forest management has been obsessed with metrics for centuries. While the vanguard of forest science and management has been labouring to expose the complexity of forest systems, the historic alliance with economic thinking is still so insidious, that even when trying to save the planet experts are sometimes aiming at the wrong target. Rosetta Elkin writes that “tree-planting fixations have become a political and industrial act rather than environmental necessity, exploiting the plant using persuasion, aggression and control. This is not a projection; this is one of the world’s most rehearsed spatial practices”.6 Foresters, she argues, continue to selectively determine value and focus on the more visible parts of forests because massive tree-planting initiatives are easier to fund and provide better photo ops. Rather than improving existing conditions, these projects lead to the disappearance of complex ecologies and to “commercialising plant life”. This line of thinking flows into adjacent disciplines. Elkin warns that the design professions “are complicit in repeating an exhausted association with forestation”.7 By doing so, they are doomed to continue along the path of “merciless” tearing-up that is embedded in the logic of forestry. In other words, designers are too often either ignorant or content with the idea of treating trees as interchangeable units, thereby facilitating the relentless transformation of sites on which their disciplines depend.

Forests are concurrently portrayed as allies in the struggle against carbon emissions, as exemplars of sound economic management, and as allegories to the point of no return reached by the hubris of humankind.

Beyond disciplinary critique, these observations point to the unpronounced links that bind science, management and design through shared ideas. These metaphors, referred to as analogies or organising principles depending on the discipline, guide the work of forest ecologists as much as they drive the aesthetics of designed buildings and underlie the development of economic theories as much as they are applied in the routine management of commercial tree plantations. Untangling these ideas is a task that demands moving across time and space. In recent decades, forests have been cast in many roles in the unfolding play of human history, reaching new dramatic heights with the looming omens of the climate crisis. Forests are concurrently portrayed as allies in the struggle against carbon emissions, as exemplars of sound economic management, and as allegories to the point of no return reached by the hubris of humankind. These roles are mediated by metaphors that circulate within and between fields of expertise and between cultures, circumscribing how people think of and act on forests. This book situates these metaphors within the specific historical, social and economic contexts in which they were shaped and traces their sinuous evolution and elusive resonance in thoughts and ideas that lead up to the current moment.

Bio

Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on under-explored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. Over the past fifteen years, he has been studying the links between scientists, forest managers and spatial designers, resulting in various exhibitions and publications on the subject.

Notes

1 Cronon, William. Changes in the Land : Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, 30. This has since been substantiated by palaeoecological studies, even though the precise extent of the impact of indigenous ecological alterations is still being debated.See Abrams, Marc D. “Fire and the Development of Oak Forests.” BioScience 42, no. 5 (1992): 346; Oswald, Wyatt, David Foster, Bryan Shuman, et al. “Conservation Implications of Limited Native American Impacts in Pre-Contact New England.” Nature Sustainability 3 (2020): 241.
2 Levis, Carolina, Flavia R. C. Costa, Frans Bongers, Marielos Peña-Claros, et al. “Persistent Effects of Pre-Columbian Plant Domestication on Amazonian Forest Composition.” Science 355, no. 6328 (March 3, 2017): 925–31.
3 Published in English in Becker, Bertha. “Undoing Myths: The Amazon – An Urbanized Forest.” In Brazilian Perspectives on Sustainable Development of the Amazon Region, edited by Miguel Clüsener-Gogt and Ignacy Sachs, 53–89. Paris: UNESCO, 1995.
4 Lavin, Sylvia. “Reclaiming Plant Architecture.” e-flux Architecture, August 2019. [online]
5 This gradual process received a notable thrust through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, whose treatises wielded great influence over many generations of architects.
6 Elkin, Rosetta. “The Prefixes of Forestation.” In Harvard Design Magazine 45 (Spring/Summer 2018): Into the Woods, 10.
7 Elkin, Rosetta. “The Prefixes of Forestation.” In Harvard Design Magazine 45 (Spring/Summer 2018): Into the Woods, 6.

Published
10 Jan 2025
Reading time
15 minutes
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