Designed Forests

Book excerpt: Designed Forests: A Cultural History explores the unique kinship that exists between forests and spatial design; the forest’s influence on architectural culture and practice; and the potentials and pitfalls of “forest thinking” for more sustainable and ethical ways of doing architecture today. It tackles these subjects by focusing on architecture’s own dispositions, which stem from an ecology of metaphor that surrounds its encounters with the forest and undergird ideas about Nature and natural systems. The book weaves together global narratives and chapters explore a range of topics, such as the invention of forest plans in colonial India, the war waged on the jungles of Vietnam, economic land use concepts in rural Germany, precolonial ecological pasts in Manhattan, and technologically saturated forests in California. This book is essential for landscape architects, urbanists, architects, forestry experts, and everyone concerned with larger environmental contexts and the ever-evolving relationship between nature and culture.