I am grateful for the interviews, input, and proofreading of: Dr. Mark Harmon, Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Oregon, an expert on carbon accounting who has given testimony to the United States House Natural Resources Committee Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands at the hearing on Climate Change and Public Lands: Examining Impacts and Considering Adaptation Opportunities (2019); and Dr. Fred Swanson, Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Oregon and research geologist with the USDA Forest Service, who spent decades researching and working with the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.
Ellen Weiss, “Americans in Paris: Two Buildings,” Journal for the Society of Art Historians XLV (1986): 164; Weiss cites W. P. Blake, ed., Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition 1867 (Washington, DC, 1870).
See Laila Seewang, “From Forest to Frame: Representation and Exception in the Regional Modernism of the Pacific Northwest,” Building with Timber: Architectural Theory Review 25 (2021): 7-27.
Kenneth Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 147-62.
This shift has brought with it outsized interest in the superlative, with many towers—built and unbuilt—striving to be the tallest. In 2019, Mjøstårnet, an eighteen-story timber tower in Brumunddal, Norway became the world’s tallest wooden building. Three years later, that title was passed over to Ascent, a building in Wisconsin designed by Korb + Associates. The main difference between the two is that, while Mjøstårnet looks like it is built out of timber—it has a timber façade—Ascent looks like luxury housing, with aluminum cladding, and in fact has a concrete-timber hybrid structure.
The SLB also funds the American Wood Council; Think Wood, “a proactive North American marketing and communications program supporting the softwood lumber industry”; WoodWorks, “SLB’s premier program for increasing the consumption and market share of softwood lumber in commercial and multifamily buildings”; the Mass Timber Competition; and the ASCA Timber Education Prize. I was awarded the 2023 ACSA Timber Prize, which was subject to its own kind of narrativizing. Edited from the abstract were the following sentences: “The term ‘forest’ flattens the difference between same-species plantations oriented towards lightweight framing and diverse, healthy ecosystems. Between practices of clearcutting, chemical usage, and variable retention.” “Winners Announced for the 2023 Timber Education Prize,” Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (blog), August 30, 2023. See ➝.
“Softwood Lumber Board and USDA Seek to Expand Wood Use,” Structural Building Components Association (blog), October 5, 2021. See ➝.
Many of Christopher Wren’s projects were commissions in the wake of the London Fire in 1666, eighteenth-century Boston arose in response to the Great Fire of 1760, and the Columbian Exposition owes thanks to the Chicago Fire of 1871.
L. Dietrich, “Restriktionen beim Bauen mit Holz und Ansatzpunkte zur überwindung,” Internationales Holzbau-Forum, 2013.
Thank you to Thomas Robinson, Timothy Cooke and Sara Martin for reminding me of the early origins of the carbon cycle during our discussions on a timber history timeline that will appear in their upcoming monograph.
“One of these mechanisms, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), [allowed
“2030 Challenge,” Architecture 2030. See ➝.
Ibid.
Maxwell T Boykoff et al., “Theorizing the Carbon Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 2299-2300.
Boyd, “Governing the Clean Development Mechanism.”
Randall Crane and John Landis, “Planning for Climate Change: Assessing Progress and Challenges,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 389-401; Thomas L. Daniels, “Integrating Forest Carbon Sequestration into a Cap-and-Trade Program to Reduce Net CO2 Emissions,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 463-475.
R. Perschel, A. Evans, M. Summers, Climate change, carbon, and the forests of the northeast (Santa Fe, NM: Forest Guild, 2007), 13.
Patrick Fleming, Simon Smith, and Michael Ramage, “Measuring-up in timber: a critical perspective on mid- and high-rise timber building design,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2014): 20-30. Articles that include “carbon” and “building” without specifically addressing how wood buildings “sequester” do appear slightly earlier. See Oliver Lowenstein, “Perfectly framed,” Architects' Journal 227, no. 23, June 12, 2008; Steffen Lehmann, “Developing a Prefabricated Low-Carbon Construction System Using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) Panels for Multistorey Inner-City Infill Housing in Australia,” Journal of Green Building 7, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 131-150.
The earliest record in the Avery concerning the use of urban forests to offset carbon emissions in China was written in 2009. C. Y. Jim and Wendy Y. Chen, “Ecosystem services and valuation of urban forests in China,” Cities 26, no. 4 (August 2009): 187-194. This falls in line with the articles presented in the Environment and Planning A special issue from 2009 discussed above.
This includes Touch Wood (2022) in Zurich, Graz Architecture Magazine’s Wood. Rethinking Material (2021), and the Ambasz Institute’s 2023 Earth Day lecture. See ➝.
Wendy Wendlandt, “When it comes to trees, President Biden makes Earth Day count,” The Public Interest Network, April 21, 2023. See ➝.
My research over the last four years has examined these narratives in relation to changes in US forestry, and it is possible to map the pioneer wood cabin in relation to colonial settlement and US railroad grants; regional modernism in relation to the boom in plantation-style regrowth and suburban light frame housing demand; or the Critical Regionalism arguments of the 1980s in relation to the exceptionalism of timber architectures in a time of major timber exports.
“Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice… It’s all in the pronouns.” Robin Wall-Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in The Democracy of Species (New York: Penguin, 2021), 20-21 (my emphasis).
I am grateful to Dr. Mark Harmon, Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University Department of Forestry for this guidance.
Most carbon accounting tools will take a certain amount of downstream emissions into account (processing and transport, for example) whereas many architectural narratives and summaries do not.
See Seewang, “From Forest to Frame,”; Laila Seewang, “Timber Territory: Salvaging a Resilient Architecture in the Pacific Northwest” GAM 17: Wood: Rethinking Material (Berlin: Jovis, 2021): 168-187.
Seewang, “From Forest to Frame” (2021).
William Cronon examines this moment inside the grain elevators of Chicago in great historical specificity. See William Cronon, “Pricing the Future: Grain,” in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991), 97–147.
Steve New, “The Transparent Supply Chain,” Harvard Business Review (October 2010). See ➝.
State of California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General, “The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act.” See ➝.
“The Wood We Use,” IKEA. See ➝.
“Timber Traceability,” U. S. Green Building Council, March 18, 2019. See ➝.
ZGF Architects, Internal document, Wood Transparency Specification, Version 4 (2023).
One historical example of this is the Northwest Forest Plan, established in 1994 as a compromise between silvicultural practices prioritizing wood products and those prioritizing biodiversity protection for one region and its forests.
ZGF Architects, Wood Transparency Specification.