ABSTRACT
Despite population trends toward urbanization, the forest continues to have a strong appeal to the human imagination, and the human preference for forest over many other types of terrain is well documented. This book re-imagines architecture and urbanism by allowing the forest to be a prominent consideration in the language of design, thus recognizing the forest as essential rather than just incidental to human well-being. In Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic, forest is a large-scale urban construct that is far more extensive and nuanced than trees and shrubbery. The forest aesthetic opens designers to the forest as a model for an urban architecture of permeable floors, protective canopies, connected food chains, beneficial decomposition, and resilient ecologies. Much can be learned about these features of the forest from the natural sciences; however, when they are given due consideration technically and metaphorically in the design of urban habitat, the places in which humans live become living forests.
What is present here in Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic is both a review of many ingenious ways in which the forest aesthetic has already been expressed in design and urbanism, and an encouragement to further use the forest aesthetic in design language and design outcomes. Case study projects featured include the Chilotan building craft of Southern Chile, the yaki sugi of Japan, the Biltmore Forest in the Southeastern United States, the Australian capital city Canberra, Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy, the Beijing Olympic Forest Park in China, and more.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|42 pages
Built in Wood
chapter |19 pages
The Wood Cycle: Plyscrapers and the Cross-Laminated Timber Panel
chapter |7 pages
Transposing the Forest: Gothic Cathedrals in Northern France
chapter |7 pages
The Design and Make Forest at Hooke Park
chapter |8 pages
57Fitzroya Architecture: Chiloé Archipelago Churches of Southern Chile
part II|22 pages
Decomposition
chapter |15 pages
Char After Burn: Pyromenon of the Boreal Forest
chapter |6 pages
Mycelium Bricks: Hy-Fi in New York City
part III|34 pages
Collective Space in a Field
chapter |18 pages
Table in Rome II: Forest as Forum
chapter |8 pages
Dehesa and the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba in Spain
chapter |7 pages
Constructed Succession: Afterlife at the Beijing Olympic Forest Park
part IV|32 pages
Forestry Cultures
chapter |16 pages
Hand-Over Urbanism: Future Library
chapter |8 pages
Urbanism in Biltmore and Pisgah Forest
chapter |6 pages
Logging: Dux and the Fascist Ritorno All’Ordine in Italy
part V|24 pages
Technology and the Forest Archive
chapter |18 pages
Harvard Forest Timelapse
part VI|44 pages
Treed Infrastructure
chapter |20 pages
Treed Infrastructure: The Performance of Planting in Canberra
chapter |7 pages
Woodlot Urbanism: Hantz Woodlands in Detroit
chapter |5 pages
Low Density Recipe: Tree City at Downsview Park
chapter |10 pages
Waterlogging: Amsterdam and its Bos
part VII|34 pages
Human Forest Biosystems