The book reads like a crime novel for landscape architects. It contains much of the stuff we don’t dare to look into, true – mostly because forests fall under the domain of forestry. Designed Forests: A Cultural History uncovers human entanglements with forests as a design metaphor through a series of gripping stories Dan Handel researched in serious depth, not leaving room for much romance. Taking us on a global journey through projects that involve forests as a point of departure, Handel catches us in our preconceived ways of thinking, traversing the undergirding ideas, cutting to the stem of those lines of thought. The book is not an answer to what a forest is, yet we might get an idea of how forest metaphor gets instrumentalized in discourse in spatial design practices and what this metaphor lacks.

The book, published with Routledge this year, is organized into five chapters – Engineered Forests, Jungle, The Thousand-Year Forest, Ecological Havens and Ubiquitous Intelligence, with Notes on each chapter as interesting as the text itself. 

Let’s start at the end – from all the gloomy hypocrisy you unravel throughout the book, disregarding forests as anything else but productive or having economic value, you finish referencing the project terra0, Richard Brautigan’s poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Cedric Price’s Generator: “Diffused forest intelligence, a complex metaphor emerging at the meeting points of ecology, cybernetics, anthropology, and spatial design, could [ … ] work its mysterious ways to undo centuries of folly and avarice and reunite us all with lost Nature”. Please dismantle. 

The book follows several cultural metaphors that shape our understanding of forests, and the actions of scientists, land managers, and designers in determining their futures. This last stance you refer to is part of the alluring idea of forest intelligence, which I try to show is very much connected with our current obsessions regarding AI, smart cities, and even plant sentience. This is an enticing metaphor, involving both technical aspects and poetic reflections, and by describing the poetry that suddenly appears in a hyper-rational project like the terra0, I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea of being united with Nature, but try to show both its paradoxes and attraction.

While you mostly successfully evade any personal suggestive inputs, at some points, you give yourself in. You open the book with the Olmstedian forest.

The work on this book really started through encounters with designed forests, first in the industrial plantations of the Pacific Northwest, and then in various sites where people manipulated the forest to an extent. So the first-hand account that opens the book is there not only to introduce the themes, but as a reminder that personal experience plays an important role in the shaping of our ideas about landscapes. The Olmsted Mont-Royal sortie is also telling because of the gap that existed for me between my knowledge of the site, a carefully designed set piece in the park’s plan, and my ineffable experience of being in a natural setting. This gap was a good demonstration of the importance of pre-conceived cultural ideas that shape the ways in which we encounter forest environments.

Interestingly, the book doesn’t start with primordial forest and its successive stages towards Designed Forest, but abruptly with the chapter Engineered Forests, in which you bomb us with data in an Adam Curtis documentary series style, with small and local accounts, media images, to intercontinental corporations … designing forests.

What I appreciate about this chapter is that it scrutinizes architecture and landscape architecture projects (like Weyerhaeuser HQ or Biltmore Forest) and puts design and forest into perspective much less idealistic than one might like to think. When did the disenchantment with the forest begin? 

I think one of the tasks of this book is indeed dispelling the “state of nature” hypothesis, and suggest a more complex narrative of designed forests, in which, for instance, the composition of species in the Amazon results from settlement patterns from hundreds of years ago, and the Black Forest is the product of carefully planned afforestation efforts. Once we adopt this lens, it enables us to open a spectrum of “forest projects” that range from rough metaphors (i.e. calling a large number of vertical elements “forest”) to projects like Weyerhaeuser, in which SOM and Sasaki, Walker, and associates introduced a revolutionary design, based on what Pete Walker referred to as “learning to build a forest”. Once we develop this critical capacity, we can better evaluate some of the less honest design projects that are currently using forest metaphors. 

The Jungle chapter reads even worse. I find this notion important: “The task of tropical forestry, even at this embryonic phase, became one of distilling forest from the jungle”. 

I find the jungle metaphor to be an extremely powerful one. It essentially appears each time a culture that regards itself as superior wants to assign a negative value to a forest environment and its inhabitants. We see it happening frequently in imperial contexts, from Colonial India to the German colonies in Brazil, and from the American presence in the Philippines into the Vietnam War. It is striking that in these arenas, where large-scale forest plans were first developed, one finds the coercive aspects of enforcing a certain idea of forests that seek to transform entire landscapes, often against the will of the peoples inhabiting them. 

The book on several accounts exposes the landscape architecture profession in its discomforting role, as an accomplice to extractive and colonial practices, or for example, shedding light on rivalry with forestry, especially working on urban forests. 

It is not hugely controversial nowadays to admit that the spatial design professions have long been closely aligned with a developmental state of mind, which is essentially built on extractive methods and unfair labor. But the book is trying to show that the history of our disciplines is actually full of projects that, in real time, proposed alternatives to this prevailing march towards planetary doom. So rather than atoning for our sins, which is vastly popular in some circles, I believe there are ways to move forward that are more aware and reflective of the time we live in. 

Green over grey is often taken literally, as a greenwash strategy. Please share your view on Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, what is the Ecological Urbanism idea and why it failed. 

I am highly critical of green over grey projects – a genius maxim invented by Emilio Ambasz in the 1970s. That is because such projects easily lend themselves to surface aesthetics, which is, by the way, what Ambasz was initially interested in. Similarly, Bosco Verticale is an impressive project on many levels, but I find its presentation as “forest” misleading. It is a prime example of the misuse of the forest metaphor: who could resist a project vailed in green? But I think we need to ask ourselves what parts of the forest are we looking to bring into cities? Is it their environmental benefits? Ecosystem services? Spiritual values? In all of these, the green over grey projects fail entirely when compared to “real” forests. This means that it is time to be more specific, and by that find new ways to design buildings, cities, and landscapes.

The main thread running throughout the book is how the forest metaphor lends itself to various projects as an answer to national, organizational, social, economic, and ecological challenges. What the forests can and cannot do? 

The question should not be what forests can do, but what can humans do. Once we’ve established that forests are by and large a product of our cultural ideas, and that this has been the case for many centuries, the roles that they are cast and our ability to negotiate these roles becomes paramount. This is why design is so crucial: it allows us to recombine forests and humans in ways that reconsider resource extraction and resonate the challenges of our time.  This is our patrimony, and we would be fools not to use it. 

About the Author

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.