1st Edition

Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic A New Look at Design and Resilient Urbanism

By Jana VanderGoot Copyright 2018
    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    INTRODUCTION  Part 1 BUILT IN WOOD 1. The Wood Cycle: Plyscrapers and the Cross-Laminated Timber Panel  2. Transposing the Forest: Gothic Cathedrals in Northern France  3. The Design and Make Forest at Hooke Park  4. Fitzroya Architecture: Chiloé Archipelago Churches in Southern Chile  Part 2 DECOMPOSITION 1. Char After Burn: Pyromenon of the Boreal Forest  2. Mycelium Bricks: Hy-Fi in New York City Part 3 COLLECTIVE SPACE IN A FIELD 1. Table in Rome II: Forest as Forum  2. Dehesa and the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba in Spain  3. Constructed Succession: Afterlife at the Beijing Olympic Forest Park  Part 4 FORESTRY CULTURES  1. Hand-over Urbanism: Future Library 2. Logging: DUX and the Fascist Ritorno all’Ordine in Italy  Part 5 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FOREST ARCHIVE  1. Harvard Forest Timelapse 2. Instant City and the Cybernetic Forest  Part 6 TREED INFRASTRUCTURE  1. Treed Infrastructure: The Performance of Planting in Canberra 2. Woodlot Urbanism: Hantz Woodlands in Detroit 3. Waterlogging: Amsterdam and its Bos 4. Low Density Recipe: Tree City at Downsview Park Part 7 HUMAN FOREST BIOSYSTEMS 1. A Vertical Forest Biosystem in the Human Forest Biome 2. Krummholz Design in West Loop 3.  Spontaneous Ornament: Hundertwasser and the Tree Tenant

    Biography

    Jana VanderGoot is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, USA. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame. Jana is a registered architect, founding partner of VanderGoot Ezban Studio, and the 2011 recipient of the Rieger Graham Prize ICAA affiliated fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.