First, the forests

The inaugural exhibition of the Young Curators Program at the CCA argues that forests are not the natural scenery that we think they are, but a highly processed, rational, productive and manicured environment.

Suddenly, everything gets a different gloss. And by everything I mean whatever nature has surrounded me in the past couple of days. I have crossed the New York State's Adirondack Park Preserve two times in less than a week, to visit the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) — researching the undisciplined Gordon Matta-Clark — in francophone Montréal. As you might be thinking, it must have been a beautiful and bucolic trip during the Fall season watching the multicolored trees and the landscape from the train, indeed, it was. But, the return trip to New York forced me to look through the window in a different way, although in a Park Preserve, I was curious searching for clues and signs among the trees. Are they aligned?, Are this pieces the result of nature's own growth? Are they following a rational pattern? All these questions arose by one recent provocation, the inaugural exhibition of the Young Curators Program started by the CCA in 2011 that opened last 4 October with an introductory lecture by Dan Handel, the recipient of the program among 250 international proposals.

Entitled First, The Forests, the exhibition explores the ways in which we understand and perceive forests, introducing the concept of forestry as a design (not just science) tool and a form of knowledge about creating artificial forests. With some previous research on his back, the curator — with a Master degree in architecture from Harvard GSD and a PhD candidate at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology — proposes an invitation to question the "romantic and more traditional approach of the forest and nature", as suggested by Mirko Zardini, Director and Chief Curator of the CCA.

Handel's curatorial project is ambitious. It is historic and contemporarily researched, and argues that forests are not the natural scenery that we think they are, but a highly processed, rational, productive and manicured environment. To sustain this, Handel investigated a variety of forests manifestations between a range of time that goes back to 17th century Venice to the recent Hannover Expo in the year 2000. The research collected information from the CCA archives alongside external primary sources. After spending three months developing this task, the immense amount of data and outcome possibilities needed to be filtered, and the project is thus organized under four categories that provide the interpreter with a synthetic view of the complex and larger phenomenon of forestry and nature. These are: Bureaucratic Forestry, Scientific Forestry, Tropical Forestry and Economic Forestry.
Top and above: <em>First, the Forests</em> installation view at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal
Top and above: First, the Forests installation view at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal
The Bureaucratic category explores a certain pre-history of the concept of forestry (and perhaps also of landscape as a design discipline). Searching the tools of 17th century Venetian bureaucrats to map their resources, Handel found and picked the intriguing charts made by Andrea Badoer in 1638, that show how the forest was "mapped". The chart includes in a single illustration data regarding weather, time, as well as information about the bureaucratic managament of forests trees (do not forget that Venice's buildings are supported on woodpiles of tree logs). Those maps indeed represented a formal solution to the manipulation of trees, or what can be called as principles for the design of forestry. Showing a photograph of contemporary Venetian scenery, the curator invites us to see how the existing "natural" panorama is effectively the result of hundreds of years of bureaucratic management of trees.
<em>First, the Forests</em> installation view at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal
First, the Forests installation view at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal
The second category, the Scientific Forestry, presents the rationale of both the Swiss and German aproach to forests. In this section we find two revealing pieces of how a rational thought was applied to the thinking of ordering trees. One piece is a representation by Karl Kasthofer published in the 1830 book Le Guide Dans Les Forêts, showing a numeric quantification of a forest; the second is by Willy Lange in 1927, displaying a thorough "scientific mapping" of groupings of trees, paths of recurrences and the different species contained within a certain area of a forest. Bringing this rationale to a contemporary example, the exhibition also shows a not-too-circulated unbuilt project by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron made for the Hannover Expo of the year 2000, in which the design strategy is based on forestry principles to organize both buildings and trees.
The exhibition explores the ways in which we understand and perceive forests, introducing the concept of forestry as a design (not just science) tool and a form of knowledge about creating artificial forests
Large-scale model of a generic Swiss forest, designed by Heidi and Peter Wenger for the 1965
national Lausanne Expo. © Archives de la construction moderne – Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, fonds Heidi & Peter Wenger
Large-scale model of a generic Swiss forest, designed by Heidi and Peter Wenger for the 1965 national Lausanne Expo. © Archives de la construction moderne – Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, fonds Heidi & Peter Wenger
The category of the Tropical Forestry records the circulation of the tropical wood in the context of colonial India, specifically in British Burmah. It also acknowledges the role of forestry in the realm of labor as well as to expose the conflictive nature of the tropical forests exploitation. The contemporary reference introduce the work of Studio Mumbai — who exhibited their wood work practice in the 2010 edition of the Venice Biennale — and the ways in which they design but mainly craft their projects in a wood-shop, of hands-on environment.
Left, cover of <em>Durable Douglas Fir, America’s Permanent Lumber Supply</em>, by Bror L. Grondal. (Seattle: West Coast Lumber Trade Extension Bureau, 1926), page 16-17. CCA Collection. Right, photomontage comparing the Douglas fir to a 10-storey building, from <em>Durable Douglas Fir, America’s Permanent Lumber Supply</em>
Left, cover of Durable Douglas Fir, America’s Permanent Lumber Supply, by Bror L. Grondal. (Seattle: West Coast Lumber Trade Extension Bureau, 1926), page 16-17. CCA Collection. Right, photomontage comparing the Douglas fir to a 10-storey building, from Durable Douglas Fir, America’s Permanent Lumber Supply
The last category, Economic Forestry, exposes how the ideas of efficiency, optimization, value and productivity shaped and paved a new way for forestry as industry. This grouping made visible the pairing of the concepts of "Preservation vs. Industry" and "Federal Property vs. Private Property" as noted by Handel. Not a surprise, this category is represented by a 1971 project by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters in Federal Way, Washington, United States of America. The Weyerhaeuser Company is one of the largest in the industry of pulp and paper and is also in the front row as owners of large areas of timberland in the U.S. Although the SOM project encloses an area of 34,000 square metres, the building site occupy 525,000 square metres of land, and as per Handel's argument, is the formal consequence of design principles based on forestry, not just architecture. In this case, the project would be more than a series of horizontal slabs reminiscent of the organic architecture of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or a lying-down skyscraper as it was often called; it was also the materialization of the economic shift between the exploitation of trees versus the exploitation of the land. Forestry became another means for the consumer culture, and SOM's building an architecture project designed not just for the forestry industry but by forestry principles. In this group, the images of the British Columbia pavilion for the 1970 Osaka Expo show another curious example of the category of Economic Forestry.
Satellite image of the checkerboard forests in Montana, 2008. ©Terraserver
Satellite image of the checkerboard forests in Montana, 2008. ©Terraserver
The exhibition is located in the small octagonal room on the main floor of the CCA. The four categories are represented mainly with printed reproductions over thin bare-plywood cut to size, placed over four open wood frames which evoke an uncovered balloon-frame construction. The room is even more centralized since these "walls" can be read as samples of the end product of a processed forest. Parallel to these wood frames, four walls in the eight-sided room serve as background for an enlarged reproduction of an emblematic representation in each of the show's categories. A few objects, both originals and reproductions, accompany the clean and sober wood work.
Giant Fir Log, Washington, USA. From the Gilles Gagnon postcard collection, CCA, Montréal. Gift of Gilles Gagnon
Giant Fir Log, Washington, USA. From the Gilles Gagnon postcard collection, CCA, Montréal. Gift of Gilles Gagnon
Although beautifully and neatly crafted, the "wood walls" and the thin bare-plywood boards seem to be too neutral — Matta-Clark's building cuts might have influenced me here — to convey the complexity of the provocative and unusual material curated by Handel. After confronting the many findings that the research reveals, the exhibition's design seems a glimpse of a larger project. Perhaps the idealistic octagonal room needs to be challenged in further editions of the program, and a much-needed catalog or publication of the exhibition should be included as part of the outcome.

Inaugurating the unique and valuable space of the CCA's Young Curator Program, First, The Forests is a thoughtful curatorial project, exploring marginal and provocative approaches to the discussion of this more and more expanded practice in the field of architecture. The next edition of the curatorial program will surely be anticipated by many. Marcelo López-Dinardi (@marcelolopezd)
Through 6 January 2013
First, The Forests
CCA
Montréal, Canada

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