Behind what we see as products we desire, interiors we live in, housing developments we grew up in, and architecture we appreciate, are organizations that drive their circulation in the social imagination. What we think of hardwood flooring or how we consume paper towels is often a result of a careful construction of new products for new markets, in the process of which new consumers are being created.
This is not a simple marketing scheme; the constant reformation of popular demand is backed up in regional and national politics and supported by a multi-channel assault on the public opinion. This is also a process that takes time. And indeed, some of the organizations that were most successful in defining our relationship to our physical environments have existed for many decades, changing with the times, as well as relentlessly shaping them.
In the United States, where more than fifty percent of all forestlands are private, forestry organizations are, accordingly, private companies. And while a disillusioned reader, versed in poststructuralist parlance, can argue that our lives are anyway preconditioned by the structures of capital, forest corporations are still exceptional. That is due to their history, which makes them the largest private landowners in the country. The simple fact that these few companies have in their possession more than ten percent of the total US land area, holding eighty to ninety percent of certain states, makes their direct and indirect influence on the design of environments greater than any single administration or public agency.
Weyerhaeuser is one such forestry company; in existence since 1900, it developed to be one of the world largest forest corporations. Its history and contemporary operations provide a striking illustration of the lines that connect remote forestlands, engineered subjectivities and individual homes.
Chapter 1
The most important moment in the creation of American forest corporations was when “Land Grants” were given to railroad companies. The government handed immense areas following the 1862 Land Grant in order to subsidize the realization of railway systems. In detail, these lands were given in alternating one-mile sections, in order to maintain federal control and profit from future rise in land values.
In forested areas such as the Pacific Northwest, this pattern was translated into “checkerboard forests,” as the railroad companies clear-cut their lands in order to sponsor operations. What followed was the translation of this abstract system into a fractured landscape, still visible today.
As railroad companies struggled, a new era for the lumber industry was opening: in 1900, Frederick Weyerhaeuser purchased, in what was the largest land transaction in American history, 900,000 acres of forestland from the Northern Pacific. What began as a collection of early logging camps with rough conditions gradually developed into a nationwide map of strategic control of production and distribution, constantly changing according to the formation and development of new markets.
Chapter 2
New markets did not just emerge. They were consciously defined and articulated in tune with a specific geographical and social context. The wood-based construction industry was one such market, and its cultivation demanded an elaborate production of home catalogues, designed through collaborations with architects. The houses in these catalogues often referred to cultural ideals and regional identity, going as far as proposing Frank Lloyd Wright inspired prairie style homes, made entirely out of wood.
The distribution of catalogues to individual consumers was complemented by campaigns that were meant to structure a public opinion. In these, architects again played a role, associating “education in good design” with the use of wood and, even more, in promoting the way in which the company managed its forestlands, always with a genuine concern to the public good.
Eventually, beyond the public good, it was the business diagram that determined the dynamic of market development. This diagram, produced c. 1970, demonstrates a moment of abstraction, in which land can be converted into multiple products, based on their sales. This moment also signaled the transformation of Weyerhaeuser into an international corporation, with international headquarters.
While early facilities were simple industrial plants, at times joined by generic structures that housed office functions, the evolution of the company, with its growing emphasis on logistics, coordination, and capital operations, demanded a different approach and managerial vision. This materialized in its headquarters building, designed by SOM Sasaki, Walker and Associates and completed in 1971 near Tacoma, Washington.
The design of the building was of major importance to the company’s president, made clear by his decision to take responsibility from Gordon Bunshaft in the SOM New York office and hand it to Edward C. Bassett of the San Francisco branch, declaring that a Western architect was deemed “more compatible” with the task. The result was indeed a unique terraced, vegetated structure, strikingly different from the previous line of headquarters buildings that SOM had become known for. In its positioning on the site, as well as in its surprisingly “bubbly” section, the project well-captured an ambivalence inherent to the forest industry regarding the boundaries between artificial and ecological systems.
This was further enhanced with the design of the interiors, which masterfully blended organizational functions with naturalistic settings, mixing executives, secretaries, plants, desks, and tapestries in a total and constantly changing organic environment. With that, the corporation carefully calibrated the everyday settings of its consumers turned inwards to do the same for its employees.
Dan Handel is an architect and the inaugural Young Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, for which he developed the exhibition First, the Forests. His writing has appeared in Thresholds, Bracket, Frame, San Rocco, and Cabinet. He is the editor of Aircraft Carrier (Hajte Cantz, 2012), and of Manifest, an upcoming journal of American architecture and urbanism.
www.manifestproject.org/
The veil of corporate strategizing, of invisible reorganizations on a massive scale and of constructed tastes fed to individuals, mask the real sites from which the forest corporations still draw their power. It is there where one encounters environments that manifest an inherent ambivalence that can be described as follows: when designing a completely artificial forest, nature is somehow introduced into the picture. Strangely enough, it is these processed, industrialized, manipulated forests, which are geared towards putting products into circulation that enable us to insist, once again, on an elusive and complex understanding of “nature.”
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