
City of Wood
San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry
- 360 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize, University of Virginia Center for Cultural Landscapes
2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers
2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum
How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.
California's 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the "instant city" of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state's vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional "city." This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region's rich natural environment.
Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sourcesâincluding contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographsâto explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sitesâa "City of Wood"âBuckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Frontispiece
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Geography of the City of Wood
- Part I. The Landscape of Lumber
- Part II. Forest
- Part III. Metropolis
- Part IV. Region
- Conclusion: The Architecture of the City of Wood
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index