Portland XX
It’s a book about the people who built America’s idea, literally, out of a tree. Their work is a disappearing but leaving a form in which the utopia of progress and the sadness of the lost landscape came together.
The city of Portland grew up surrounded by productive, sneaky forests in the Pacific Northwest. There was the formation of its own ecosystem of forest practices, ranging from the creation of a forest service to architectural images in which the tree became not just a building material, but an ideology of space.
In the early 20th century, the US experienced a moment when nature and industry came together as partners. The forests of the Pacific North have become not only an economic resource, but also a cultural symbol — a national body that feeds the growth of the new America. In 1905, on Lewis and Clark Central Exportation in Portland, it was visualized in a grand form: Forestry Building, built entirely of giant logs, became a «chamber of wood».
