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Book Cover for: City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry, James Michael Buckley

City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry

James Michael Buckley

Hardcover
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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 sources--including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs--to 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 sites--a "City of Wood"--Buckley 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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of Texas Press
  • Publish Date: Nov 19th, 2024
  • Pages: 360
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.40in - 6.50in - 1.40in - 1.50lb
  • EAN: 9781477330241
  • Categories: • History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)• Methods & Materials• Industries - Natural Resource Extraction

About the Author

James Michael Buckley is an urban planner and historian.

Praise for this book

With this impressive new book, James Buckley shows just how important it is to take a spatial approach to architectural and urban history. From the great redwood forests of Northern California to the booming city of San Francisco, Buckley guides us through the class-differentiated physical landscapes that capitalists and workers, almost all of them white men, built of wood along the Pacific Coast. The unsparing narrative tracks the devastating effects of unrelenting resource extraction, an assault that decimated ancient forests, and, coupled with industrial production, married the urban core with the countryside, creating a veritable, ever-changing City of Wood. Buckley gives the great struggles between capital and labor their due and tracks the impact of money and material, new technologies, and consumer desire on the modernizing architectural landscapes of the urbanizing West. A great gift of this book is the care that Buckley takes to document the places of everyday life in the City of Wood--the lumber camps, mill towns, docks, lumber yards, planing mills, employer mansions, worker housing, and office buildings--and the attempts to conserve what remained of the grand trees from which they were built, before the forest disappeared entirely.--Marta Gutman, City College of New York, author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950
City of Wood is a masterful work of history befitting the giant redwoods at its center. James Buckley guides the reader from forest to metropolis and through multiple scales of analysis, linking it all together, with gorgeous illustrations, into one breathtaking human landscape.--Mary P. Ryan, Johns Hopkins University (emeritus), author of Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America
Scholars seeking insight into the formation of regional-metropolitan economies will value James Buckley's expert and artful analysis of nature-capital regimes in northern California's redwood bioregion. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, timber titans, financiers, managers, and workers transformed territory into property, forests into fields, trees into logs, and logs into lumber. The author's encompassing scale and scope support a recalibration of metropole-hinterland relations seen as intrinsically dependent: the former a peak locale for enterprise, trade, and the addition of value, the latter a peripheral location for crude accumulation and entropy. Most ambitiously, Buckley's findings compel us to redraw our originary maps for today's "regional urban networks" to include California and America's West and to reset our timelines accordingly.--Greg Hise, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, coauthor of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region