Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History

Abstract

In 1852, a hunter called Augustus T. Dowd came across a grove of Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The find aroused sufficient public curiosity for prospectors to see an opportunity. In 1856, the second largest among the trees, recorded at circa one hundred metres in height and twenty-eight metres in diameter, was covered in scaffolding and stripped of its bark up to a height of thirty-five metres. A total of sixty tonnes of bark sections, 2.4 metres high and on average twenty-eight centimetres thick, was shipped to New York and exhibited as a reconstituted, crownless, trunk. This structure was later reassembled inside London’s Crystal Palace, which itself, disassembled after the 1851 Great Exhibition, had been rebuilt as a permanent attraction in Sydenham (fig. 1). There, the hollow redwood remained on display until its destruction, along with much of the central nave of the Palace, in a fire in 1866. By that time, back in California, the partially de-barked tree had stopped growing foliage (fig. 2). Its base unprotected, it eventually burnt down in a wildfire in 1908. A 2500-year-old giant tree perished within six decades—not, presumably, of its first encounter with the human race, but following its violent incorporation into the flows of interests, finance, technology, and greed associated with colonisation, industrialisation, and associated cultural production. The scattering of its parts thousands of miles away from its original location traced these currents faithfully enough. The lack of protection that destroyed the tree was both concrete, following the removal, transportation, and commodification of its protective layer, and abstract: as so often witnessed in history, the public outcry that followed its destruction formed the basis of laws for the protection of the natural environment that are still in force today. Not that humans can always claim learning from their historical mistakes. Worldwide, the current destruction of forests amply illustrates the same disregard for the natural world, with ominous consequences for our own survival as species. This sorry tale tells us more than the strange parallelism of architecture and exploited nature, the hollow Giant Sequoia and its short-lived shelter, the Crystal Palace. Both of these monumental structures, man-made and man-appropriated, were moved from their original location, consumed and turned into surplus. Timber, as part of a global mercantile exchange network, had of course previously been incorporated into these economic flows for centuries. But in the 1850s, these mediating flows are