The art, science, and design of forests

Abstract

The iconic habitat representing nature to the public, forests are the focus of two recent books. The first, Cambio, accompanied the show of the same name by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin that opened (and then closed due to the pandemic) in 2020 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The essays comprising the book and their accompanying illustrations provide an unusually multidisciplinary view of forests and timber forest resources. The second, Forêts Géométriques, is the book version of a photography show first presented at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 2017. Through a combination of several essays and arresting photographs in different styles, it tells the story of forests, plantations, and the people who live with them in southern Chile. Both books present intriguing visual and textual approaches to understanding forests as not only ecological but also social and material spaces. Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin are designers jointly going by the name Formafantasma, known for their interest in research-based approaches, recycling and reusability, sustainable sourcing, attention to materiality, and interdisciplinary collaborations. They direct the GeoDesign master’s programme at Design Academy Eindhoven (for which I teach). As they write in their introduction to the Cambio book, ‘Design as an act can be defined as the innate propensity of humans to conceive and perform desired changes to their habitat, but design as a discipline is a historical phenomenon formed in relation to the Industrial Revolution’. The tension between design as an inevitable and natural transformation of the world, and design as part of an extraction-and-consumptionbased economy contributing to numerous harms is one of the key themes of the book. If we think of design as the act of changing one’s habitat, then all species are designers to a greater or larger degree. Indeed, evolution itself can be understood as design carried out in a diffuse and reciprocal manner at the interface between individuals, species, and their environments (i.e. natural selection and adaptation). This view is articulated in the essay by Frederic Lens, an evolutionary ecologist who writes about the evolution of woodiness. I was surprised to learn that woodiness was a basal trait of plants, but then was lost in many lineages that became herbaceous, only to be regained at least 700 separate times. The philosopher Emanuele Coccia also reflects on the design approach incarnated in trees: