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

How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.

Californias 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 states 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 regions rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sourcesincluding contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographsto 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 sitesa City of WoodBuckley 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.