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

2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize, University of Virginia Center for Cultural Landscapes2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture ForumHow 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 huma