A 1 English author A.A. Milne (1882-1956) published The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.
English writer William Golding’s (1911-93) 1954 novel Lord of the Flies tells of a stranded group of schoolboys’ regression to a primitive state on an uninhabited island.
2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was a Genevan social and political philosopher. His 1762 novel Émile, or On Education, is a treatise on the importance of education to society.
3
Max Ernst (1891-1976) was a German artist influential in both Dadaism and Surrealism.
4
John Constable (1776-1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) were English landscape painters and two of the foremost figures in Romantic art.
5
Opposite page: An oven built to produce charcoal by slow burning wood, created in 2012 by Formafantasma for its Charcoal project at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. PHOTO Luisa Zanzani
A. Milne’s second Winnie the Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner,1 begins with a contradiction. It would start with an introduction, Milne says, but he did that in the first book, so what’s left to say? Instead, he offers the opposite. The introduction becomes a conclusion and Pooh says goodbye before he’s even said hello. “But it isn’t really Good-bye,” Milne reassures us, “because the Forest will always be there…”
It’s a somewhat mystical opening, especially for a children’s story, yet one that captures something of the allure of forests. They recur throughout art and literature, but seldom as straightforward settings. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies,2 they’re a degenerative force that lets inherent vice run wild, while in Rousseau’s Émile3 they’re an early schoolyard for civilisation. The forests of Max Ernst4 are abstracted and foreboding, whereas Constable and Turner5 painted them as romantic idylls. A forest is rarely just a forest, and this quality of otherness accounts for their cultural cachet. “It is not only in the Modern Imagination that forests cast their shadow of primeval antiquity,” wrote Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization,6 “from the beginning they appeared to our ancestors as archaic, as antecedent to the human world.”
For many, such a pull has been difficult to resist, and we are accustomed to the forest as a muse for art.7 However, while woodlands have been eulogised by writers, painters and filmmakers, their creative influence is uneven. Designers, especially in the 20th century, have been largely unswayed. Although the design industry has always made heavy use of wood, its engagement with woods has been infrequent. The forest has been seen as a material resource and little else. Yet a generation of young designers is now emerging who look to the forest for inspiration. From established studios such as Formafantasma8 and Peter Marigold,9 through to more recent graduates such as Pippa Murray and Studio Swine,10 the forest has become a prevalent theme in design. To some, it provides material engagement on a grand scale; an ecosystem that offers not only wood, but which also proposes new treatments for that material. For others, the organic growth of forests symbolises progressive forms of manufacture that move away from the rigidity of industry and towards more spontaneous modes of production. Perhaps most strikingly, some studios have taken the forest to be a valid subject for design – a problem to be solved, rather than an inspiration in solving others. Designers are becoming attuned to the forest’s otherness.
Design’s traditional view of the forest was as a material store and this attitude abides; wood remains most designers’ introduction to their subject. “In design there is always a link to wood and one of the reasons is that it’s easy to work with,” says Augustin Scott de Martinville, a member of Big-Game and former head of the MA Product Design course at ECAL.11 “It’s an entry point to design that’s not linked to fashion. It’s always around.” >
128 Disegno. FOREST AS IDEA GENERATOR