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2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award
City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (published by the Univ of Texas Press in 2024).
James Michael Buckley
Buckley’s lively and beautifully written book marshals an impressive array of evidence – historical photographs, maps, company records, and the landscape itself – to show the reader a complex historical terrain of forest/city and center/periphery, spanning redwood extraction, lumber production and distribution, and building construction.
Over the course of eight chapters, the book moves from logging camps to the San Francisco docks and financial district to residential neighborhoods and back again, inviting us to understand the ways in which capitalist extraction – in this case of wood – had economic, spatial, and cultural impacts far beyond the site of harvests and the rising fortunes of lumber barons. Buckley reveals the ways in which this industry manifested in the physical landscape, and in turn shaped the activities of people who lived and worked throughout the entire region.
Using the tools of both vernacular studies and economic geography, the book forces us to see a common building material found across time and space as part of a larger, dynamic, extractive system. Wood has been used to create many of the physical places we study, but Buckley encourages us to think about the specific worlds it shaped even before it was used to fashion houses, barns, and commercial buildings.
The book’s significance for the field lies partly in the fact it straddles the line between economic, environmental and architectural history. It suggests ways that those of us interested in local (and regional) architectural history must expand our gaze to consider the networks – natural, cultural, and economic – that give buildings and cultural landscapes their shape and meaning.
Committee: Anna Andrzejewski, Chair, Cynthia Falk, Matthew Gordon Lasner
EVENT INFO:
Abbott Lowell Cummings Award Lecture
City of Wood: A Conversation with James Buckley
January 14, 2026 | 12pm EST on Zoom
REGISTRATION LINK:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TewxZcpbQf-__KHatr39-A
SPEAKER BIOS:
James Michael Buckley is an urban planner and historian in San Francisco, CA. His book, City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas, 2024) has been awarded the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award (Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2025), the J.B. Jackson Award (American Association of Geographers, 2025), and the John Brickerhoff Jackson Book Prize (UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes, 2025). Jim is a long-time member of the VAF and served as its President from 2021-2023. He taught in the urban planning programs at MIT and UC Berkeley and was the Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Oregon.
Matthew G. Lasner is a historian of housing and community planning in the United States. His first monograph, High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (2012), a history of housing co-operatives, condominiums, and townhouse complexes, was awarded the Vernacular Architecture Forum's Cummings Prize. His second, Apartments: A Postwar American History (or How the Pill, Fair Housing, Social Security, Cars, and the Loneliness Epidemic Transformed Apartment Design), will be published by University of Texas Press. Lasner is also co-editor of the in-progress Catherine Bauer: Making Housing Modern. He has written widely on housing topics in scholarly and popular journals, including The New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, and is a founding co-editor of the web journal PLATFORM. He was previously associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, CUNY, and assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. He is a member of the editorial board of Buildings & Landscapes and formerly served as a member of VAF’s board of directors and reviews editor for Buildings & Landscapes.