2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award

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