The Last Lookout: Architecture After The Forest Service

Master of Architecture Thesis Exhibition

Temple University Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Advisors Jeffrey S. Nesbit, Kate Wingert-Playdon, Sally Harrison

2025

Our forest has been entirely designed.

Through the production of artificial boundaries, unassuming objects, and pervasive cultural imaginaries, the United States Forest Service (USFS) constructs American forests in the image of a naturalized occupying state. Contemporary architecture, in its reliance on this manufactured forest, sustains violent neoliberal fantasies of displacement disguised as world-saving visions of productivity and progress.

So how might we imagine the future of architecture, of our forest, of resistance? If the Forest Service is a tool of an occupying state, a new vision of the forest is delayed until the current system of commodification and nationalization is dismantled. This project speculates on a final form - the last lookout - and asks how this end can be just as valuable as a beginning in realizing a new future – an architecture after the Forest Service.

Based on the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 which set forth five productivity mandates for USFS managed lands (watershed, logging, recreation, range, and wildlife), and in conversation with the five metaphors of Dan Handel’s Designed Forests, the project satirizes five architectural endings of the forest: the MAUSOLEUM, the PENITENTIARY, the MUSEUM, the COMMONS, and the AFTERLIFE. Each forest, rendered in plan, perspective, and physical model, investigates the symbiotic relationship between forest imaginary, architectural vessel, urban form, and political agency.

Together, the presented history of the Forest Service and the speculative spatial imaginaries posit that the forest we inherit need not be the forest we leave behind, and act from an understanding that the forest we ultimately construct must first be the forest we imagine.