Learning from the Tree Crusher

Research project
On Site Review 39: Tools
2021

The Mackenzie Tree Crusher was manufactured in 1964 and transported (at great logistical and financial expense) to the town of Mackenzie in northern British Columbia. The machine’s purpose was simple: to crush trees. Specifically, it was designed to clear-cut vast tracts of non-merchantable timber that would be drowned under the rising waters of the Williston Reservoir: a large artificial lake formed by the construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. Today, it sits as a roadside attraction along Highway 39.

What can designers learn from the Mackenzie Tree Crusher? As a tool, the Tree Crusher is a powerful amplification of humanity’s ability to transform a landscape, although it is impractical and inefficient. As a monument, the Tree Crusher reflects the convergence of capital, labour, and industrial ambition that carved Mackenzie out of the northern forests of British Columbia. However, it also monumentalizes the hubris of reckless resource extraction and the ongoing violence of Canadian settler colonialism on Indigenous lands. As a symbol, the Tree Crusher runs anathema to modern design’s core values of environmental stewardship and attention to the particularities of site. I argue that the utility of the Mackenzie Tree Crusher lies not in its intended function as a tool, but as a symbol for all the schemes and misplaced ambitions that characterize many of Canada’s northern extractive landscapes. It is a monument to failure, and also a reminder of the ongoing forms of dispossession, marginalization, and violence inflicted upon northern communities and lands.