Textile Society of America
Date of this Version
2018
Citation
Published in The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global; Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 16th Biennial Symposium. Presented at Vancouver, BC, Canada; September 19 – 23, 2018. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/
doi 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0022
Abstract
Timberline Village holds an iconic place in popular culture, serving as a symbol of Western U.S. mountain tradition. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was filmed there, dozens of ski-wear advertisements feature it as background, and it has even been used for an immersive horror game setting. During the early 20th century, other great mountain lodges were built in the West, but what makes Timberline unique is its textiles. It receives almost two million visitors a year who come from around the world to admire this handcrafted building perched at 6000 fee elevation on Mt. Hood in Oregon. The Lodge was built in 1936-37 during The Great Depression, as a WPA project meant to employ craftspeople and construct a ski resort. They used whatever materials were available, milling local wood with handsaws, hauling huge stone boulders from the other side of the mountain, and making textiles by hand for the interior spaces with wool and linen produced in Oregon. The result is a masterpiece of design in the regional aesthetic called Cascadian style architecture. This paper looks at how Timberline Lodge’s handcrafted fabrics help visitors interpret their mountain experience using a unique textile pattern language specific to this place, and how that interpretation has evolved over the past 80 years.
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Comments
Copyright © 2018 by the author