Synopses & Reviews
As old as a roadway that was once a Native trail, as new as the suburban subdivisions spreading across the American countryside, the cultural landscape is endlessly changing. The study of cultural landscapesand#151;a far more recent developmentand#151;has also undergone great changes, ever broadening, deepening, and refining our understanding of the intricate webs of social and ecological spaces that help to define human groups and their activities.
Everyday America surveys the widening conceptions and applications of cultural landscape writing in the United States and, in doing so, offers a clear and compelling view of the state of cultural landscape studies today.
These essaysand#151;by distinguished journalists, historians, cultural geographers, architects, landscape architects, and plannersand#151;constitute a critical evaluation of the fieldand#8217;s theoretical assumptions, and of the work of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the pivotal figure in the emergence of cultural landscape studies. At the same time, they present exemplary studies of twentieth-century landscapes, from the turn-of-the-century American downtown to the corporate campus and the mini-mall. Assessing the fieldand#8217;s accomplishments and shortcomings, offering insights into teaching the subject, and charting new directions for its future development, Everyday America is an eloquent statement of the meaning, value, and potential of the close study of human environments as they embody, reflect, and reveal American culture.
About the Author
Chris Wilson is J. B. Jackson Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (1997) and Facing Southwest: The Life and Houses of John Gaw Meem (2001). Paul Groth is Associate Professor in the Departments of Architecture and Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (1994) and the coeditor of Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (1997).
Table of Contents
PREFACE
1. The Polyphony of Cultural Landscape Study: An Introduction
and#151;Paul Groth and Chris Wilson
EVALUATING J.B. JACKSON
2. J.B. Jackson and the Play of the Mind: Inquiry and Assertion as Contact Sports
and#151;Patricia Nelson Limerick
3. J.B. Jackson as a Critic of Modern Architecture
and#151;Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
4. Learning from Brinck
and#151;Denise Scott Brown
5. Looking Down the Road: J.B. Jackson and the American Highway Landscape
and#151;Timothy Davis
TEACHING AND LEARNING LANDSCAPE VISION
6. The Monument and the Bungalow: The Intellectual Legacy of J.B. Jackson
and#151;Peirce Lewis
7. Crossing the American Grain with Vesalius, Geddes, and Jackson: The Cross Section as a Learning Tool
and#151;Grady Clay
8. Basic "Brincksmanship": Impressions Left in a Youthful Mind
and#151;Jeffrey W. Limerick
9. Observations of Faith: Landscape Context in Design Education
and#151;Tracy Walker Moir-McClean
QUESTIONING THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS
10. On Modern Vernaculars and J.B. Jackson
and#151;Gwendolyn Wright
11. What (Else) We Talk about When We Talk about Landscape: For a Return to the Social Imagination
and#151;George L. Henderson
12. Normative Dimensions of Landscape
and#151;Richard H. Schein
13. Private Property and the Ecological Commons in the American West
and#151;Mark Fiege
INTERPRETING TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBAN LANDSCAPES
14. Gender, Imagination, and Experience in the Early-Twentieth-Century American Downtown
and#151;Jessica Sewell
15. Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation
and#151;Louise A. Mozingo
16. The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles
and#151;James Rojas
17. Medicine in the (Mini) Mall: An American Health Care Landscape
and#151;David C. Sloane
Notes
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index