Landscape in Sight: Looking at America Book

J.B. Jackson's LANDSCAPE IN SIGHT: LOOKING AT AMERICA is a collection of the author's articles about American cultural landscapes. These far-ranging topical essays were written over nearly half a century and compiled by an admiring scholar Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in 1997 within a year of Jackson's death. Reading through his writings, Jackson's influence on John Stilgoe's exploration, description, and explanation method of writing about the American landscape becomes readily apparent. Operating at various scales of observation'from the modestly sized American front lawn to entire city grids'J.B. Jackson has an unmistakable style and formula for analyzing everyday landscape features that often go unnoticed or at least un-pondered. He places the landscape feature within a historical context that often takes it back to European antecedents, explains how it has adapted over time, and speculates how it might evolve in the future. Although there are times where his conclusions about the American landscape seem to be a bit too universal for a few individual examples, there are other times where Jackson reveals his extensive travels to many American (and international) cities that lends more credibility to his sweeping claims and generalizations. Using a casual, rather than academic, format and tone allows Jackson to use speculative and creative ways to explore changes and continuities in the landscape. For an exemplary essay using this method see "The Westward-Moving House," in which Jackson maps out the progressive changes in three generations (18th, 19th, and 20th century) families that build their homes in particular ways to meet their particular needs with certain technological advances (81-105).

One of Jackson's reoccurring themes of discussion is the term "vernacular." As noted in last week's class, the term can mean a wide range of things due to its fluid use. Jackson understands this, and he repeatedly takes the time to explain just what he means by it whenever he uses it in an essay. In "The Domestication of the Garage," his concluding paragraph explains a working definition of vernacular as "the visible result of a confrontation between the aspirations of the occupying family and the realities of the environment'natural, social, and economic" (125). This definition offers a great method for analyzing everyday architecture as it suggests the binary of cultural expectations and environmental realities that can readily be applied to a variety of cultural landscapes. Jackson's definition seems to apply most readily to homes as he admits'in much the same way Dell Upton highlighted the home as "an American icon"'that all people have a familiarity with and "an innate interest in houses" (312). A sampling of his writings on garages, visitor pathways in cities, farmlands, and truck stops, however, demonstrates his commitment to a broad definition of what "vernacular" applies to and includes. It is no wonder that Pierce Lewis boils down J.B. Jackson's overall philosophy to the phrase: "look at everything."