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Landscape in Sight: Looking at America
Focusing not on nature but on landscape―land shaped by human presence―Jackson invites us to see the everyday places of the American countryside and city. This appealing anthology, illustrated with Jackson’s sketches and photographs, brings together his most famous essays, significant but less well known writings, articles originally published under pseudonyms, a bibliography of his landscape writings, and introductions that place his work in context.
"Jackson remains a model for civil discussion of architecture and the landscape."―Michael Leccese, Architecture
"[This book] contains several wonderful essays in what is best described as domestic anthropology, including a paean to mobile homes and an investigation of the humble garage. Vintage Jackson."―Witold Rybczynski , Lingua Franca
"A large and varied sampler of essays by the late doyen of American cultural geography. . . . Highly recommended for geographers and students of the American scene."― Kirkus Reviews
"Horowitz makes the reader appreciate once again the dignity and affection Jackson brought to garages, supermarkets, cemeteries, or the urban grid."―Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
"Jackson remains a model for civil discussion of architecture and the landscape."―Michael Leccese, Architecture
"[This book] contains several wonderful essays in what is best described as domestic anthropology, including a paean to mobile homes and an investigation of the humble garage. Vintage Jackson."―Witold Rybczynski , Lingua Franca
"A large and varied sampler of essays by the late doyen of American cultural geography. . . . Highly recommended for geographers and students of the American scene."― Kirkus Reviews
"Horowitz makes the reader appreciate once again the dignity and affection Jackson brought to garages, supermarkets, cemeteries, or the urban grid."―Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
440 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
J.B. Jackson
14 books19 followersJohn Brinckerhoff "Brinck" Jackson, J. B. Jackson, (September 25, 1909, Dinard, France - August 28, 1996, La Cienega, NM) was a writer, publisher, instructor, and sketch artist in landscape design. Herbert Muschamp, New York Times architecture critic, stated that J. B. Jackson was “America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies.” He was influential in broadening the perspective on the “vernacular” landscape.
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August 10, 2018
Shortly after finishing a degree in urban planning, I found myself in charge of a project that set out to compare population growth in New York City with auto registration data. My boss, a car-owning labor economist who resided in a leafy suburb on the far edge of Queens, expected that the data would show that registrations continued to increase faster than population growth as they had throughout the 80s and early 90s. He hoped our research would bolster policy recommendations that were then calling for increased parking requirements for new construction in the city.
I, on the other hand, having just shed the most visible vestige of my former suburban self, was quite satisfied with my ‘post-car’ reality; tokens, transfers, and taxicabs more than met my daily transportation needs. And truth be told, I felt a certain pride knowing that my former car would no longer be among the hundreds of thousands of those registered with a New York City address. My own hope for the project was to find a drop in registrations, proving that the newest New Yorkers were equally confident in the public transit system and wouldn’t need more storage space for their two tons of metal, glass, and rubber.
In the end the data showed that there had indeed been a decline in registrations, though the reasons behind that decline were unclear. The boss, to give him his due, also used the train for his daily commute and was just as pro-transit as me. But in our numerous debates over the subject of the car in the city, he frequently admonished me not to forget about the centrality of the car to American culture and identity, stressing that even New York City was not exceptional in this regard. Not yet 30, I assumed that our differences of opinion were born of a generational divide.
Looking back on our debates, I’ve come to realize that wasn’t necessarily the case. The boss may indeed have romanticized the car in a way that I didn’t, but he was also pragmatic. His refusal to countenance my visions of a car-free city, and his eagerness to make New York City accommodate American culture, rather than vice versa, made the boss, at least when it came to the cityscape, a fellow traveller in the populist intellectual tradition of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, high scribe of the 20th century American landscape.
“Brink” as he was known by his familiars wrote on a wide range of topics: the evolution of the American house, early ranching and farming economies, America’s mystical attachment to the front yard, town planning, cemetery design, and even psychedelic sports, just to name a few. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, editor of Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (1997), a beautifully-crafted collection of more than 40 years of Jackson’s writings, shows him to be a thoughtful skeptic of modern architecture, a writer who revels in the underappreciated beauty of rural America, and in the final analysis, a facts-on-the-ground realist who cannot help but appreciate the freedom of the highway and its attendant development. As for the car:
It would be tempting to characterize Jackson’s views as conservative, especially given the way he often butts heads with the work of social scientists and urban planners. In his response to The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’s paean to the joys of the congested city, for instance, Jackson circumspectly reminds his readers that a cityscape need not be “knee-deep in parked cars, disguised and defaced by colored and moving lights, [and] crawling with humanity” to be enjoyed as a work of art. Calling Jackson a conservative, though, is akin to calling President Donald Trump a conservative.
The truth is, he’s not easy to pin down. Take Jackson’s definition of vernacular architecture:
Elevating the unorthodox, eschewing universal principles that fail to meet the psychic needs of men, and raising the bar on what’s worthy of conservation: these are all hallmarks of the iconoclastic populist, not the conservative resistant to change. But Jackson doesn’t just define the vernacular, he also, more than any other 20th century American architectural critic, finds merit in it. Writing about the vernacular city, he holds up Lubbock, Texas as an exemplar of a contemporary urban design whereby the city “comes into existence simultaneously over a wide area—a scatteration of structures with no real focal point.” Having spent the better part of five years in Lubbock, and having visited downtown on exactly one occasion—that for jury duty—I can attest to said scatteration.
Nan Ellin, in her insightful book Postmodern Urbanism, links Jackson with the Vidalian tradition of French geography. His geographic concern for the social organization that the land reveals is indeed consistent with the work of Paul Vidal de la Blanche and his early 20th century disciples. But I would suggest that Jackson’s writings are as much connected to, if not more so, a tradition of American travel writing that stretches back to Timothy Dwight, writing around the turn of the 19th century, and is today found in the work of contemporary writers like Jonathan Raban and William Least-Heat Moon. While not shying away from the majestic beauty of the picturesque, these writers prefer to focus their gaze on the ways in which landscapes both create and reflect human identities and activities.
No matter the intellectual genealogy, it’s clear that Jackson was steeped in learning. Born to American parents in France, he was the beneficiary of an elite East Coast education, and like a number of prominent men in the latter half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, ultimately put roots down in the American West. Some of his strongest pieces in the collection have to do with New Mexico and the surrounding region. In Looking at New Mexico (1983) he writes:
In Chihuahua as We Might Have Been an essay that appeared in the first edition of Landscape, a magazine Jackson edited and published from 1951 to 1968, he profiles the history of ranching in the Chihuahuan desert and how it was shaped by national decisions on both the Mexican and American sides of the border. Security, politics, development policy, and economics all play essential roles in shaping not only the region’s ranches, but also its towns and cities. Even despite a reliance on psychology that feels dated and his rather overblown conclusion: “It would do us no harm…if more of the Latin faith in reason rather than in power had spread northward into our country before the line was drawn,” the piece is a memorable one.
If there’s something to criticize in Lefkowitz Horowitz’s compilation of Jackson’s work, it may be the generosity of what she has chosen to include. In The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder (1957) Jackson complains that we uncritically accept what artists and scientists have to say about space, matter, and motion even when we don’t understand their theories, but that we’re not willing to do the same when the hot-rodder or motorcyclist tries to explore and explain space, matter, and motion on their own terms. Why do we sympathize with the scientist and not the hot-rodder? “Because his unconventionality comes too close to home…and what we notice in particular about his activities is the rubbish-strewn landscape, the disregard of time-honored esthetic values, the reckless driving.” So weak is the argument that it feels like filler material for an edition of the magazine that desperately needed copy. That said, Jackson’s accompanying sketch of a speeding motorcycle is a joyful addition to that particular piece.
The “Notes and Comments” pieces are another portion of the book that could have benefited from a more judicious editorial hand, and maybe integrated into the collection as a whole rather than be made to stand on their own. To be sure, some of them are worthy—who doesn’t want to know about the great German garden gnome debate of 1961!—but collected near the end of the book as they are, most of them feel extraneous. There’s also a second introduction by the editor that feels as if it has been adapted from previously published work. It’s not uninteresting, but neither is it clear why one introduction, in the beginning, wouldn’t have sufficed.
As for the major limitation I sense in Jackson’s work itself, it’s ironically the lack of a human presence. For all his celebration of the landscapes of men, he wholly avoids the inclusion of contemporary voices or anything that we might call a human-interest story. Understandably, he’s not a journalist. But he does employ a variety of characters, literary, historical, and even his own everyman fictional constructs. His reading of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit is strong, his articulation of the differences between the worldviews of Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau is convincing, and his satirical portrait of Babs’ in her “black velvet toreador tights…and…divine yellow linen shirt” reads today as a light and genuinely humorous period piece.
But never do we find the voices of a real farmer, a real city-dweller, a real truck driver in anything that Jackson writes. And it’s here where one senses a missed opportunity to garner insights that go beyond the keen eye of the trained observer. It’s one thing to intellectually defend and validate the man-on-the-street’s point of view, it’s another to actually give him a voice. It’s this lack that separates Jackson’s imaginative and analytical work from the ‘deep mapping’ undertaken in a book like PrairyErth, Least-Heat Moon’s 1991 masterpiece. Still, Jackson’s populist, iconoclastic voice, even standing on its own, is an important one and it’s clear to me that he deserves to be more widely read by students of the American 20th century, this book being a good place to start. © Jeffrey L. Otto, August 10, 2018
I, on the other hand, having just shed the most visible vestige of my former suburban self, was quite satisfied with my ‘post-car’ reality; tokens, transfers, and taxicabs more than met my daily transportation needs. And truth be told, I felt a certain pride knowing that my former car would no longer be among the hundreds of thousands of those registered with a New York City address. My own hope for the project was to find a drop in registrations, proving that the newest New Yorkers were equally confident in the public transit system and wouldn’t need more storage space for their two tons of metal, glass, and rubber.
In the end the data showed that there had indeed been a decline in registrations, though the reasons behind that decline were unclear. The boss, to give him his due, also used the train for his daily commute and was just as pro-transit as me. But in our numerous debates over the subject of the car in the city, he frequently admonished me not to forget about the centrality of the car to American culture and identity, stressing that even New York City was not exceptional in this regard. Not yet 30, I assumed that our differences of opinion were born of a generational divide.
Looking back on our debates, I’ve come to realize that wasn’t necessarily the case. The boss may indeed have romanticized the car in a way that I didn’t, but he was also pragmatic. His refusal to countenance my visions of a car-free city, and his eagerness to make New York City accommodate American culture, rather than vice versa, made the boss, at least when it came to the cityscape, a fellow traveller in the populist intellectual tradition of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, high scribe of the 20th century American landscape.
“Brink” as he was known by his familiars wrote on a wide range of topics: the evolution of the American house, early ranching and farming economies, America’s mystical attachment to the front yard, town planning, cemetery design, and even psychedelic sports, just to name a few. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, editor of Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (1997), a beautifully-crafted collection of more than 40 years of Jackson’s writings, shows him to be a thoughtful skeptic of modern architecture, a writer who revels in the underappreciated beauty of rural America, and in the final analysis, a facts-on-the-ground realist who cannot help but appreciate the freedom of the highway and its attendant development. As for the car:
The automobile allows one to travel almost at will anywhere in the public domain while remaining in a completely private world unequivocally defined by physical boundaries…This ability to move through public space without suffering impingements upon, or readjustment of, one’s own personal space could explain much more than the commuter’s attachment to his private automobile.
It would be tempting to characterize Jackson’s views as conservative, especially given the way he often butts heads with the work of social scientists and urban planners. In his response to The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’s paean to the joys of the congested city, for instance, Jackson circumspectly reminds his readers that a cityscape need not be “knee-deep in parked cars, disguised and defaced by colored and moving lights, [and] crawling with humanity” to be enjoyed as a work of art. Calling Jackson a conservative, though, is akin to calling President Donald Trump a conservative.
The truth is, he’s not easy to pin down. Take Jackson’s definition of vernacular architecture:
My own definition of vernacular architecture describes it as a form of building that is temporary, utilitarian, unorthodox in style, and often unorthodox in construction. Vernacular…does not aspire to express universal principles of design; it is contingent; it responds to environmental influences—social as well as natural—and alters as those influences alter. Its attachment to place is strictly pragmatic.
Elevating the unorthodox, eschewing universal principles that fail to meet the psychic needs of men, and raising the bar on what’s worthy of conservation: these are all hallmarks of the iconoclastic populist, not the conservative resistant to change. But Jackson doesn’t just define the vernacular, he also, more than any other 20th century American architectural critic, finds merit in it. Writing about the vernacular city, he holds up Lubbock, Texas as an exemplar of a contemporary urban design whereby the city “comes into existence simultaneously over a wide area—a scatteration of structures with no real focal point.” Having spent the better part of five years in Lubbock, and having visited downtown on exactly one occasion—that for jury duty—I can attest to said scatteration.
Nan Ellin, in her insightful book Postmodern Urbanism, links Jackson with the Vidalian tradition of French geography. His geographic concern for the social organization that the land reveals is indeed consistent with the work of Paul Vidal de la Blanche and his early 20th century disciples. But I would suggest that Jackson’s writings are as much connected to, if not more so, a tradition of American travel writing that stretches back to Timothy Dwight, writing around the turn of the 19th century, and is today found in the work of contemporary writers like Jonathan Raban and William Least-Heat Moon. While not shying away from the majestic beauty of the picturesque, these writers prefer to focus their gaze on the ways in which landscapes both create and reflect human identities and activities.
No matter the intellectual genealogy, it’s clear that Jackson was steeped in learning. Born to American parents in France, he was the beneficiary of an elite East Coast education, and like a number of prominent men in the latter half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, ultimately put roots down in the American West. Some of his strongest pieces in the collection have to do with New Mexico and the surrounding region. In Looking at New Mexico (1983) he writes:
The days are all alike; the summer is long and immobile. In the late afternoon immense black clouds boil up to the zenith, and then some small portion of the hot and thirsty landscape is suddenly blessed with a brief, violent downpour which makes every rock, every patch of earth glisten.
In Chihuahua as We Might Have Been an essay that appeared in the first edition of Landscape, a magazine Jackson edited and published from 1951 to 1968, he profiles the history of ranching in the Chihuahuan desert and how it was shaped by national decisions on both the Mexican and American sides of the border. Security, politics, development policy, and economics all play essential roles in shaping not only the region’s ranches, but also its towns and cities. Even despite a reliance on psychology that feels dated and his rather overblown conclusion: “It would do us no harm…if more of the Latin faith in reason rather than in power had spread northward into our country before the line was drawn,” the piece is a memorable one.
If there’s something to criticize in Lefkowitz Horowitz’s compilation of Jackson’s work, it may be the generosity of what she has chosen to include. In The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder (1957) Jackson complains that we uncritically accept what artists and scientists have to say about space, matter, and motion even when we don’t understand their theories, but that we’re not willing to do the same when the hot-rodder or motorcyclist tries to explore and explain space, matter, and motion on their own terms. Why do we sympathize with the scientist and not the hot-rodder? “Because his unconventionality comes too close to home…and what we notice in particular about his activities is the rubbish-strewn landscape, the disregard of time-honored esthetic values, the reckless driving.” So weak is the argument that it feels like filler material for an edition of the magazine that desperately needed copy. That said, Jackson’s accompanying sketch of a speeding motorcycle is a joyful addition to that particular piece.
The “Notes and Comments” pieces are another portion of the book that could have benefited from a more judicious editorial hand, and maybe integrated into the collection as a whole rather than be made to stand on their own. To be sure, some of them are worthy—who doesn’t want to know about the great German garden gnome debate of 1961!—but collected near the end of the book as they are, most of them feel extraneous. There’s also a second introduction by the editor that feels as if it has been adapted from previously published work. It’s not uninteresting, but neither is it clear why one introduction, in the beginning, wouldn’t have sufficed.
As for the major limitation I sense in Jackson’s work itself, it’s ironically the lack of a human presence. For all his celebration of the landscapes of men, he wholly avoids the inclusion of contemporary voices or anything that we might call a human-interest story. Understandably, he’s not a journalist. But he does employ a variety of characters, literary, historical, and even his own everyman fictional constructs. His reading of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit is strong, his articulation of the differences between the worldviews of Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau is convincing, and his satirical portrait of Babs’ in her “black velvet toreador tights…and…divine yellow linen shirt” reads today as a light and genuinely humorous period piece.
But never do we find the voices of a real farmer, a real city-dweller, a real truck driver in anything that Jackson writes. And it’s here where one senses a missed opportunity to garner insights that go beyond the keen eye of the trained observer. It’s one thing to intellectually defend and validate the man-on-the-street’s point of view, it’s another to actually give him a voice. It’s this lack that separates Jackson’s imaginative and analytical work from the ‘deep mapping’ undertaken in a book like PrairyErth, Least-Heat Moon’s 1991 masterpiece. Still, Jackson’s populist, iconoclastic voice, even standing on its own, is an important one and it’s clear to me that he deserves to be more widely read by students of the American 20th century, this book being a good place to start. © Jeffrey L. Otto, August 10, 2018
April 13, 2014
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.”
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.”
November 5, 2010
SOMEDAY- I will write a book just like this.
November 2, 2013
Seminal work.
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