THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

In the evolution of modern American geography, few writers or teachers have left a more important and indelible intellectual legacy than John Brinckerhoff Jackson - a man who dominated scholarly thinking about the American landscape for almost half a century. At the time of his death in 1996, it is fair to say that no single individual had done more to enliven the study of ordinary American landscapes - no writer had done more to influence and make respectable the study of seemingly ordinary things.(1) Toward the end of his career, KQED, the public television station in San Francisco, made a documentary about Jackson, and his interviewer, Robert Calo, caught Jackson airing the spirit of his philosophy: My theme has never really varied. I've wanted people to become familiar with the contemporary American landscape and recognize its extraordinary complexity and beauty. Over and over again I've said that the commonplace aspects of the contemporary landscape - the streets and houses and fields and places of work - could teach us a great deal, not only about American history and American society, but about ourselves, and how we relate to the world. It is a matter of learning how to see. (Jackson, in Calo 1989) In October 1998, two years after Jackson's death, a group of some 300 scholars and designers gathered at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to honor Jackson's memory and to assess his intellectual legacy. While the conferees came from a wide variety of academic and design professions, most came with similar questions in mind. Where do Jackson's ideas lead? What does the study of commonplace landscapes have to offer? What problems does it pose? And what does it require of us, as scholars and as teachers? LANDSCAPE AS DOCUMENT Jackson was a prolific writer, and his essays on landscape embrace a wide variety of ideas, arguments, musings, and speculations. Throughout his huge opus, however, one basic proposition persistently recurs. Although it is not original with Jackson, it is fundamental to the intellectual position he espoused:(2) Wherever we go, whatever the nature of our work, we adorn the face of the earth with a living design which changes and is eventually replaced by that of a future generation.... A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it. (Jackson 1951, 5) In sum, landscape is an historic document that tells a story - nay, multiple stories - about the people who created the landscape - and the cultural context in which that landscape was embedded (Lewis 1979). And, like any document, landscape can be read by those who possess the necessary skills and vocabulary. Vernacular landscape, furthermore, is a very special kind of document. The ordinary landscape is, after all, the only lasting record written by the overwhelming majority of the earth's population who can't write because they are illiterate, or don't write because they are uncomfortable with the use of written language. The landscape created by ordinary people is the main historic record left behind by those ordinary unlettered people - records "written" on the face of the earth. But what does it mean to "read" landscape? How do we learn to do it? And, how do we teach our students the skills of landscape reading? WHERE THE IDEA OF READING LANDSCAPE CAME FROM The idea of "reading" landscape is a very old one. In his History of the Persian Wars, written about 500 B.C., Herodotus describes the delta of the Nile and speculates about its origins, how that curious landscape came to be. But today's tradition of landscape reading was an offspring of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empiricism, and the rise of what we might loosely call "natural science." The practitioners of natural science were explorers of the natural universe, who wanted to know what was out there in the world - to catalog omnivorously the things they noticed, to speculate about what things meant, and how they related to each other. …