John Brinkerhoff  Jackson

A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)

 
The sky above southern England

2,    Seeing New Mexico.

3,    Pueblo Dwellings and our own.

4,    Church or Plaza?

5,    A Mobile Home on the Range.  

6,    Beyond Wilderness.

7,    In Favor of Trees.

8,    The Past and Future Park.

9,    Vernacular Gardens.

10,   Working at Home.

11,    A Sense of Place/Time.

12,    Looking Into Automobiles.

13,    Truck City.

14,    Roads Belong in the Landscape.
 
 

Who, What, When, Where, How?

He is a landscape historian, geographer by training.

He wants us to understand the serious void in our aesthetic, historical and rational sensitivities to our surroundings, in particular, and geography, in general

The Middle ages and Renaissance to now, but Jackson argues that time really dictates how we understand the importance of places.

His focus is the Indo-European world as it impacts the indigenous creations of the Native American farmers in the Anasazi culture area and desert biome.

He uses a dialectical approach to convey the meaning of useful and abusive intrusions into the landscape as the substrate of our intellect and emotions.

Dialectical approach means a method by which we use opposition to determine the veracity of statements made. Verity arises from a sort of confrontation between opposites: such as the Far East and the Far West; if ideas about landscape changes exist in both very different culture areas as China and the American frontier, then there may be some elements in common we need to remember when arguing about how humans use or revere places

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Summary
 

The significant role of architecture in defining places and the replacement of architectural dominance in delineating these common spaces we have been recreating since the 19th century.

"The role of architecture and man-made forms  in creating a new civilized landscape."      

  x

 Understanding the extent to which technology as an instrument of change modifoes our landscape and thus the social perspective.
 

Three very different means of getting at place, time, architecture and technology:

• He begins with a well defined natural and cultural area to make observations concrete in that they arise from the features of a peculiar geographical setting.

Oldest inhabited area of North America above the Rio Grande is the Anasazi culture area of the Great Basin and Sonoran deserts.

Sacred areas contrasted with vernacular, or indigenous places.

• Then, moving from the specific cases to the general level of abstraction, he looks at the element and natural features that environments have in common.

• He finally examines the features and stylistic elements of modern, or mechanized civilization in contrast to the element we inherited, such as towns and villages, from the agrarian heritage of our respective ancestral cultures.

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"Out of the ruin a new symbol emerges, and a landscape finds form, and comes alive."   

ix

Jackson's three means are to focus sequentially on:

Place as Southwest as a high country geography, with an arid climate, characterized by a desert biome where the growing season is short and based on snow melting and low summer rainfall patterns. Where historically prolonged drought in the 12th and 13th centuries may have ended Anasazi cultural hegemony over the region.

Time as Environments (places in a succession of periodic recreations are actually a palimpsest of human activities across the landscape)

Objects as Town, cars & roads, which are actually examples of the oikumene, vehicles, byways.

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"we were the first generation... accustomed to seeing the earth from the air"

Western European land-use, 2006	Eastern European land-use, 1997

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In Three Parts, a Chapter by Chapter discussion of key and memorable ideas

Preface:

"the human use and abuse of the earth and its resources" vii

environmentalism betrays an awareness of cosmic order (and of high church dogma)

"that since the beginning of history humanity has modified and scarred the environment to convey some message." * [Americans are of two minds as to how we ought to live -157]

"differentiate among those wounds inflicted by greed and destructive fury, those which serve to keep us alive, and those which are inspired by a love of order and beauty, in obedience to some divine law."

Signs of our sense of responsibility for the survival of the earth and its people."

viii

"all serve as symbols; symbols of what we have done that is wrong or of what is appropriate and right."

"Much of our contemporary American landscape can no longer be seen as a composition of well defined individual spaces --farms, counties, states territories and ecological regions -- but a zones of influence and control of roads, streets, highways: arteries which dominate and nourish and hold a landscape together and provide t with instant accessibility."

¶ 2, l 12-17, viii

"rediscover the role of architecture and man-made forms in creating a new civilized landscape....[is] essentially a question of rediscovering symbols and believing in them..."

"Out of a ruin a new symbol emerges, and a landscape finds form and comes alive."

Ix

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1,     The Accessible Landscape

Coming to terms with technology as an instrument to change our perspective.

The question which insists on an answer is, What kind of small or local community can we hope to have?

"a kind of sodality based on shared uses of the street or road or shared routines."

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2,     Seeing New Mexico

Oldest inhabited area of North America above the Rio Grande is the Anasazi culture area of the Great Basin and Sonoran deserts.

"It is not easy in this landscape to separate the role of man from the role of nature."

It simply tells us that there is another way of measuring time and that the present is, in fact, an enormous interval in which even the newest of man-made structures are contemporary with the primeval."

17

"farming meant irrigation,"

"Each village devised its own communal irrigation system."

19
 
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3,     Pueblo Dwellings and our own

The Hopi villages of Arizona, are agrarian settings that crow corn beans and squash to survive on less than eleven inches of rainfall.

Site of Anasazi peoples referred to as "Pueblos" by the Spanish chroniclers because they lived in towns or puebla.

"For all its common environmental characteristics, the area has enormous diversity."

Acoma Pueblo is an Indian Reservation, called the City of the Sky, in central New Mexico.

Acoma pueblo, or the "sky city" as it was called by the Spanish is the site of the Church photographed here which is the largest adobe construction in North America.
 

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4,     Church or Plaza?

Puddled or puddling method of Adobe construction of the pre-Columbian Native American means of building is contrasted with the Spanish method of clay based construction.

"The church was a particularly fearsome example of adobe brick architecture, not only because of its monstrous size and permanence, but also because people were compelled to enter its labyrinthine rooms at regular intervals and for a prescribed length of time."

45

"For the Pueblo Indian, the really essential lived-in spaces are those found in the village: the plaza, and alleys and garden.

46

One of the curious blending of indigenous beliefs and the masque of Roman Catholicism in the southwest, not mentioned by the author is the tradition of healing earth as experienced by pilgrims to Chimayo, N.M.

Tsimayo in Native Indian, or Chimayo in English,is the name of the place that was a Tewa cultural site of great medicinal significance. It is one of the few sites today of pilgrimage in North America, for Roman Catholics.

Chimayo lies on the high road to Taos, north from Santa Fe near the flow of Truchas Creek.

Contrast of Pueblos dances and Iberian ritual:

"--the traditional dances, endlessly repetitive and without climax, whether in time or in space of the plaza, were again performed in the open."

47

"All elements of celebration are present: all the symbols of order and reverence and undying love of this particular time, this particular place.

48
 
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More American families may live in mobile homes than any other type of dwelling, for instance drive State Road 17 to Lake Wales and count the number of trailer homes you see.
 

"They had degenerated into rural slums of a very abject kind. Fields had reverted to second growth, houses were in decay, roads and irrigation ditches choked with rubbish and abandoned cars."

57

"You can find a squalor as hopeless as anywhere else in the United States."

58

"Now, two generations later, America has more trailers than ever before."

59

"To begin with the trailer is an industrial product, mass-produced, low-cost, and disposable."

"I shill think it is the most practical low cost dwelling we have, and that it is well adapted to a way of life that is becoming increasingly common in both rural and urban America."

62

The vernacular dwelling and the vernacular space it encompasses making it part and parcel of its surroundings.

67

6,     Beyond Wilderness

A portrait of New York City in the 1830s with 200,000 residents still tied by rivers to the hinterlands and countryside.

73

An area outside ( in Latin fores ) the realm of customary law.

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76
 
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7,     In Favor of Trees

 

"I continue to plant them when and where I can."

"What geographers call the Atlantic landscape stretches across northwestern Europe,...And in the course of the last three centuries it has been transplanted to Canada ...And the United States. It can be thought of as a gradual creation of those Indo-European migrants who came out of Asia some seven thousand years ago with their livestock ...And who eventually occupied all of Europe."

95

In Germany a set number of Walnut trees were required prior to ones ability to marry, John Evelyn in Silva, in the 17th Century, suggested iron making was leading to deforestation.

97

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8, The Past ...And Future Park?

Boston; Back Bay and the Charles River	A photograph of a portion of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.'s "Green Necklace" in Jamaica Plain.

It is a portion of a larger urban park ...And parkway design where Boston ...And Brookline Massachusetts share a common boundary (2002, J.V. Siry).

   
The Past ...And Future Park?
 
  "In every city, in every town, even in every village in America,...I expect to find ...And outdoor recreation area, or what is usually called a park."
 
  "In terms of greenery ...And design, no such space existed in ancient Greece or in Rome, ...And it first appeared in European towns not Much earlier than three centuries ago."
 
  "... for such a vague purpose as recreation."

107
   

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9,     Vernacular Gardens

"We enjoy gardening as a kind of therapy."

121

"our own domestic plants have a different relation to their environment." Our gardening is derived from the Russian ...And northern European traditions.

"The word garden, like the Latin hortus, derives from an Indo-Germanic root meaning fence or enclosure."

"Gardens teach us more than we are aware of."

There caretakers learned "a new sense of time."

123

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10,    Working at Home
 

" a mental ...And spiritual condition" of being "at home." in a place.

137

Colonial relationship between home ...And cottage industry kept alive in New England villages despite mechanization.

141

Class ...And prestige led to a separation of work from home among the wealthy classes ...And was later imposed on monocrop agricultural labor and factory labor as village life was eclipsed by company towns and plantations. 
 

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11,     A Sense of Place and Time

"They believe that a sense of place comes from being in an unusual composition of spaces and forms -- natural or man-made."

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12,     Looking Into Automobiles

The car and truck may be seen as essential, symbolic, automatically operational and a love object for many modern people.

The auto oriented world,

169

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13,     Truck City

"The rich and sporting element in American society adopted the automobile because of the mobile and adventurous way of life it fostered."

173

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14,    
Roads Belong in the Landscape

Which came first the house or the road leading to the house?

189

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Contrast with Terry Tempest Williams