Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,118
By This is the grave of J.B. Jackson.
Born in 1909 in Dinard, France, James Brinckerhoff Jackson’s parents were rich Americans. He spent his childhood between the U.S. and Europe, including fancy schools in Switzerland. His family had a ranch in New Mexico and he often spent his summers there, falling in love with the place. He was an interesting young guy, following experimental and even avant-garde ideas by the time he entered college. He started at the University of Wisconsin, at its Experimental College. He was already interested in the kind of architecture that regular people put on the landscape, not fancy stuff, but the ways in which everyday people interacted and created landscapes. As such, he became a follower of Lewis Mumford, as well as of Oscar Spengler after reading the latter’s Decline of the West, a 1923 book that was a lot less apocalyptic than its title suggested but was one of these world-explaining books popular at the time. Then it was to Harvard. Jackson was already rejecting the ideas of modernism then hitting its peak of influence and he started writing about landscapes while there, not a subject the modernists cared about.
For the next 20 years or so, Jackson sort of bandied about, doing this and that. He did have money, so he spent a lot of time in Europe in the 30s. He started writing about politics while there, publishing pieces on the horrors of the Nazis. He wrote a novel called Saints in Summertime in 1938 that was a critique of the Nazis as well, but I don’t know if anyone has ever read it. Certainly it’s less influential than his later books. During World War II, he worked as a translator in the military, since he was fluent in both French and German.
Jackson became one of the most interesting postwar essayists in America. His vision was starkly oppositional to many of the major trends in architecture and society. Where the mid-twentieth century was the great era of high buildings, exposing materials, and thinking of people in large groups that did not take individuals seriously, Jackson rejected all of this, if not ideologically, then in his writings. His interests were how people created their own landscapes, the individual choices they made in how they shaped their yards, how junk shops and tire stores presented themselves. At the core of this was an implicit and sometimes explicit critique for the environmental impact of the large city and the resources it used. It’s fair enough to critique this critique by noting the romanticism for rural spaces that in fact was not particularly environmentally oriented, but since basically every American intellectual in its history has hated the city, it’s not surprising.
In the 1950s, Jackson basically created the term “cultural landscape” in the American context. He was an intense essayist who wrote a lot. He started publishing the journal Landscape: Human Geography in the Southwest in 1951, though he later dropped the clunky subtitle and after all, non-Southwest essays were interesting too. This journal ran until 1999 and he was the editor until 1968. As an example, one of his early essays stated, “It is from the air that the true relationship between the natural and the human landscape is first clearly revealed. The peaks and canyons lose much of their impressiveness when seen from above. What catches our eye and arouses our interest is not the sandy washes and the naked rocks, but the evidences of man.” These essays began to appear in book collections. First there was Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson, from 1970. Other books included The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics in 1980 and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape in 1984.
Later in life, Jackson became much more famous. His supremely fascinating 1995 book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, which might be his most distilled and mature discussion of his ideas–though really, all his books I’ve read are good–won the PEN essay prize. This post gave me a reason to flip through that great book again. It’s so democratic. It starts by talking the trailer court and the highway as common, accessible spaces that maybe aren’t going to be remembered like Notre Dame, but are meaningful nonetheless. Much of it is deeply enmeshed in the traditional land use and architecture of the Southwest, especially New Mexico, past and present. The pueblo homes of Mesa Verde and Taos and the 18th century churches of Trampas and San Isidro are spaces imbued with enormous meaning, not by us today, but by the people who used them on a daily basis, much like we imbue our common spaces with meaning in contemporary Euro-American life. The mobile homes strewn across the New Mexico landscape are as worthy of respect as any other building and in fact said mobile homes make Jackson rethink the entire idea of the vernacular. He doesn’t actually like trailers, but they are what they are–a low-cost practical option for many people. He urges readers to push beyond simplistic ideas of wilderness as valid spaces to understand the local environment; the shaping and use of parks is a huge thing for Jackson. Then there’s the world we have constructed around the automobile, which like it or not, is a dominating feature of both the American landscape and American social life and has to be respected enough to take seriously.
All in all, this book is a fascinating way to consider the modern American landscape in a way that centers the democratic use of space. It’s also quite readable and you all should check it out.
And here’s another quote that I think really gets at the heart of Jackson’s thought: “Let us hope that the merits and charm of the highway strip are not so obscure but they will be accepted by a wider public.” Indeed.
Jackson lived most of his later years in New Mexico. He bought a place in La Cienega, which is a small community about 10 miles south of Santa Fe, right before the uprising drops into the Rio Grande Valley, so you get the elevation and the lower temperatures. Jackson died in Santa Fe in 1996. He was 86 years old.
J.B. Jackson is buried in San Jose Cemetery, La Cienega, New Mexico.
If you would like this series to visit other geographers, an interesting bunch of folks, though the field is largely dead today thanks to the corporatization of the university (history will be dead soon and universities will employ no one to tell the story of the Trump administration). you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mark Jefferson is in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Fred Schaefer is in Iowa City, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
J.B. Jackson is buried in San Jose Cemetery, La Cienega, New Mexico.
Speaking of vernacular architecture, this cemetery provides a great example of just what Jackson was talking about.
