John Brinckerhoff Jackson

                                                       Prada Marfa. Jeff Davis County, Texas. © Basha Burwell  2011

“A landscape is a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature… it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.” John B. Jackson.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson was one of the first writers to pay attention to the ordinary landcape of roadside America. He called it the vernacular landscape: places and spaces so familiar that we have trouble actually seeing them. JBJ discovered some fascinating patterns in the American space, and he has a lot to say about the way we live now. Herbert Muschamp, New York Times architecture critic, wrote that Jackson was “America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies.” A couple of books to start with are

Landscape in Sight and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. 

http://www.amazon.com/John-Brinckerhoff-Jackson/e/B001HCZFYQ

                                                   "Communist Scrap Dealer, Saskatchewan"        ©Alex Emond  2011