The Making of the American Landscape

The Making of the American Landscape (1990)
Edited by Michael P. Conzen

Synopsis: Tis book is a compilation of essays which survey the American landscape via some major historical forces that have shaped it. It focuses on "themes about clusters of related landscape processes set in a broadly historical and regional framework"(6). Moves chronologically to some degree, but is more thematic. It includes essays on climate and natural features, immigrant and colonist legacies (especially the vast Spanish imprint and the way it has been downplayed), plantations, planning and the grid pattern, forest-clearing, industrialization and urbanization, cars, weather, and vernacular houses (especially the ways in which buildings reflect adaptations to lands and climate, as well as cultural beliefs). The overall argument holding these essays together is loose, but is basically that culture leaves its imprint on the landscape, and thus meaning and a layered cultural history lie all around us.

Interesting Specifics:
[Lots of Steve's Intro to AMS material seems to derive from this].
Chapter 17 on landscapes of the wealthy is interesting.

Interacts With:
Building Suburbia, The Modern Urban Landscape,

The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society

The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997)

By Lucy Lippard

Synopsis: Lippard is an art-critic/teacher who's concerned with "The historical narrative as it is written in the landscape or place by the people who live or live there" (7). Mostly, she is advocating for “the possibility of an art boasting stronger contextual ties and audience access” (263); art that arises from the conditions of the place and says something to many people. This is because today local art is “about but not of a place” (283). Art governed by the “place ethic” would be: specific, collaborative, generous and open-ended, appealing, simple and familiar enough to attract people, layered and complex and unfamiliar enough to hold attention, evocative, provocative, and critical (286-87). Overall tone of the book is very activist-oriented, with the view that we need public art so that we can better understand each other and our connections to place. Seems to be advocating a kind of regionalism. Seems to be very influenced by early 1990s "decline of place" trope - esp. Kunstler and Margaret Crawford- hence her belief that place needs to be rescued from its current "homogenization." Tone is also romantic, poetic, personal, and activist.

Interesting Specifics:

“Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity” (6).

“If space is where culture is lived, the place in the result of the union” (10).

The Western world views Nature as something apart from humans – to be held at a distance and in awe, or else “raped.” [This idea connects with Jennifer Price, etc.]

Rebecca Solnit quote: “[Suburbia] seemed to me a voluntary limbo, a condition more like sedation than exile, for exiles know what’s missing” (225).

“If the city has stood for vice, and nature for virtue, then the suburb is morally somewhere in between” (226).

Interacts With:

Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs, Elvis Culture,