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The Domestication of the Garage – J.B Jackson

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. How can one tire of looking at this variety, or of marveling at the forces within man and nature that brought it about?

The city is an essential part of this shifting and growing design, but only a part of it. Beyond the last street light, out where the familiar asphalt ends, a whole country waits to be discovered: villages, farmsteads and highways, half-hidden valleys of irrigated gardens, and wide landscapes reaching to the horizon. A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it. *

* J.B. Jackson, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Landscape, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1951) as quoted in Paul Groth and Chris Wilson, “The Polyphony of Cultural Landscape Study: An Introduction,” in Everyday America, 9. The essay borrows its title from a 1920 poem by Robert Frost. 

J.B. Jackson’s 1976 essay on the evolution of the American garage displays his rare ability to combine deep erudition with eloquent and plainspoken analysis.

Read on Places Journal

Citation: “The Domestication of the Garage,”: Introduction by Jeffrey Kastner. Archival text by J.B. Jackson, “The Domestication of the Garage,” Places Journal, February 2019. Accessed 07 Feb 2019.    https://placesjournal.org/article/j-b-jackson-the-domestication-of-the-garage/

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Impossible City: New Orleans – Places Journal

Sometimes you see a picture and you can tell that something’s missing, but you don’t know what it is …

Or you could try to fill the emptiness with something you love, as I love Walker Percy’s renderings in The Moviegoer:

The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints.

…

Via: Impossible City: New Orleans — Places Journal