Category: Place

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Airport — Liminal Narratives

In an endlessly fascinating essay – Non-places: an introduction to super modernity – Marc Augé contrasts anthropological place (any space bearing the inscriptions of the social bond or collective history, such as churches, market places and town halls) with non-places. Described as spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, they are the places we inhabit when […]

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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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The Greenwich Village vision of artist Alfred Mira — Ephemeral New York

Alfred S. Mira and his realistic, gritty, intimate Greenwich Village street scenes should be better known. [“Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Village”] Born in 1900 in Italy to a carpenter father, he left school and began working for an interior decorator, dreaming of going to art school but without the 50 cents a day it cost to […]

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The artist and scholar gargoyles on 121st Street — Ephemeral New York

Copper bay windows, grand arches, juliet balconies and a sloping roof: As university housing goes, the 8-story Bancroft Apartments are pretty fanciful. Preeminent architect Emery Roth designed the building, which opened at 509 West 121st Street in 1910. By 1920, it had been acquired by Columbia University’s Teachers College, just a block away in the […]

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