Abstract

Abstract:In his writing in Landscape magazine, the essayist and critic John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) championed a focus on the “everyday” mid-century American landscape. My argument in this paper is that Jackson's writing has enduring relevance for understanding the relationship of modernity to everyday landscapes. Specifically, I develop the concept of “everyday modernities” in order to define and specify the lens through which Jackson sought to reconcile the logics of modernity with the lived realities of mid-century American life. Pulling this concept through two examples of his work—the “other-directedness” of landscape and the bodied landscapes of the hot-rodder—I show how Jackson endeavored to understand how these logics were embedded in some of the most common landscapes. He limned an approach to the modern landscape that took seriously the binary structure of modernist ideology (nature and culture, country and city), but strove to recognize the impacts of this ideology through the networks and connections that produce the material realities of everyday life. While Jackson's particular lens is certainly a very personal one, his interests and approach can help to reveal new connections and inspire new questions about the modern American landscape.