The Built Environment and the Shaped Landscape

THEBUILTENVIRONMENT ANDTHESHAPEDLANDSCAPE Walter L. Creese. The Crowning of the American Landscape:Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986. xi + 289 pp. Illus. Phoebe Cutler. The Public Landscape of the New Deal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. xiv + 182pp. Anne Vernez Moudon. Built for Change: NeighbourhoodArchitecture in San Francisco. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. xix + 286 pp. Illus. Marvin Trachtenberg. The Statue of Liberty: The Centenaryof a Classic History and Guide. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986 (rev.) 230 pp. Illus. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds. Common Places:Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia, 1986. xxiv + 529 pp. Illus. Shane O'Dea It is an irony of man's existence that the more he becomes attuned to the landscape and the more he becomes aesthetically sensitive to it, the more removed he becomes from his own kind. He who lives in the fields, the woods, thetown or on the water and who is totally absorbed in his work-in the sense that there is little time for leisure-seldom analyses the nature of the environment about him: it has a form and a function and that is all that is necessary. The man who attains leisure steps back from mere form and mere function to assessthe whole of what is around him. In so doing he places a greater value on it, or on certain aspects of it, shapes it to his fancy and builds his house within it. These acts are done partially to distinguish him from his fellows, to set himself apart from them; but more than that, in the act of acquiring the land and reshaping it, of putting upon it his house or building, he puts a barrier between himself and his neighbours and seeks privacy from them. This is explicitly pointed out by James Borchert in his essay on the city of Washington (Common Places)where the alleys-when occupied by poor black families-were open common ground but since they have been occupied by young professional whites are now more closed. The appearance of the alleys and their physical environment has been improved with paint and plantings, but the old open social environment has been lost in the process. The books reviewed here do, in part, make this point about asocial tendencies but they also give a wide range of accounts of, and responses to, the 94 Shane O'Dea natural and built environment. Creese deals with what are actually private landscapes, private buildings, while Cutler-stepping into another era-deals with the public application of some of these earlier ideals. The Statue of Liberty of Trachtenberg's book is also public landscape but in quite a different sense and Common Places looks at the private landscapes of common persons. Moudon's work on San Francisco treats the private dwelling as part of the public landscape and, in a more activist than academic fashion, suggests ways in which private and public needs can meet. Walter L. Creese' s Crowning of the American Landscape contains a number of demonstrations of the fact that an increased sensibility leads to a decreased sociability. He deals with a range of landscapes from the cultivated, suchas those of Andrew Jackson Downing, and the natural, such as Mt. Hood National Forest, but also takes in such spaces as the late nineteenth-century Chicago suburb of Riverside and Chicago's Graceland cemetery. Each of these is seen in context with its buildings so that an integrated view of the natural and built environment is given. As he points out, many of these projects have a distinctly moral aesthetic basis: their intention is to improve man or the lot of man by improving the land. Downing, for example, held that "Horticulture and its kindred arts, tend strongly to fix the habits, and elevate the character of our whole rural population" (78). Creese is also aware, although he does not use these terms, of a growing consumerist demand in the nineteenth century for increasing excitement in the environment. So the gentle, hazy vistas of Jefferson's Charlottesville give way to the more dramatic heights and falls of the Hudson Valley...