The University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning presents the fifth annual J.B. Jackson Lecture featuring Paul Groth, professor of architecture and geography, University of California, Berkeley, on Friday, March 4, at 4:30 p.m., in Northrop Hall rm. 122.
Preceding the lecture, Groth will discuss J.B. Jackson’s collection, at noon in Zimmerman Library’s Willard Reading Room. The University Libraries hold Jackson’s collection of typed and handwritten drafts and manuscripts of books, lectures, essays and articles.
Extensive subject files on topics related to his writings provide insight into his influences and methods of research. Topics reflect Jackson’s work and personal interest in landscape studies, human geography, vernacular architecture, settlement patterns, and public spDavid Brookshire, focusing on Europe and the United States.
Jackson’s collection is housed in the University Libraries’ Center for Southwest Research.
Groth’s 4 p.m. lecture, “Making Modernity: Bungalow Neighborhoods in the American West,” explores urban neighborhoods built in the United States for the working class after the turn of the 20th century.
“House types emerged and became the norm for middle class housing,” said Chris Wilson, J.B. Jackson Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning. Wilson and Groth co-edited “Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J.B. Jackson” (University of California Press, 2003).
“Paul Groth is a distinguished scholar, recognized as one of the best cultural landscape historians in the United States. He was one of J.B. Jackson’s students at Berkeley and is, in a sense, his successor,” Wilson said.
Groth will explain that early housing styles featured four-square, hipped cottages built between 1900-1910, but that bungalow neighborhoods didn’t spring up in the eastern U.S. until the years between World War I and the Great Depression.
“The houses featured rough-cut stone, hand-split shingles, exposed rafters, imperfectly fired brick and sloppy mortar joints,” Wilson said.
The homes would become the first ring of suburbs around cities, large and small. The neighborhoods changed as different migrant and immigrant populations entered the urban consumer class, Wilson said.
The bungalows and neighborhoods became vehicles for the social transition from one life to another, he said. The rings of neighborhoods recycled and refurbished the suburbs to the city’s edge.
“They are the precursor to suburban life today. They still have public policy implications, such as imposing impact fees on developers who move people out to areas where no infrastructure exists,” Wilson said.
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, for whom the lecture is named, died in 1996. He is credited with creating the field of landscape studies. He elevated vernacular architecture and landscapes to a level of study once reserved for architect-designed buildings. He founded, published and edited Landscape, a magazine dedicated to cultural landscape.
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920
Posted by scarr at March 2, 2005 03:51 PM