J.B. Jackson

Abstract

John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) was not a landscape architect, but he had a profound influence on how many landscape architects think about, and represent, the complexities of the everyday cultural landscape. He founded Landscape magazine in 1951 and edited three issues a year until 1968, after which he continued to write, lecture, and teach for much of the rest of his life. In his essays, Jackson challenged designers and planners to think beyond their narrow professional lenses and prescriptive theories to consider the common landscapes that emerge from often-messy cultural, historical, social, and economic processes. Jackson was also a talented draftsman with a quick, spontaneous approach to drawing that he occasionally used to great effect in illustrating his magazine. He had an eye for graphic design and layout and created a magazine with wide appeal to the design professions as well as a dozen other disciplines concerned with landscape as a subject of inquiry. All of what Jackson produced for Landscape magazine—the drawings, essays, photography, graphic symbols, and other editorial choices—worked to represent everyday landscapes as worthy of serious consideration. Beginning in the 1950s, generations of landscape architects have been exposed to J.B. Jackson’s representations of everyday landscapes.