Jackson, John B.

Jackson, John B. (Brinckerhoff) (1909–  ) landscape historian; born in Dinard, France. Of American parentage, he was educated in New England and Europe. He was in the U.S. Army (1940–46) and during World War II worked with maps for intelligence in Europe. He founded and edited Landscape (1951–68), a magazine published in Sante Fe that promoted his appreciation of the American scene based on the value structures have to those who build and use them, not on a comparison to European developments. This was the basis of his best-known concept, "the vernacular landscape," which he came to appreciate through travels on his motorcycle and which he expressed in essays collected in such books as The Necessity for Ruins (1980) and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984). Between 1961–77, he taught at Harvard and Berkeley; he also taught at other universities and was resident at the American Academy in Rome (1983). Often opposed by conventional designers as well as conservationists, he was a loner by temperament, eloquent in his writings, and widely regarded as altering the way students of the American landscape perceived the interactions between human beings and natural environments.