The chapters selected for this week’s reading provided a good variety of material to think about. I got quite a bit out of Peirce Lewis’ “The Monument and the Bungalow.” I thought his two-part advice on how to begin evaluating and studying landscape was simple yet true, especially looking back at my familiarization with architectural history. Lewis suggested that we first need to be open, curious and ask unbiased questions, and to be sure to acquire the necessary vocabulary and background first. I’ve done quite a bit of work with inventorying residential neighborhoods, and too often I waited to study architectural types until after fieldwork. On another note, I had no knowledge of the Arts & Crafts style before this week’s reading.
I enjoyed Lewis’ musings on the fact that so many plantations stand while few sharecropper cabins do. The biased nature of landscape study and, often, historic preservation is an interesting aspect to touch upon. The “Great Man” school of thought is far-reaching.
I also really enjoyed Mark Fiege’s section on ecological commons. I read his book, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West when working on my senior paper as an undergrad. That book dealt with the changing of the Southern Idaho landscape due to irrigation, the degree to which man could control nature, and the ways in which nature shaped the human environment. It does go into quite a bit of detail regarding the “rabbit drives,” which I wasn’t quite ready to hear at the time.
As for the Fiege piece included in the book – I thought it added to the argument that simple artifacts (such as the “No Hunting” sign) can convey endless amounts of information on places, or at least become important starting places when trying to understand the landscape around them.