Landscapes of Housing

Design and Planning in the History of Environmental Thought

Jeanne Haffner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138504400
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351381079
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In the twenty-first century, housing has become a site of ecological experimentation and environmental remediation. From the vantage point of contemporary architecture, conservation concerns and emergent building science technologies support one another, with new processes and materials deployed to reduce energy usage, water consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions. Landscapes of Housing examines this trend in historical perspective, arguing for a more considered environmental vision that includes the organic, social, and cultural dimensions of landscape. By shifting the focus from architecture, the book highlights and critiques the relationship between dwelling and landscape itself. Contributors from a wide range of international perspectives propose a more integrative ecology that includes history, culture, society, and materiality, in addition to technology, within contemporary ecological housing programs. This book will be a resource for upper-level students, academics, and researchers in landscape architecture interested in the social and political implications of ecological housing.

PART I
Shaping society

1
“This Scene Is Itself Living”

Human geography and the ecologies of dwelling, 1870–1970¹

Peter Ekman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315145983-3

Introduction

At the turn of the twentieth century, to give a “geographic explanation” of observed phenomena, past or present, was to isolate a set of physical features, assign them causal powers, and render society’s shape and sequencing as mere “responses” to the stimuli of “environment.” Beginning in the 1920s, Carl Ortwin Sauer (b. 1889) mounted a dissent, insisting that the question of space, society, and their ongoing interrelations be kept open. “The Morphology of Landscape,” the 1925 essay understood as Sauer’s first full-blooded salvo against the reigning “environmental determinism,” is typically read as a simple inversion, an assertion of human powers over the nonhuman environment. The stark syllogism most often cited—“Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result”—seems to leave little room for debate over who causes what. “Landscape,” in Sauer’s work, refers to visible “land shape” but equally to the social, necessarily dynamic “process of shaping” and building upon the land. Morphologists writing in his wake, he prescribed, were to scrutinize the evolving human “use of environment rather than the active agency of the environment.”²

Buildings play a crucial evidentiary role in Sauer’s refutation of early-twentieth-century environmental determinism. Within the Sauerian framework, material culture has pride of place as tangible “residue” of the fact that humans have fashioned, and not merely obeyed, the environment.³ Indeed, for Sauer, material culture “in its areal massiveness” fundamentally is the “culture” to which cultural geography refers—and it serves the social scientist as microcosmic “expression” of whatever larger, less visible system of values or ideas might be of interest to the analyst.⁴ Among all the “visible, areally extensive, and expressive factors of man’s presence” that add up to “cultural landscape,” buildings seem to hold a special significance for Sauer. To clinch the case against determinism, he writes, geographers ought to telescope their analyses across physical scale, attending to “items” both small and “gross.”⁵ Ultimately, houses, more than other classes of building, come to anchor Sauer’s thingly geography—as both index of and participant in social life. “The unit of dwelling,” he reasoned, in “Foreword to Historical Geography,” his 1940 presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, “commonly approximates the social unit.” It is also “the smallest economic unit.”⁶ Where better, he reasoned, to embark on a truly human geography? Quietly, without much fanfare, Sauer had houses again and again mediate, and so complicate, geography’s core theoretical binaries: space and society, environment and culture, landscape and life.

Sauer’s dogged maneuvering on this point helped reorient geographic thought between 1925 and his death in 1975, and it still impinges on how we might pose questions of urbanism and landscape, whether to study, critique, or intervene. The “Morphology” is both a methodological manual and an essay in landscape ontology. Sauer understands the surface of the earth and its adornments, though pliable, as composed of fundamentally lively matter—not determinant, not causal, but somehow animate and in vital transaction with other, especially human, lives. To press that point, he appeals to the dean of French regionalist geographers: “Indirectly [Paul] Vidal de la Blache has stated this position by cautioning against considering ‘the earth as “the scene on which the activity of man unfolds itself,” without reflecting that this scene is itself living’.”⁷ True enough, his contemporaries nodded, if this means a new attentiveness to vegetation, animal life, and other organic conjunctions of bio with geo. Less apparent in Sauer’s text, however, and virtually unasked since 1925, is the question of what sense such a vitalist ontology of landscape might make of buildings, synthetic nonhuman scenes that rise at the urging of humans but can then act and change well in excess of any particular “culture” or intent. Vidal (b. 1845) did not say much on the urban fabric. Neither, if we follow conventional histories of geography, did Sauer. And yet, inquiry into the animacy, the livingness, of buildings—how they actively enable, constrain, and participate in novel forms of social interaction and affective bond—is of no small moment to those who would seek to reshape urban housing and its milieux in line with the received lessons of ecology. Although they may never have had to debate card-carrying determinists on their own terms, planners, architects, landscape designers, and urban geographers today are still tacitly working over a set of theoretical questions that Sauer and his “Berkeley School,” which ramified out from the University of California department he reshaped in his image from his arrival in 1923, voiced and gave point. That intergenerational rapprochement deserves another look, if the critical theory of landscape is to perform something more than a series of “turns” away from intellectual history.

The present chapter takes one first step in that direction. It is an episodic history that dwells with greatest intensity on three distinct, though mutually referential, moments across a century’s worth of cultural geography. It begins with Sauer himself, pointing up a series of tensions that ever beset his appeals to domestic architecture, which he considered an ecological “adaptation” to natural surrounds, as anthropogenic testimony against the determinists. The chapter then turns back a generation and considers the vitalist ecologies of housing found in the American writings of one of Sauer’s most favored intellectual forebears, Friedrich Ratzel, whose on-the-go urban and architectural criticism is laden with possibilities curiously untapped by Sauer when crafting his dissent. Then, the chapter projects forward in time. In its third movement, it engages midcentury currents in the study of vernacular architecture—both in the academy by those of Sauer’s students friendlier to urban life than he was, and beyond its walls by his ally John Brinckerhoff (J.B.) Jackson—to assess how this broadly ecological inheritance came to inform critiques of industrial modernity and of architectural Modernism in the postwar United States, as well as how it might articulate with theoretical impulses animating geography’s twenty-first century.

At each juncture, these varied attempts to account for housing’s duality—as a human artifice that nonetheless lives, persists, affects, and atrophies according to forces and prerogatives all its own—tack uneasily between two analytical modes. In one of them, housing expresses, tangibly, legibly, and in microcosm, some unitary set of anthropological truths about its social context, itself conceived as a stable, self-enclosed whole. The task of the geographer therein is to inventory and collate. In the other, housing’s ecologies appear more dynamic and processual: little is stable or sacrosanct; the material vitality of things, once built, exceeds anyone’s design or intent; and what buildings do is not express but impress themselves, unpredictably, on the lives lived in and near them. Housing is also, in this second mode, conceived as ontologically more open—both more aggressive and more vulnerable—to the unbuilt scenes that enfold it: architecture’s vitalities mix with those of the greens, browns, and blues that conventional divisions of labor parcel out to “landscape.” The geographer’s task then becomes, at root, one of critique. Sauer, Ratzel, and Jackson swerved, ever uneasily, between these two imperatives. Read together, they equip students of urbanism with a wide repertoire of affective responses to a modern world at once developing and devolving.

Carl O. Sauer and the ambivalent life of landscape

The “Morphology” was not the first time Sauer had registered discontent with determinist orthodoxy. “At best,” Sauer had noted in an otherwise anodyne 1924 article on the methodology of field surveys, such causal schemes are “likely to throw only a half-light on the human scene.”⁸ Nor was Sauer alone in his unease about unidirectional “geographic explanation”: Michigan’s Mark Jefferson, Chicago’s Charles Colby and Harlan Barrows, and outsiders including the anti-Spencerian sociologist Lester Ward had been grasping for alternatives well before 1925.⁹ And although some scholars continue to insist that Sauer meant the “Morphology” as a one-time-only statement of methods and principles, clearing the air and inaugurating the long-term “hiatus” from theoretical debate he had always desired, his post-1925 pedagogy, correspondence, and empirical sorties do not square with this contention.¹⁰ Sauer continued to theorize, and his questions on culture, matter, and life remain unresolved.

Sauer never truly bore out his sense of housing’s centrality as index of and participant in human life. We are left only with traces. In his Outline for Field Work in Geography (1915), coauthored with Wellington D. Jones and essentially a checklist for researchers, buildings scarcely figure as objects of geographic interest. Ninth on the list of “Characteristics of the people,” lodged without further comment alongside “Physique...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: housing and/as landscape
• Part I Shaping society
• Part II Shaping individuals
• Part III Shaping the environment
• Index