The “Burger Tank” on Temple’s Campus
(Photo Credit: Laurie Fitzpatrick)
In this week’s readings, we’re being asked to consider space (encompassing the landscape, buildings, furnishings, juxtapositions of men and women in work spaces) as a material object that both reveals as it controls human thinking and behavior.
J.B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
Jackson begins with a discussion of “the road as a very powerful space” that has the potential to destroy the neatly grid marked, old Jeffersonian fiction imposed across America. (Jackson, p. 6) Roads that are also meant to serve the small community, and not the state, are a thing of the past as now our modern world has largely replaced small, local roads with broader, straighter, more traffic laden and hence restless new roads.
As if escaping this sterile modernity, Jackson next examines the American Southwest, because, he states, “”in New Mexico history remains exposed for all to see,” from ancient pueblo dwellings to the place where the neutron bomb was tested. (Jackson, p. 15) Here, in thinking he has detected a new hardscrabble community of individuals who deliberately confront rather than avoid the elements, Jackson finds himself. For example, when he indulges in a wholly romantic, East Coast and largely Protestant/Anglo consideration of ancient pueblos, he mystifies (as a protean vernacular form) what he willfully misunderstands: here there are no individuals and no singular rooms with singular purposes.
Then Jackson jumps back to our present to consider the American trailer and the little parks in which they are located, to rightly observe these places are “small scale architectural version[s] of a widespread modern tendency to organize all spaces in the landscape in terms of some special function.” (Jackson, p. 65) He correctly asserts this is a “vernacular concept of a space: a space [that] has no inherent identity, it is simply defined by the way it is used.” (Jackson, p. 65)
When considering the so called ‘natural world,’ Jackson begins with the assertion that nature creates two feelings in people: either fear and hostility or a sense of safety. Next, Jackson sketches a broad, Western European and European American male history of contested space and resources (the King’s woods as considered by Frank Forester, Henry William Herbert, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Thoreau) to illustrate his idea of the “cult of the forest.” (Jackson, p. 85) It is this forest, and wilderness at large that the Sierra Club and other contemporary environmental organizations Jackson seems somehow at odds with, seek to preserve as a pristine environment. Jackson views the Sierra Club as operating for nefarious reasons because humans, they contend, should be kept out of these precious spaces. Jackson asserts we heed a ‘humanized landscape,’ as he is confident the wilderness will “be still available to those who want a transcendental experience.” (Jackson, p. 90) So, like, do what to our national parks?
After similar considerations of the vernacular of trees, the vernacular of gardens, the vernacular of working – but not really working yet enshrining old tools in a vernacular space of work, and so on, Jackson pulls his kitchen camper truck into the driveway of his trailer to gaze admiringly into the mirror of his Protestant/Anglo ethos (first encountered in the beginning of this book) to observe, “that was a definition emphasizing the privacy of the house, the interior as a refuge.” (Jackson, p. 145) Then restless, he pulls out again, and after a discussion of cars that grinds into a lower gear to discuss work trucks (both introduce a different spacial order) , Jackson finally introduces a lovely word: Odology, which is “part geography, part planning, and part [building and social] engineering.” (Jackson, p. 191) We had best recognize we are languishing under a new odology: our major roads as managed, authoritarian flows of economic benefits. (Jackson, p. 193)
Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).
Upton’s article brings up the endlessly interesting struggle to know how racial and economic hegemonies are imposed on people through material culture, and in this article, the landscape of houses, work buildings, slave quarters, hedgerows, pathways, and roads themselves. Upton considers the white dominant landscape of Virginia Planters to reveal their hegemony was never total over African Americans. According to Upton, the unified landscape of the White European American planter was indeed a fragmentary one that was “composed of several fragmentary [landscapes], some sharing common elements of the larger assemblage” of spatial divisions among settlement patterns. (Upton, p. 357)
Upton goes further to draw a finer contrast between enslaved African Americans and free but poor White European Americans when he observes that the Spartan dwellings of the latter reflected a lack of economic success, while the poverty of arose from the appropriation of their labor. (p. 361)
There is no question that the great Virginia planter intended that his landscape was hierarchical, which is reflected by the series of physical barriers one must pass through to reach the main house, barriers that are physical metaphors for social barriers thrown up against enslaved Blacks and poor Whites. (Upton p, 362 and 363) The slave, for one, could simultaneously be contained in a stable environment and evade constant enforcement of the power of the planter if they traveled through the woods (the periphery) from their dwellings (slave quarter) to the work fields. In this way, enslaved African Americans ‘pushed back’ in a holistic, space based way on the Virginia Planter.
Kenneth Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 19-46.
One never knew a piece of furniture within a space could be so controlling. Consider first the large, dark, generally walnut, basically unattractive (to many contemporary aesthetics) hallstand that is placed in the ‘sorting space’ of the hallway of the Victorian home. The hallstand is a mish-mashy bit of home décor that, according to Ames, provides large and expensive mirror that signals wealth as it provides a means for checking one’s status through clothing, has only a few pegs to signal what important personages are present — or are conspicuously not present, and a table that could hold grooming tools. This hegemonic hallstand is only outdone by the equally co-directing card receiver that instantly telegraphs to all the success or failure of one’s participation in the ritual of ‘social calling.’ These items, plus stiff back chairs, are organized in a relatively empty space (as compared to the chokingly decorated Victorian parlor, for example) that is meant to sort people in terms of their status: those who are important are whisked into comfortable rooms while those who are unimportant must wait in this hall amidst the inanimate company of these reminders (Mr. Hallstand, Miss Card Receiver, and Grandfather Chair) of their inferiority.
Joan Crawford, Working Girl, from the 1931 movie, “Dance Fools, Dance”
Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace, 1880-1930,” in Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds. The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 157-79.
Kwolek- Folland examines largely white collar, corporate American work spaces from the years 1880 through 1930 to observe how “male and female definitions of the purpose and experience of work reinforced corporate status.” (Kwolek- Folland , page 175) What is largely clear is how this experience evolved, as revealed by the inefficiency (despite the efforts of Systematic managers and efficiency engineers) of how the work space was divided and designed to separate genders and reinforce paternalistic, normative power of men.
At first, the corporate personality attempted – through gender environments – to both project and protect family based gender norms through the devised stance of corporate domesticity, largely to “salve the fears” of customers and employees who were equally alarmed by women entering the workforce. (Kwolek- Folland, p. 159)
Later, gendered mental spaces grew from these physical environments to include time (the rigid chronological structure imposed by time clocks) and status (manual versus brain workers) further segregated men and women in the workplace. Finally, private space for men became the “most sought after mark of status … [that] … validated the manhood of those who possessed them by emphasizing individuality and personal freedom.” (Kwolek- Folland, p. 167) The total effect was to further segregate male and female spaces in the corporate environment.
Kwolek- Folland’s essay deconstructs these environments, their evolution, to reveal their meanings without resolving the inequalities they might represent. It is clear that the effort to “defuse the sexuality that was encouraged by gendered offices” did not work. (Kwolek- Folland, p. 172) One could observe that the more a manager or efficiency designer worked toward removing tensions between the sexes, the more they weirdly created and encouraged this tension as a perpetual motion machine that in truth existed to support its own European American Male hegemony.