J.B. (John Brinckerhoff) Jackson
J.B. (John Brinckerhoff) Jackson, author, editor and educator, was born to American parents on September 25, 1909, in Dinard, France. He was educated in France, Switzerland, and the United States. In 1932, he received a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard. He studied architecture at MIT for one year before departing to work as a reporter and then to travel by motorcycle across the country. Eventually, he settled in northeastern New Mexico, where he had previously spent time visiting his uncle in Wagon Mount, NM, Wall Street lawyer Percy Jackson. During WWII, Jackson served as a field intelligence officer, an experience that may have been the catalyst for his lifelong interest in the landscape.
Credited with founding the field of landscape studies, Jackson elevated vernacular architecture and landscape to a level of study once reserved for architect-designed buildings. Shortly after returning to New Mexico, he founded, published and edited Landscape, a magazine that covered topics relating to the cultural landscape. Jackson published Landscape from 1951-1968, when he turned the operation over to Blair Boyd, who continued into the min-1990s. La Cienega, N.M. was Jackson’s home base from 1965 until his death in August of 1996. From there he travelled seasonally to teach classes. He taught in UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and Department of Geography, and also at Harvard (starting in 1969), both as a lecturer in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and in the Department of Landscape Architecture. His books include Landscapes (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1970), American Space: The Centennial Year (New York: Norton, 1972), Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), and A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Biography from Rocky Mountain Online Archive
J.B. Jackson retired at 272 Los Pintos Road in La Cienega, New Mexico south of Santa Fe in a house he designed and helped build. He knew the area since he was a child and participated in the religious and social life of the community there until his death in 1996.