This group of three posters, meant to hang side-by-side, is a visual translation of “Concluding with Landscapes,” an essay by J.B. Jackson. In this 1984 essay, Jackson identifies three archetypal ways of organizing space in the US:

Let us call that early medieval landscape Landscape One. There is another landscape (which we may call Landscape Two), which began to take shape in the latter part of the fifteenth century and which we can associate with the Renaissance; and since we are giving them names, let us identify a Landscape Three, which we can see in certain aspects of contemporary America. (Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, p.152)

My translation of this verbal essay into images becomes an exercise in symbols. I express the key qualities and features of each landscape using three systems. First, the images of buildings connote particular parts of the country and particular time periods. Second, the map features, grid lines, and dashes, reflect particular spatial structures. Finally, the riverlike features and background textures stand in for the natural terrain, which is always present. Writers can use words that describe both a general idea and a particular example at once, but designers working with images do not have that luxury, for an image is almost always specific.

This translation is in some ways an adaptation, as its arguments depart from Jackson’s original proposition. It is not possible to present exactly the same case in images, but more importantly, I see the American landscape, from the perspective of 2006, not 1984.