Cultural landscape

Paul Groth - Social Connections, Cultural Landscapes and Architecture

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• published: 06 Apr 2010
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Often, all too quickly, designers need to analyze building sites and their neighborhood contexts. Looking for clues to one cultural landscape process—connection—can usefully inform our understanding of a place. Connection is a process, as much as a thing; a verb as much as a noun. Using examples from everyday environments in cities, small towns, and farms, this lecture outlines six realms of social connection that suggest not only local well-being and vitality, but also qualities to preserve as we design. Paul Groth is Professor of U.S. Cultural Landscape History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves on the faculties of the architecture, geography, and American studies departments. His research focuses on the ways in which social groups have used houses, factories, street grids, fields, store fronts and yards to articulate social relations, to derive cultural meanings and to create social change. Groth has a professional architecture degree from North Dakota State University in addition to his Ph.D. in historical geography from UC Berkeley. His most recent book, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (co-edited with Chris Wilson) was published in 2003 by the University of California Press. This lecture is made possible by the Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth Endowment which supports lecture on Historic Preservation.