The Camaro in the Pasture: Speculations on the Cultural Landscape of America

Robert Riley has been a renowned figure in landscape studies for over fifty years, valued for his perceptive, learned, and highly entertaining articles, reviews, and essays. Much of Rileys work originally ran in Landscape, the pioneering magazine at which Riley succeeded the great geographer J. B. Jackson as editor. The Camaro in the Pasture is the first book to collect this compelling authors writing. With diverse topics ranging from science-fiction fantasies to problems of academic design research, the essays in this volume cover an entire half-century of Rileys observations on the American landscape. The essaysseveral of which are new or previously unpublishedinterpret changing rationales for urban beautification, the evolution and transformation of the strip, the development of a global landscape of golf and resorts replacing an older tourist search for exoticism, and the vernacular landscape as wallpaper not quilt. Ultimately, Riley envisions our future landscape as a rapidly fluctuating electronic net draped over the more slowly changing and familiar land- and building-based system. Throughout, Riley emphasizes the vernacular landscape of contemporary Americahow we have shaped and use it, what it is becoming, and, above all, how we experience it. See more