American Lawn

From the Publisher

According to The American Lawn ... grass is the ragged border where the American Dream holds sway, and the lawn itself is the mood ring of the American domestic environment. New Art Examiner, July/August 1999

This volume helps fill a gap in the field of landscape architecture, whose comprehensive history in the United States remains to be written. But even reads with no scholarly brief will appreciate the rich texture the authors give to the concept of the lawn as a social form...With copious illustrations and archival sources, the volume details how importantly the lawn figures in innumerable aspects of American culture. ..Editor Georges Teyssot and company have produced a history of the lawn as multicated and visually inviting as their subject. Sara Blair, Preservation Magazine

Charles Elliott

[I]t sails boldly into its subject...a lot of really splendid illustrations.
— Garden Illustrations

Christian Science Monitor

The American front lawn is an idea, a dream, a fantasy, an image. It is an outdoor carpet in an outdoor room....The American lawn is not...simple. It is...[t]he wilderness, house-trained.

Library Journal

From carefully manicured golf greens to small patches nurtured in front of row houses, the lawn is a symbol of private and civic pride and personal and community enrichment. This collection of essays by historians, architects, and social theorists identifies the role that "green space" has played in the development of our collective self-image. The enclosure or privatization of the lawn in earlier days has given way to a more politically acceptable idea of shared open spaces, and purely aesthetic value has often taken second place to commercial adaptations. From the backyard barbecue to campus demonstrations and architectural elements, the lawn has provided a background to all our activities. The inclusion of court cases based on "failure to cut grass" and "violation of lawn sign ordinance" emphasizes how passion about lawns influences personal and civic behavior. Published to coincide with an exhibition organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, this book offers an interesting look at the encounter between idealism and technology.--Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Christian Science Monitor

The American front lawn is an idea, a dream, a fantasy, an image. It is an outdoor carpet in an outdoor room....The American lawn is not...simple. It is...[t]he wilderness, house-trained.

Preservation

The essay constituting The American Lawn go a long way toward explaining the logic of that image and countless others like it that reverberate through our collective national life: advertising icons of the family barbecue; social-science images of "hygienic" play in the healthy green space of suburbia; wartime images of the middle-class back yard as shelter (or even bomb shelter, during the height of the Cold War.) Indeed, the volume suggests that America imagines itself to be a kind of Oz-a land of opportunity where fantasies can be made real-and sees the lawn as a version of American Nature, which both expresses our national character and submits to our manifestly destined forms of progress.

House & Garden

Turf wars range in this fascinating collection of essays, which demonstrates how one person's clean shaven field of suburban dreams is another's nightmare of creeping conformity. The history and politics of lawn care (grow it or mow it) shed light on broader cultural preferences; a series of 3-D photos (a special viewer is provided at the back of the book) documents neighbors' withering legal disputes.

Denlinger

According to The American Lawn, a collection of essays edited by George Teyssot, grass is the ragged border where the American dream holds sway, and the lawn itself is the mood ring of the American domestic environment, reflecting a continous flux in the psychology of paradise.
— New Art Examiner