Rhyme Paysage

I came home from vaca­tion to find four cour­tesy copies of the lat­est issue of Future Ante­ri­or, Columbi­a’s jour­nal on his­toric preser­va­tion, fea­tur­ing my arti­cle ​“Going Mobile: Green­field Vil­lage in Prac­tice.” It’s a par­tic­u­lar thrill to see my name on that sig­na­ture striped cov­er, and more so to be a guest in a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple ded­i­cat­ed to rethink­ing a huge­ly under­val­ued line of work.

“Going Mobile” brings togeth­er McGuf­fey read­ers, the nou­veau roman, and the long dark shad­ow of Hen­ry Ford. Green­field Vil­lage, the place where they all coex­ist, is not a very good land­scape, but it is a use­ful land­scape for under­stand­ing Fordist thought. That is cer­tain­ly how he intend­ed it, for well and ill. It is a space where things are made and set into order­ly motion.