building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

which displayed hundreds of pieces of equipment, machinery, mills, tools, spare
parts, carriages, and naturally multiple types of ploughs, some of them
programmatically named “New Deal”, the ultimate objective of the well‐known
policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, implemented between 1933 and 1937.
In Virginia in 1831, Cyrus H. McCormick invented the mechanical harvester, a light,
horse‐drawn, wooden structure, but the model was to be perfected in Chicago in
the 1840’s. The historian, Maldwyn Jones, confirms the importance of this event
“[…] in the middle of the wheat belt, and, thanks also to his business skills, he was
able to defeat a rival who had independently perfected a similar machine. In 1860
McCormick was able to manufacture 20,000 harvesters per year. Almost at the
same time, similar innovations improved threshing […]”. 73
In the years immediately after the Civil War, all these technological transformations
and innovations had created the extraordinary agricultural landscape of the
bonanza farms 74 , cereal cultivations which extended for hundreds of kilometres
along the shores of the Northern Red River, in an extremely fertile geographical
area. From an architectural point of view, the landscape of the prairies was
dominated by typical wooden buildings. The invention of the balloon frame in the
1830’s completely changed the building techniques and the American landscape
during the settlement of the West 75 . The construction of homes became an
industry which replaced the small log cabins built by the pioneers, as well as the
more imposing, costly masonry buildings.
Sigfried Giedion identifies the inventor of the balloon frame in George Washington
Snow 76 (1797‐1870), even though the phenomenon has to be set in a wider context,
73 Numeric data and quotation from JONES, A., Maldwyn, The Limits of Liberty American History
1607‐1992, London, Oxford University Press, 1995 [first ed. 1983] cit. p. 1 (Italian translation Storia
degli Stati Uniti d’ America. Dalle prime colonie inglesi ai giorni nostri, Milano, Bompiani 2011, p.
111)
74 JACKSON, John Brinckeroff, American Space: the Centennial Years, 1865‐1876, New York, W.W.
Norton, 1972, pp. 49‐55
75 On the diffusion and knowledge of the construction system in the middle of the nineteenth century
see: WOODWARD, George Eveston and F.W., Country Homes, New York, 1865
76 See GIEDION, Sigfried, Space, TIme and Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard
University Press, 1954 (first ed. 1941)(Italian translation edited by Enrica e Mario Labò, Spazio,
Tempo ed Architettura. Lo Sviluppo di una nuova tradizione, Milano, Hoepli, 2004, p. 340)
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