building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Economy was described by Charles Nordhoff in his book The Communistic Societies
of the United States (1875) as a small charming village devoted to breeding the silkworm:
The vicinity to Pittsburgh, and cheap water communication, encouraged
them in manufacturing. Economy lay upon the main stage‐road, and was
thus an important and presently a favorite stopping ‐ place; the colonists
found kindly neighbors; there was sufficient young blood in the
community to give enterprise and strength; and " we sang songs every
day, and had music every evening," said old Mr. Keppler to me,
recounting the glories of those days. They erected woolen and cotton
mills, a grist‐mill and saw‐mill; they planted orchards and vineyards; they
began the culture of silk, and with such success that soon the Sunday
dress of men as well as women was of silk, grown, reeled, spun, and
woven by themselves. 115
In describing the village, situated in a place sheltered from the cold winter winds,
Nordhoff spoke of the trees, which had been deliberately planted along the river,
and described the plain but pleasant houses, each with a garden. But he also dwelt
on one significant detail: “The houses, substantially built but unpretentious, are
beautified by a singular arrangement of grape‐vines, which are trained to espaliers
fixed to cover the space between the top of the lower and the bottom of the upper
windows. This manner of training vines gives the town quite a peculiar look, as
though the houses had been crowned with green” 116 .
He was so impressed by the integration of greenery in the façades of the buildings,
that he highlighted the effect in the illustrations in the chapter concerning the
Harmonists [Figure 57]. Simple pruning of the vines with some anchorage to the
wall enabled the plants to form a natural cover to the house, where small birds
frequently made their nests. The industrious inhabitants of Economy had used
limited means to obtain an effect, sought nowadays by many trendsetting architects
with the help of specialist consultants. Neither the sophisticated substrata of
contemporary vertical walls, nor the complicated irrigation systems may be
115 NORDHOFF, Charles, The Communistic Societies of the United States, from personal visit and
observation, London, John Murray, 1875, p.77
116 Ibid. p. 64 (this second quotation is also in Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America, with other
sentences previously taken from Nordhoff’s book, but Reps does not comment on landscape)
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