Mappings of environmental and cultural values of the United States as drawn by Warren Manning in ?A National Plan,? 1919. Courtesy Warren Manning Papers, Iowa State University Special Collections, Ames, Iowa, From the 2021 individual grant to Sara Jacobs for Landscapes of Racial Formation: Warren Manning in Atlanta, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama
Sara Jacobs, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia, has received a Graham Foundation grant for her project Landscapes of Racial Formation: Warren Manning in Atlanta, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama.
Landscapes of Racial Formation examines how landscape architectural practice was folded into the racial formation of the United States in the early twentieth century, according to the Graham Foundation website. Jacobs’ archival and site-based research examines the relationship between landscape architect Warren Manning?s white supremacist environmental atlas, ?A National Plan? (1919), and city plans Manning implemented for Birmingham and Atlanta, in 1919 and 1922, respectively. A significant designer who completed over 100 built projects, Manning was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a long-time employee of Fredrick Law Olmsted. The research looks at how Manning?s representation of landscape intersected with Progressive era anxieties to legitimize the design of racialized urban landscapes in Birmingham and Atlanta. Examining how Manning naturaliz...