Abstract: Over the years, Buildings & Landscapes has been very fortunate to be guided by a number of conscientious members of the Vernacular Architecture Forum who have stepped forward to offer their services as editors, reviewers, and advisors. None more so than two individuals who have recently left after many years at the helm as a coeditor and illustration editor. With the last issue, Anna Andrzejewski stepped down from her four-year term as coeditor of the journal. Dedicated and hardworking, Anna produced four issues with former coeditor Cynthia Falk, and it has been my good luck and pleasure to work with her during the last two years of her stint in this demanding job. Rather than rest from her labors, Anna has taken ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the summer of 2018, my son and I walked across Los Angeles. Julian was off to Drexel University in the fall, so I planned the week-long journey across the city to give us some quality time together before he moved away from home. I imagine he would rather have spent the week in San Diego at Comic-Con, but he agreed to join me in late June to walk in the Southern California heat from Pasadena to Marina del Rey. We covered about ten miles each day, carrying everything in our backpacks, and staying at a new motel each night (Figure 1).The trip was a success on many levels. Unplugged from the incessant demands of social media and email, Julian and I talked nonstop as we walked through a range of landscapes: wide ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Atop a hillside just north of downtown Richmond, Virginia, an abandoned automobile service station sits on a lonely lot (Figure 1). The master architectural survey form at the state's Department of Historic Resources describes "Talley's Auto Center" as a one-story, four-bay masonry building composed of brick and concrete block. Constructed in 1960, this structure faces a paved driveway on a parcel at the northeast intersection of Fifth and Hospital Streets. Railroad tracks run along the bottom of its hill; Interstate 64 cuts across its eastern edge. When the staff of the Department of Historic Resources conducted their assessment of the site in 2011, they concluded that the property should not be considered ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "They whisper Hollywood," wrote the Kansas City Star's architecture critic in describing the city's film row. The district was "one of the most architecturally cohesive" places within Kansas City, "exceptionally well framed by geography, period, style and function."1 Suggesting that a collection of mostly one- and two-story buildings in a warehouse district whisper Hollywood is a vague yet tantalizing statement. What does it mean to whisper Hollywood'The mere mention of "Hollywood" conjures up images of glamour and celebrity associated with the movies. Most people's interactions with Hollywood are through consumption of cultural products: watching movies in an increasing variety of ways or reading gossip about its ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Dendrochronology has allowed us to accurately date a large number of early houses in the Georgia backcountry for the first time, giving us a more plausible portrait of the region's early architecture and the lifestyle of its inhabitants than was previously available. In the case of individual houses, these new dates have permitted the construction of convincing narratives of properties and family histories. In turn, these narratives better align extant buildings with early descriptions by travelers in the southern backcountry. Finally, the new dates fine-tune the evolution of stylistic features and building elements, so that more accurate dating ranges are available where dendrochronology cannot be done due to cost ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Purchased by the Library of Congress in 1905, a collection of family papers contains letters giving firsthand accounts of the Revolutionary War, yet a routine business ledger included with them contains far more significant narratives. A book project now underway uncovers and relates those stories. The following is a glimpse of what they promise.Betty Littlepage faced a dilemma. Widowed in December 1766, with a precocious boy of four and a girl still a babe in arms, she found that her much older husband, James Littlepage, had left an extensive but significantly indebted estate. "South Wales," some three thousand acres on the banks of the South Anna River in Hanover County, Virginia, would have to be sold and its ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Late in 1980, in a derelict split-level storefront at 156 Rivington Street in New York City's Lower East Side, colorful cutout stencils of dogs begged for the gaze of passersby. Inside, ecoartist Christy Rupp's exhibition, Animales Viviendo en Ciudades / Animals Living in Cities, displayed live rats and roaches in order to shame the city for its appalling lack of basic services in the neighborhood. In this cultural moment, rats and garbage were already on the minds of New Yorkers, and the show positioned this new space, run by the artists' collective ABC No Rio, at the forefront of a creative social movement that challenged the grip of mainstream institutions on art and the political messages artists could ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is probably fair to say that when most architectural historians think of Tel Aviv, they think of the White City, that sparkling UNESCO World Heritage jewel that includes an urban plan by Patrick Geddes and approximately four thousand Bauhaus buildings designed by Jewish German émigré architects who fled Nazi Germany for British Mandate Palestine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although that thought trajectory is more than justified on aesthetic grounds, Tel Aviv has other architectures and darker, alternative narratives of place that are every bit as important as its stories of sleek modernism. It is to one of what Israeli architect Sharon Rotbard has called "Black Cities" that Gabrielle Anna Berlinger directs ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Trade, diplomacy, and travel shape landscape. The Islamic empires and Renaissance Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were very aware of one another—culturally, politically, and symbolically. This awareness led to deeper investigation, appropriation, discovery, and confluence. Who, how, and in what context did these individuals and societies transfer knowledge to reflect these complex relationships in the landscape' This is the question addressed by the essays in Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences, edited by Muhammed Gharipour. The book examines transcultural landscape exchanges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the Islamic Ottoman ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: For most readers of this journal, Camille Wells needs no introduction. Nearly forty years ago, she helped found the Vernacular Architecture Forum and, shortly afterwards, established and edited the first two collections of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture—forerunner of today's Buildings & Landscapes. As the serious study of vernacular architecture history emerged in the late 1970s and evolved over subsequent decades, she became a tireless practitioner and a guiding light for the discipline through her fieldwork, documentary research, teaching, lectures, and publications. Today, Wells's numerous articles about Virginia's colonial and early national architecture are mainstays in scholarly bibliographies and ... Read More PubDate: 2020-08-23T00:00:00-05:00
Subscription journal
[306 journals]
