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Abstract: As we navigate the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we often measure time pre- and post-pandemic. This interview stems from a pre-pandemic effort by the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) to document its own history through a series of oral histories. In 2018 and 2019, at the last two VAF annual meetings before the COVID-19 shutdown forced conferences in 2020 and 2021 to go virtual, thirteen early members of VAF shared their stories and allowed them to be recorded, transcribed, and archived. This is the second to be published in Buildings & Landscapes, the first being Richard Longstreth’s, which appeared in the Spring 2019 volume.1Students of vernacular architecture will find Elizabeth Collins Cromley’s ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As I walked through San Francisco’s Chinatown the summer of 2021, the losses of the last year due to COVID-19 were palpable. The strings of paper lanterns, wrought iron trellises decorated with Chinese characters, and antique neon Chop Suey signs glowed across Chinatown, but the streets were emptier than I remembered (Figure 1). Grant Avenue, Chinatown’s central commercial street, was blocked off from cars to accommodate pedestrians and outdoor diners. Most of the neighborhood’s historic bars and theaters were boarded up. A landscape transformed by COVID-19 was a strong reminder of Chinatown’s historical precarity, a place where the ghosts of America’s Chinese Exclusion Act and segregation still cast a long shadow ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On an early spring day in 1795, Antoine Sarrasin—an important yet understudied figure from early America—walked on a path to the port along the False and Mississippi Rivers, where he often worked loading and unloading cargo as an enslaved man living on one of Julien Poydras’s Pointe Coupée plantations, located northwest of present-day Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While on the dock, he met two free men of African descent who were passing through from New Orleans to Natchez. According to his court testimony, these two men told Sarrasin that the king of Spain had freed all of the slaves in the Louisiana territory, and that he, Sarrasin, would receive freedom soon.1 Hearing this news, he walked back along the path of the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1907, the New York police department opened the newest node in their efforts to physically demarcate their expanding control over Manhattan: the Twenty-Third Police Precinct station house on West Thirtieth Street (Figure 1). Located in the heart of Manhattan’s Tenderloin District, this new station house was hailed by the police commissioner as “the most important precinct in New York, if not the United States, or probably in the world.”1 Since the 1880s, the Tenderloin had been considered the most notorious concentration of vice in the city; it was also the most predominant Black neighborhood in Manhattan. Variously referred to as the Colored District, African Broadway, and Negro Bohemia, among other more ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Travis McDonald, Director of Architectural Restoration of Poplar Forest, has spent the last thirty-four years conducting a meticulous restoration of Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s private retreat in Bedford County, Virginia. McDonald considers it to be Jefferson’s “most important and personal work of architecture” (xiii). McDonald’s book recounts the remarkable story of Jefferson and Poplar Forest in clear, well-organized prose. McDonald takes a bewildering array of sources, including the minutiae of construction details, and weaves a story that is fascinating, informative, and never boring. He provides three appendices. Appendix A is a chronology of Jefferson’s life and the construction of Poplar Forest. Appendix B ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For centuries, the American2 plantation has been the subject of fascination and study. Such interests can be traced to Dennis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1762–72), where a Caribbean sugar state is carefully described in text and image.3 Today, the plantation, as place and concept, continues to fuel scholarly debate. While the socioeconomic history of these enterprises is well documented, scholars are seeking greener pastures in an extensive visual record that, until recently, sat undisturbed in the pages of history books. The volume Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World promises to utilize these sources for a closer look at the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: A country’s borders, an often-overlooked physical space in which people are either admitted or denied entry, contain a wealth of cultural information. Within the field of architectural history, however, immigration architecture—reception facilities, quarantine hospitals, and detention stations—has yet to be fully explored. The design of these spaces and the experience of its occupants can reveal much about a country’s governmental policies and cultural milieu. In this richly illustrated and beautifully designed volume, David Monteyne provides a comprehensive analysis of Canada’s immigration architecture built from 1870 to the mid-1930s and the spatial practices it shaped. Canada’s Dominion government facilitated ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The urbanization process in China since the 1990s has brought fundamental changes to both urban and rural landscapes. According to the official statistics of China, the urbanization completion rate hit a record high of 65.22 percent in 2022.1 As a result, cities have to be expanded vertically to accommodate more than half of China’s population, many of whom migrated from rural areas. This seems to refute Fei Xiaotong’s conclusion that “Chinese society is fundamentally rural,” drawn from his extensive fieldwork in the early twentieth century.2In parallel with development in cities, there have been several governmental campaigns and policies enacted with the aim of improving living conditions and the physical ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-13T00:00:00-05:00