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Abstract: Fieldwork—the recording of buildings in situ with measured drawings and photographs—is one of the distinguishing features of vernacular architecture as a field of study.As Tom Carter and Betsy Cromley emphasize in their Invitation to Vernacular Architecture, the foundational introductory text for our field, fieldwork is central to the work of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. At the 2021 VAF Virtual Conference, we convened a group of VAF members for a plenary session called “Fieldwork Futures” that considered how our work in the field is evolving as intellectual, social, and technological conditions change around us. This panel led to a wide-ranging discussion among all those assembled about what the future of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “Why don’t you just use a technician'”Posed at a recent conference of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, this question was puzzling and, admittedly, a bit exasperating. Nonetheless, this is not the first encounter with skepticism concerning digital documentation techniques for architectural research. The conference session “The Digital Lens on the Past” centered on the use of digital technologies to record and represent aspects of built heritage, with emphasis on indicating a fourth dimension: time. This included the visualization of ruined or lost elements, unrealized interiors (e.g., Longwood in Natchez, Mississippi), rates of decay at heritage sites in severe peril, and seasonal ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 2000, the City of Berkeley, California designated a parking lot adjacent to a kitschy local seafood restaurant just off Interstates 80 and 580 a local landmark (Figure 1). The now parking lot was the site of an Ohlone shell mound, middens of shellfish shells and bones also used as burial sites. Destroyed in stages between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, the shell mound was one of two major mounds associated with a settlement in Huichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay, which they occupied for thousands of years. The landmarking of the West Berkeley Shell Mound was spurred by a proposal to construct a large-scale ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As a historian of the built environment, I began talking to people “in the field” almost twenty years ago, when researching my master’s thesis at the University of California Berkeley. Human stories and experiences have been a critical source of primary evidence in my research since that time, and I continue to seek clarity and resolve about my own research methods. Here, I offer questions and reflections on my working process, as well as thoughts about how our discipline can further refine methods for engaging humans in built environment research. While my methods are not unique, I have developed working strategies from the ground up through the mistakes, awkward encounters, and surprising rewards that occur in ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Hope is a discipline and . . . we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. . . . I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way.Surrounded by war, racial violence, injustice, climate catastrophe, and health disasters, I search for that little ray of hope that could make my work as an architectural historian meaningful. As Mariame Kaba prophetically declares, hope is not an abstract ideal we move toward, but a scrupulous mode of living and working. I remember a question that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “Can emancipation be carried out without using the lands of the slave masters'”1Three years after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865, and one year after a winter of devastating floods in the Mississippi Valley in 1867, a radical congressman from Missouri named Benjamin F. Loan had an idea. The Memphis and Saint Louis Railroad Company sought permission and aid in constructing a raised railroad bed and levee in a two-hundred-mile arc from the mouth of the Saint Francis River in Arkansas to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The exact route the railroad would take, however, was still in question. The road could divert away from the Mississippi lowlands, hugging higher but rougher ground west of the swampy Grand ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Just about a dozen miles west of Richmond, Virginia, the busy six-lane highway of Broad Street leads to one of Henrico County’s most popular attractions—the Short Pump Town Center, a gigantic open-air shopping mall. Opened in late 2003 and occupying the western edge of development in the county, this mall helped to intensify the transformation of this once-rural region into a wealthy and increasingly crowded suburban area. Attracting visitors and businesses from across the state, the mall has made the area of Short Pump synonymous with shopping and has fueled the creation of an edge city on the periphery of Richmond.Defined by Nicholas Fyfe and Judith Kenny as “urban complexes on the periphery of existing” ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Few American places have been so conspicuously shaped by the politics of class and race over the long twentieth century as Pullman, Illinois, making it an important location for studying the role of place-based heritage practice in today’s fight for social justice and equality. This model company town, built in 1883 by luxury-train producer George Pullman as the ultimate test of corporate paternalism, gained high praise at first, but became the poster child for company overreach when an 1894 strike highlighted worker frustration with Pullman’s control over both wages and rents (Figure 1). The company was ordered to divest itself from the town by 1907, but Pullman retained a distinctive identity on the south side of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In cities across the United States, vernacular structures of all kinds—from row houses and churches to vacant factories and schools— exist within urban landscapes of opportunity and decline. Often the preservation of these structures for study, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse depends upon the protections and financial incentives associated with historic district designation. For this reason alone, the relationship between historic districts and neighborhood change should interest readers of Buildings & Landscapes, whether or not they are professional preservationists.In Preserving Neighborhoods, author Aaron Passell compares the effects of historic district designations in Baltimore and Brooklyn, which he views ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Two recent books—one a new publication and the other an updated work now issued in paperback—explore the struggles people face when they seek to preserve or reconstruct the physical architecture so critical to community success. In Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb, Jeffrey A. Kroessler charts the largely successful efforts to preserve the architecture of garden suburbs first conceived and built in the early twentieth century. In the updated Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, Gordon Young recounts his far less fruitful attempts to contribute a small piece to the resurrection of a once-thriving city built around, and in parts by, the industrial giant that dominated its ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: China was largely a country of peasants when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, the rural population was 505 million in 1953, while the urban population was only 77 million. In 1995, the rural population peaked at 859 million, but by 2020 it had decreased to 510 million, or about 36 percent of the Chinese population. This rapid urbanization process has had profound social impacts, as rural and urban China are divided through the “household registration” (hukou ) system; rural and urban China are each governed under their distinct set of policies, conditioning people’s access to food rations, housing, education ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Sara Jensen Carr’s Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape is a timely and thought-provoking examination of the development of connections between landscape and public health ideals in the United States. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, the book provides a broad overview of significant historical movements and asks, “How have we attempted to build for health in the past and what were the advances and unseen consequences of those movements'” (3). To answer this question, the author has divided the book into two parts—“Infectious Terrains, 1860s–1940s” and “The Chorography of Chronic Disease, 1950s–Present”—and qualifies that this not a handbook of design and policy ... Read More PubDate: 2022-10-16T00:00:00-05:00