Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

Vernacular Architecture Forum

Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum
Editors: Louis P. Nelson and Marta Gutman
The leading source for scholarly work on vernacular architecture in North America and beyond

Buildings & Landscapes examines the built world that most people experience every day—houses and cities, farmsteads and alleys, churches and courthouses, subdivisions and shopping malls. Strongly based on fieldwork and archival research that views buildings as windows into human life and culture, articles are written by historians, preservationists, architects, cultural and urban geographers, cultural anthropologists, and others involved with the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of the built world.

Formerly titled Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Buildings & Landscapes is published twice a year.

All Issues

  • Issue 2 - Volume 18 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Articles
    Viewpoint: Building Stories: Narrative Prospects for Vernacular Architecture Studies by Ryan K. Smith
    Introducing the Bathroom: Space and Change in Working-Class Houses by Alison K. Hoagland
    The Floating Dwellings of Chong Kneas, Cambodia by Tijen Roshko
    The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia by Stephen E. Nepa
    Violence and the Vernacular: Conflict, Commemoration and Rebuilding in the Urban Context by Sara McDowell and Catherine Switzer
    Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular, Peter Guillery editor. Review by Carl Lounsbury
    The Jeffersons at Shadwell by Susan Kern. Review by Barbara J. Heath
    The Great Valley Road of Virginia: Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present, Warren R. Hofstra and Karl Raitz, editors. Review by John Hankey
    Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa by Jeremy Foster. Review by Rebecca Ginsburg
    Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century by Heath Massey Schenker. Review by Eliza Earle Ferguson
    The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City by Randall Mason. Review by Carla Yanni
    Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War by Thomas G. Andrews. Review by Alison K. Hoagland
    Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. Review by Jason Alexander Hayter
    Census of Places that Matter by The Place Matters Project of City Lore and the Municipal Art Society. Review by Mike Christenson
    Reviews
    The Making of the American Landscape, Michael P. Conzen editor. Review by Chris Wilson
  • Issue 1 - Volume 18 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Viewpoint:
    “From the Unknown to the Known”: Transitions in the Architectural Vernacular
    Articles
    The Fabric of New York City’s Garment District: Architecture and Development in an Urban Cultural Landscape
    Ga-ne-tli-yv-s-di (Change) in the Cherokee Nation: The Vann and Ridge Houses of Northwest Georgia
    Cultivating Citizens: The Children’s School Farm in New York City, 1902-1931
    The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States by Carla Yanni
    From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa by Steven Nelson
    Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy by Michelangelo Sabatino
    Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Culture by Paula Lupkin
    Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country by Alison K. Hoagland
    The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960 by Richard Longstreth
    Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design by Greg Castillo
    North Carolina Architects & Builders: A Biographical Dictionary Caroline W. Bishir, Markus Wust, Joseph Ryan, et al.
    Research Notes:
    Extract and comment on the diary of John Marshall, bricklayer, of Braintree, Massachusetts, 1697-1711
    Reviews
    Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean edited by David S. Shields
  • Issue 2 - Volume 17 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editors’ Introduction
    Editors’ Introduction
    Viewpoint:
    A Contemporary Vernacular: Latino Landscapes in California’s Central Valley
    Urban Slavery at Work: The Bellamy Mansion Compound, Wilmington, North Carolina
    The Remittance House: Architecture of Migration in Rural Mexico
    “The Walled City”: Industrial Flux in Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1840-1920 Malka Simon Building and Rebuilding Community: Discourse, Public Memory, and the Grand Opera House of Oshkosh, Wisconsi
    Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City by William J. Glover
    The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908-1929 by Andrew Scott Dolkart
    Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal by Gabrielle Esperdy
    Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America by Wei L
    Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice by Richard W. Longstreth, ed.
    Book Reviews
    Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic by Dell Upton
  • Issue 1 - Volume 17 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editors’ Introduction
    Editors’ Introduction
    Features
    Location, Occupation, Juxtaposition, Interpenetration: Notes on an Erotics of the Mining City
    “The Lighthouse Top I See”: Lighthouses as Instruments and Manifestations of State Building in the Early Republic
    Indians at the Corn Palaces: Race and Reception at Two Midwestern Festival Buildings
    A Fly in the Amber: Route 66 Architecture at Petrified Forest National Monument
    Sex and the Single Building: The Weston Havens House, 1941-2001
  • Issue 2 - Volume 16 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editors’ Introduction
    Editors’ Introduction
    Features
    Viewpoint: "History Is as History Was, and Cannot Be Changed": Origins of the National Register Criteria Consideration for Religious Properties
    Rethinking Region along the Railroads: Architecture and Cultural Economy in the Industrial Southwest, 1890-1930
    Washington Place: Harboring American Claims, Housing Hawaiian Culture
    The Poetics and the Politics of the Contemporary Sacred Place: Baba Sali's Grave Estate in Netivot, Israel
    Heeding the Landscape's Usable Past: Public History in the Service of a Working Waterfront
  • Issue 1 - Volume 16 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editor’s Introduction
    Editor’s Introduction
    Viewpoint
    The Balloon Frame, George Snow, Augstine Taylor, and All That: A View from Abroad
    The Pennsylvania Barn as a Collective Resource, 1830-1900
    "So Majestic a Monument of Antiquity": Landscape, Knowledge, and Authority in the Early National W
    Shotgun: The Most Contested House in America
    Robert Adams and Colorado's Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West
  • Volume 15 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editor’s Introduction
    Editor’s Introduction
    Features
    Tulips in Winter: A Sales Job for the Tract House.
    The Million Dollar Play House: The Office of Indian Affairs and the Pueblo Revival in the Navajo Capital
    Civic Order on Beacon Hill
    Socio-spatial Patterns of Acculturation: Examining Hmong Habitation in Milwaukee’s North-side Neighborhoods
    Inventar: Recent Struggles and Inventions in Housing in Two Cuban Cities
  • Volume 14 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents

    Editor's Introduction
    Editor's Introduction
    Features
    Vernacular Architecture and Public History
    Bringing "Downtown" to the Neighborhoods: Wieboldt’s, Goldblatt’s, and the Creation of Department Store Chains in Chicago
    Witnessing the In-visibility of Inca Architecture in Colonial Peru
    Thirteen Factories of Canton: An Architecture of Sino-Western Collaboration and Confrontation
    New York City’s Oyster Barges: Architecture’s Threshold Role along the Urban Waterfront
    Refiguring the Colonial City: Recovering the Role of Local Inhabitants in the Construction of Colonial Bombay, 1854–1918