Following tradition at VAF, the 2021 awardees were announced with much fanfare.  Each awardee was recognized for their contributions to VAF and to the field of vernacular architecture studies.  Please click on the links below to read the full inspiring stories and view the evocative images of each awardee.

Advocacy Award: In 2021 VAF honored Mimi and Ron Miller for their advocacy for the preservation and rehabilitation of the broad range of historic resources located in and near Natchez, Mississippi applied consistently and successfully over the course of professional careers that span almost fifty years.

Catherine W. Bishir Prize:  The 2021 winner of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize is Marta Gutman for her essay, “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” which appears in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (Columbia University Press, 2019).   

Paul E. Buchanan Award: The Paul E. Buchanan Award honors outstanding vernacular architecture and cultural landscape projects within a wide range of formats, other than published books or articles. The recipient of the 2021 Buchanan Award is “Dudley Farm-National Historic Landmark Nomination by Evelyn D. Causey, PhD. This exemplary work embodies the highest standards of meticulous documentation and rigorous analysis that this award was created to honor each year.

Abbott Lowell Cummings: In a field of extraordinary new publications covering a wide range of buildings and landscapes from California to Germany, this year’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Award winner forces us to rethink something we thought we understood: common American housing in the first half of the twentieth century.  Thomas C. Hubka’s, How the Working-Class Home became Modern, 1900-1940, is an important and beautiful book, the culmination of decades of Hubka’s patient and rigorous fieldwork, and a discerning analysis of buildings, documents, and previous scholarship.