Opportunities to Serve the VAF

The nominating committee of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) is seeking nominations for individuals to serve as members of the organization’s Board of Directors. Board members serve three-year terms. Individuals nominated this year, and subsequently elected, will begin service in June 2018.

The VAF is administered by a volunteer board composed of dedicated professionals and scholars from diverse disciplines who live and work in all parts of the United States and Canada. The Board meets twice a year, once during our Annual Conference in the Spring and again in the Fall. Board members are expected to attend these day-long meetings and  participate in committee work throughout the year.

The committee also seeks nominations for the position of President-Elect to start in June 2018. In the spring of 2019, the President-Elect will rise to the position of President of the VAF for two years. Candidates for the position of President-Elect should be familiar with the organization’s disparate programs, have a vision for the future of the group, and possess significant leadership skills.

Nominations should be sent to Jennifer A. Cousineau at jennifer.cousineau@pc.gc.ca, preferably before October 15, 2017. Nominees must be members of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Please include a short letter (not exceeding one page) indicating the position for which the person is being nominated and describing their qualifications as well as a short vita/resume (not exceeding two pages).

Self-nominations are actively encouraged.

Project Manager

Eliana Hamdi Murchie

emurchie@mit.edu

GAHTC.org

Announcing the next cycle of the GAHTC, and six new research grant opportunities

The goal of this cycle to promote interdisciplinary exchange amongst scholars of all ranks, the research of emerging scholars, as well as field visits for the production of new and innovative research.

The Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative announces the launch of its next cycle of funding, research, and collaborative exchange based on its recent award of $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This cycle includes an annual Member’s Conference, Teacher-to-Teacher Workshops, as well as a new grant program to promote the development of survey course material in the global history of architecture.

GAHTC will dedicate nearly $500,000 in funding to building new content through a multi-pronged plan towards research and professional expansion. To that end, GAHTC2 is pleased to announce six new grant funding opportunities: 

            • Targeted Acquisition Grants

            • Untargeted Field-initiated Grants

            • Emerging Scholar Grants

            • Global Connections Fellowships

            • Research-to-Teaching Grants, in affiliation with SAH

            • Field Seminar Travel Grants, in affiliation with SAH

This second phase of the GAHTC will continue to help teachers of architectural history meet the pressing realities of a global perspective by funding teams of scholars to build upon nearly 200 existing lectures in our free online library. GAHTC will continue to expand its library in the next years with the aim to further enhance teaching capacity and collect innovative research. 

The GAHTC is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with administrative connection to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the School of Architecture and Planning and its History Theory and Criticism Program.

Questions? Contact Eliana Hamdi Murchie at emurchie@mit.edu

more information at www.GAHTC.org

Lime: Quarrying and Limemaking in the San Juan Islands (Friday Harbor, WA: Mulno Cove Publishing 2016) 

by Boyd Pratt

Formed through eons of geologic time and sculpted by glaciers, the limestone deposits along the islands’ shore provided the essential ingredient for the block and mortar that built and rebuilt the West Coast’s major cities.  Read all about the islands’ economic booms and busts, dramatic changes to the landscape, bloody murder, contentious lawsuits, and deadly shipwrecks.

Although only sold locally, you can get your copy for $10 (tax included) by contacting the author at the address below.

Boyd C Pratt

Mulno Cove Creations, LLC

2551 Cattle Point Road

Friday Harbor, WA 98250

(360) 378-7172

Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio in Canada 1922-1956 (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2017)

co-authored by Michael Windover and Anne F. MacLennan

This book examines the visual, material, and spatial presence of radio as it reshaped Canadian society in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of radio sets and advertisements, the authors explain how marketing and design were crucial to convincing Canadians to adopt this modern technology. They also discuss how a new kind of space was produced by the radio by tracing its intersecting networks of communication and commercialism, public and private places, material and imagined sites.

The exhibition closed at Carleton University (Ottawa) in May and will be moving to York University (Toronto) in the fall.

William Keller discussed the reception of the antique at two central examples of the roofed arena building type. London's Royal Albert Hall (1867) and Stanford White's Madison Square Garden (1888), New York, were featured in his paper  "The Ancient Oval and Bowl Enclosed: Modeling the Roofed Arena," given at the Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,  Glasgow,  on June 8, 2017.

The University of Oregon Historic Preservation had a busy spring, full of VAF-related activity:

• Program Director Jim Buckley announced the formation of a new Northwest Chapter of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, only the second in the organization’s history.  More than 60 people throughout Oregon and Washington responded with enthusiasm to the call for interest, about half of whom met for an organizational meeting just after the Salt Lake City conference.  We are now planning our first program of tours and presentation for this fall – contact jbuckley@uoregon.edu if interested.
• Five UO historic preservation students attended the Salt Lake City Conference though the VAF Ambassador program.  Each student was a first timer at the conference and enjoyed the variety of material presented, from Mormon towns to Park City condos! We have some new lifetime VAFers thanks to this excellent program.  Please check out the ambassadors' essay on their experiences.
  
• Several UO scholars presented their research at the Salt Lake City conference, including alums Jon Miller (vernacular architecture of the Michigan Upper Peninsula) and Julia Larson (Latino vernacular in Woodburn, OR), current geography Ph.D. student James Miller (Micronesian migrant environments in the US), and program director James Buckley (preservation of African-American heritage).

The UO preservation program will begin its second year at the new Portland campus in September.

Susanneh Bieber, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Visualization and Architecture at Texas A&M University was awarded the Terra Foundation International Essay Prize for her essay “Going Back to Kansas City: The Origins of Judd’s Minimal Art.”  In her text, Bieber explores an early moment in artist and art critic Donald Judd’s career when his minimalist sculpture and his critical writing both elevated an “ordinariness” connected to vernacular architecture of his hometown, Kansas City. The essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of American Art, the peer-reviewed journal published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press. For more information see  americanart.si.edu/research/awards/terra.

Many members of VAF are also active in SESAH and have been recognized with publication awards in the past two years.  In 2016,

• Louis Nelson won the SESAH award for the best essay published on a southern subject for “The Falmouth House and Store: Social Landscapes of Caribbean Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” in Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture 1600-1850 edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
• Dana E. Byrd won the SESAH award for the best journal article on a southern subject for “Motive Power: Fans, Punkahs, and Fly Brushes in the Antebellum South,” in Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Spring, 2016).
• Kenneth Hafertepe won the SESAH award for the best book on a southern subject for The Material Culture of German Towns, Texas A&M University Press, 2016.

and in 2015, 

• Carrie Dilley won the SESAH award for the best book on a southern subject for Thatched Roofs and Open Sides: The Architecture of Chickees and Their Changing Role in Seminole Society, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015.
• Andrew Santoval-Strausz won the SESAH award for the best journal article on a southern subject for“Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New American Urbanism,” Journal of American History 101 (December 2014). 
• Richard Longstreth won the SESAH award for the best essay on a southern subject for “The Continuous Transformation of Savannah’s Broughton Street” in Looking Beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism  edited by Richard W. Longstreth, University of Virginia Press, 2015.
  

Compiled by Zachary Violette and Ian Stevenson

Avery-Quinn, Samuel. “At Play in the Gate of Heaven: Methodist Material Discourses of Leisure and the Picturesque at Round Lake, New York.” Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer Society of America 49, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–26.

Beech, Nick. “Social Condensation in the Metropole: Locating the First New Left.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 488–511.

Bokov, Anna. “Soviet Workers’ Clubs: Lessons from the Social Condensers.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 403–36.

Boucher, Abigail. “The Business Model of the Aristocracy: Class, Consumerism, and Commodification in the Silver Fork Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38, no. 3 (May 26, 2016): 171–81..

Boykin, Sarah J., and Susan M. Hunter. Southern Homes and Plan Books: The Architectural Legacy of Leila Ross Wilburn. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Brehm, Brett. “Soundscapes of Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Cries of Kastner and Mallarm?” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38, no. 4 (August 7, 2016): 263–74.

Breisch, Kenneth. American Libraries 1730-1950. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.

Brinkman, Joshua T., and Richard F. Hirsh. “Welcoming Wind Turbines and the PIMBY (‘Please in My Backyard’) Phenomenon: The Culture of the Machine in the Rural American Midwest.” Technology and Culture 58, no. 2 (2017): 335–67.

Bryan D. Orthel. “Preservation and Negotiation of History and Identity in Lexington, Kentucky.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 23.

Buchli, Victor. “The Social Condenser: Again, Again and Again—the Case for the Narkomfin Communal House, Moscow.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 387–402.

Cain, Friedrich. “The Occupied City as a Sociological Laboratory: Developing and Applying Social Psychology in Warsaw 1939-1945.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4 (July 2017): 587–601.

Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

Campbell, Lindsay K. City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Campos Franozo, Mariana de. “‘Inhabitants of Rustic Parts of the World’: John Locke’s Collection of Drawings and the Dutch Empire in Ethnographic Types.” History and Anthropology 28, no. 3 (May 27, 2017): 349–74.

Carlson, Linda. Company Towns in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Cowman, Krista. “Play Streets: Women, Children and the Problem of Urban Traffic, 1930?1970.” Social History 42, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 233–56.

Cummings, Alex Sayf. “‘Brain Magnet’: Research Triangle Park and the Origins of the Creative City, 1953-1965 ¹.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 3 (May 2017): 470–92.

Cynthia G. Falk, and Anna Vemer Andrzejewski. “Peopling Preservation: A Forum in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 1.

Davarian L. Baldwin. “‘It’s Not the Location; It’s the Institution’: The New Politics of Historic Preservation within the Heritage Tourism Economy.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 6.

Davis, Amy. Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore’s Forgotten Movie Theaters. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Erin Cunningham. “Interiors, Histories, and the Preservation of Chicago’s Hull House Settlement.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 53.

Ernsten, Christian. “Truth as Historical Recapitulation: The Dead of Cape Town’s District One.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 6 (July 3, 2017): 575–86.

Foxhall, Lin. “Introduction: Households and Landscapes.” World Archaeology 48, no. 3: Households and Landscapes (April 2017): 325–331.

Gantner, Eszter. “Logos, Industrial Palace, and Urania: The Urban Forms of Knowledge in Budapest, 1873-1914.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4 (July 2017): 602–14.

Gantner, Eszter, and Heidi Hein-Kircher. “‘Emerging Cities’: Knowledge and Urbanization in Europe’s Borderlands 1880-1945.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4 (July 2017): 575–86.

Graaf, Reinier de. Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Grant, Susan-Mary. “When the Fires Burned Too Close to Home: Southern Women and the Dislocations of the Home Front in the American Civil War.” Women’s History Review 26, no. 4 (July 4, 2017): 568–83.

Gwartney, Debra, and Barry Lopez, eds. Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013.

Hallas-Murula, Karin. “Diffusion of European Modern City Planning around 1910: Transferring and Implementation of International Knowledge in Tallinn, Estonia.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4 (July 2017): 615–24.

Hanson, Royce. Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Huff, Brad. “Ave Maria, FL: A Mixed Methods Material Culture Analysis.” Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer Society of America 49, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 26–49.

Isenberg, Alison. Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Jones, P., A. Isakjee, C. Jam, C. Lorne, and S. Warren. “Urban Landscapes and the Atmosphere of Place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form.” Urban Morphology 21, no. 1 (2017).

Juravich, Nick. “‘We the Tenants’: Resident Organizing in New York City?s Public Housing, 1964-1978.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 3 (May 2017): 400–420.

Karlštrēma, Inga. “Knowledge Transfer and Advanced Urban Planning in the Newly Established Ring of Boulevards in Riga: The Case of the First Municipal Gas Factory.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4 (July 2017): 639–50.

Lebowitz, Amy, and Dan Trudeau. “Digging in: Lawn Dissidents, Performing Sustainability, and Landscapes of Privilege.” Social & Cultural Geography 18, no. 5 (2017): 706–731..

Leslie, Stuart W., and Emily A. Margolis. “Griffith Observatory: Hollywood’s Celestial Theater.” Early Popular Visual Culture 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 227–246..

Matson, Cathy. “Putting the Lydia to Sea: The Material Economy of Shipping in Colonial Philadelphia.” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (April 2017): 303–33.

Mayer, Frederick W. A Setting For Excellence, Part II: The Story of the Planning and Development of the Ann Arbor Campus of the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

McCoy, Mark D., and Maria C. Codlin. “The Influence of Religious Authority in Everyday Life: A Landscape-Scale Study of Domestic Architecture and Religious Law in Ancient Hawai’i.” World Archaeology 48, no. 3: Households and Landscape (April 2017): 411–430.

Merlino, Kathryn Rogers. Building Reuse: Sustainability, Preservation, and the Value of Design. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.

Mike Christenson. “Research Notes: The Photographic Construction of Urban Renewal in Fargo, North Dakota.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 116.

Murawski, Micha? “Introduction: Crystallising the Social Condenser.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 372–86.

———. “The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Social Condenser in Warsaw.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 458–77.

Murtagh, Brendan, Philip Boland, and Peter Shirlow. “Contested Heritages and Cultural Tourism.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 6 (July 3, 2017): 506–20.

Nathaniel Robert Walker. “American Crossroads: General Motors’ Midcentury Campaign to Promote Modernist Urban Design in Hometown U.S.A.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 89.

Pyszka, Kimberly. “Anglican Church Architecture and Religious Identity in Early Colonial South Carolina.” Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer Society of America 49, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 78–101.

Rinaldi, Thomas E., and Robert J. Yasinsac. Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017.

Riordan, Timothy. “‘The Science and Misteire of Glazing’: Thoughts on the Use of Marked Window Leads in Archaeological Analysis.” Northeast Historical Archaeology 45, no. 1 (2016).

Salamon, Sonya, and Katherine MacTavish. Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Sarah Rovang. “The Grid Comes Home: Wiring and Lighting the American Farmhouse.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (2016): 65.

Scholz, Maximilian. “Over Our Dead Bodies: The Fight over Cemetery Construction in Nineteenth-Century London.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 3 (May 2017): 445–57.

Seals, Sonny, and George S. Hart. Historic Rural Churches of Georgia. Athens. University of Georgia Press: 2016.

Shatkin, Gavin. Cities for Profit: The Real Estate Turn in Asia’s Urban Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Shelton, Kyle. “Building a Better Houston: Highways, Neighborhoods, and Infrastructural Citizenship in the 1970s.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 3 (May 2017): 421–44.

Siber, Kate. “Dance Hall Days: Texas History and Heritage, Set to Music.” Preservation 69, no. 2 (2017): 32–38.

Stanek, Lukasz “Collective Luxury.” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 478–87.

Törmä, I., S. Griffiths, and L. Vaughan. “High Street Changeability: The Effect of Urban Form on Demolition, Modification and Use Change in Two South London Suburbs.” Urban Morphology 21, no. 1 (2017).

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: Facsimile Edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Whalen, Kevin. “Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907–1930.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 2017): 290–321.

Williams, Daniel. “The Clouds and the Poor: Ruskin, Mayhew, and Ecology.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38, no. 5 (October 19, 2016): 319–31.

Williams, Nancy K., and H. Thomas Foster. “An Analysis of Native American/ Colonialist Interaction in the Southeastern United States.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21, no. 2 (June 2017): 513–31.