VAF Members Lisa Davidson and Catherine Lavoie are the authors of Buildings of Maryland, the latest volume of the Society of Architectural Historians Buildings of the United States series Divided into an introduction and six regional chapters illustrated by photographs and maps, Buildings of Maryland surveys over 500 representative properties to tell the story of Maryland’s architecture and history, with attention to both vernacular and high style. This volume covers almost 400 years of development across the entire state with emphasis on the key themes of maritime and Chesapeake culture; transportation innovation; Baltimore industry; Black life and culture; residential Maryland; and Maryland builders and architects. Featured properties range from tobacco plantations worked by enslaved laborers to Free Black communities, from maritime settlements along the Chesapeake to coal mining and railroad development across the mountains, and from rowhouses neighborhoods and streetcar suburbs to well-known modernist planned communities. Published in Oct. 2022, Buildings of Maryland is available from University of Virginia Press. 

ERA Architects, in collaboration with Spacing, recently published a book about the history, culture and stories behind the signs of Toronto. We explore how the vernacular of signs communicate the lives of the occupants who live and work within the buildings more effectively than architectural building styles.

The introduction for the book is available here.

Robert Mellin, architect and retired professor, contributed a chapter to Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W.G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconstructing Subjectivity, to be published on December 30, 2022 by Routledge (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series). As described by the book’s editors (Teresa Strong-Wilson, Ricardo L. Castro, and Warren E. Chrichlow), this book engages with the writings of W.G. Sebald, mediated by perspectives drawn from curriculum and architecture, to explore the theme of unsettling complacency and confront difficult knowledge around trauma, discrimination and destruction. Robert’s chapter which includes a photo essay is titled “Unsettling Time and Place: Sebald in Outport Newfoundland,” with a focus on the cultural landscape of Fogo Island and Little Fogo Islands just off the northeast coast of the island of Newfoundland.

Ruth Little's memoir, The Book of Ruth: Taming Ghosts, Saving History, was published in 2022 and is available from Amazon. Brett Sturm, restoration specialist with the NC SHPO says: "Rigorous, observant, colorful, and brave, the Book of Ruth weaves together threads of social history, family history, and architectural history to create a moving story of a life, shaped, like all lives, by context--people and place. Her example shows us that keeping faith in one's creative, intellectual, and personal aspirations can be precisely the ingredient that sets us free."

Ed Nilson contributed a chapter to  “Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf,” recently published by Routledge, titled History, Memory, and Narratives of the Past and Future: The New Souks in Kuwait.  The chapter featured a project in Kuwait I worked on while at The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in the 1970s that represented the transition of vernacular architecture of the pre-oil era (pre-1940) and its potential for re-purposing in the 21st century.

Boyd Pratt has recently published a new book--Island Fishing: History and Seascape of Marine Harvesting in the San Juan Islands amid the Salish Sea--as well as second editions of two old ones--Lime: Quarry and Limemaking in the San Juan Islands and Island Farming: History and Landscape of Agriculture in the San Juan Islands. They are available through independent books stores (via Ingram) or directly, at a discount, from Boyd (2551 Cattle Point Road, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 mulnocove@gmail.com) or Amazon. Hopefully, his current work-in -progress, The Disputed Islands: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, The San Juan Archipelago, 1850-1874, will see the light of day in 2023.

Wie (Windy) Zhao has several pieces of good news in publishing and research grants including  Home Beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China.. Two chapters are available online.  Additionally, Windy has received a two-year research grant (£135,328.8) from the Endangered Wooden Architecture Program hosted by Oxford Brookes University to study Interconnected Wooden Residential Structures in Remote Rural China, and she has been honored with the Emerging Legacy Award from the College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.