Vernacular Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources brings together for the first time a collection of essential and foundational readings in the study of vernacular architecture and the traditional building cultures of the world.
Collating scholarly historical texts from the last 200 years from a wide range of sources, this four-volume set offers a key knowledge resource for the field. It creates for the first time a comprehensive framework through which to understand the critical aspects and diverse interpretations of vernacular architecture studies, vital to much ongoing research in the built environment, in heritage studies, and material culture studies.
Each volume includes a substantial contextualizing introduction, while the texts are arranged according to themes which correspond to the chronological and intellectual development of the field, reflecting the subject’s evolution from primarily rural, romantic and traditional interpretations through to thoroughly contemporary and interdisciplinary definitions of the field. These contemporary perspectives connect to new scholarship on the explosive growth of cities and the global urban future – and are thus the concern not only of scholars who are seeking to understand the built world but also of professional architects, planners and citizens who continue to draw lessons from the vernacular and to apply them to design, procedures and political formations. Accordingly, this is a reference collection which enables both a critical understanding of the subject and a way to connect theory with contemporary professional practice.
This work will represent an essential addition to libraries and a major scholarly resource for architecture, building conservation / historic preservation, town planning, material culture, art history, geography, and heritage studies.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to Four Volume Work
Volume 1: TAXONOMIES AND GEOGRAPHY
Introduction
1. The Stone Sponge - Edward Allen
2. Of Dry Stone: Alberobello - Edward Allen
3. Of Mortared Stone: Cisternino - Edward Allen
4. The Tools Used in Building Log Houses in Indiana - Warren E. Roberts
5. Natural Place - Christian Norberg-Schulz
6. Man-Made Place - Christian Norberg-Schulz
7. Toward a Southwestern Architecture - David R. Williams
8. Louisiana House Types - Fred B. Kniffen
9. Building Dwelling Thinking - Martin Heidegger
10. Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture - Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
11. Turnovo - Le Corbusier, tr. Ivan Žaknic
12. Burgesses - Taut, Bruno, and Hideo Shinoda
13. Are They Men? / Earliest Settlements of the Aryas on the Upper Affluents of the Indus - Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, tr. Benjamin Bucknall
14. Introduction / Houses of the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico - Lewis H. Morgan
15. The House - Edward S. Morse
16. Walls - Charles Frederick Innocent
17. The Origin of Log Houses in the United States - Henry Mercer
18. The Natives of the Trobriand Islands - Bronislaw Malinowski
19. Bantu Homes and Kraals - James Walton
20. The Houses of the Second Period, 1675-1700 - Norman M. Isham and Albert F. Brown
21. Introduction, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture - Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand
22. The Concept of Diffusion in Its Application to Vernacular Building - J. T. Smith
23. Preface, Architecture Without Architects - Bernard Rudofsky
24. On the Lack of Incentive to Labour in a Communist Society - William Morris
Volume 2: SOCIAL LIFE
Introduction
1. Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk Building - Henry Glassie
2. Just Folks Designing: Vernacular Designers and the Generations of Form - Thomas Hubka
3. The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy. Part I - John Michael Vlach
4. The Living House - Roxana Waterson
5. The Unselfconscious Process - Christopher Alexander
6. The Selfconscious Process - Christopher Alexander
7. The Architectural Competence - Henry Glassie
8. Counting Houses - Henry Glassie
9. The Mechanics of Structural Innovation - Henry Glassie
10. Wood, Earth, and Fiber (California) - Peter Nabokov
11. Assembly and Rearing of the House Frame - Abbott Lowell Cummings
12. Handed Down Architecture: Tradition and Transmission - Paul Oliver
13. Speaking to and Talking About: Maori Architecture - Michael Linzey
14. Stability and Change in Tradition - Edward Shils
15. Concepts of Space-Time - Christine Hugh-Jones
16. Recalling Things Forgotten: Archaeology and the American Artifact - Lewis H. Morgan
17. Aboriginal Signs and Architectural Meanings - Paul Memmott
18. Architectural Archetypes: Reflections on Housing in “Paradise” - Suzanne Preston Blier
19. Thinking and Doing - Joseph Rykwert
20. The Variety of Chinese Rural Dwellings - Ronald G. Knapp
21. Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies - Cary Carson & Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton
Volume 3: THE CULTURE OF CONSTRUCTION
Introduction
1. Jacob W. Holt: An American Builder - Catherine W. Bishir
2. The Plan: Small Houses and Their Regional Varieties - Stefan Muthesius
3. The End of Artisan Production - Linda Clarke
4. Regulation Without Laws - Sam Bass Warner
5. Vernacular Gardens - John Brinckerhoff Jackson
6. The Wheelwright’s Shop - George Sturt
7. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skyline in New York and Chicago - Carol Willis
8. The Wild Melody of Steam: The Mechanization of the Manufacture of Building Materials, 1850-1890 - Carl R. Lounsbury
9. Why Tobias Walker Moved His Barn - Thomas Hubka
10. The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture - Dell Upton
11. The Art of Building - Fernando Varanda
12. Islamic Law and Neighbourhood Building Guidelines - Besim S. Hakim
13. Agreements, Contracts, and Control - Howard Davis
14. Knowing the Oriental - Edward W. Said
15. Disappearing Dichotomies: First World—Third World; Traditional—Modern - Janet Abu-Lughod
16. Contradictory Levels: The Phenomenon of ‘Both-And’ in Architecture - Robert Venturi
Volume 4: THE EMERGING URBAN VERNACULAR
Introduction
1. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-plan Analysis - Michael Robert Gunter Conzen
2. The Valuable Inefficiencies and Impracticalities of Cities - Jane Jacobs
3. Introduction, The Social Logic of Space - Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson
4. Benavides and the Barriada Movement - John F.C. Turner and William P. Mangin
5. The Need for Aged Buildings - Jane Jacobs
6. The Kind of Problem a City Is - Jane Jacobs
7. Fugue, Architect, Peasant, and Bureaucrat - Hassan Fathy
8. The Reeducation of a Professional - John F.C. Turner
9. The Forgotten Architecture of the Strip - Robert Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brow and Steven Izenour
10. Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning - Ananya Roy
11. Haussmann in the Tropics - Mike Davis
12. The City Is Not a Tree - Christopher Alexander
13. Speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1984 - King Charles III
14. Charter of the New Urbanism - Congress for the New Urbanism
About the Author :
Howard Davis is Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and director of the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism.
He is a co-author, with Christopher Alexander and others, of The Production of Houses (1985), author of The Culture of Building (1999, 2006), and of Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life (2012). He was the founding co-editor of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, book review editor of the Vernacular Architecture Newsletter, a member of the Board of Directors of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and a member of the editorial boards of Urban Morphology, the Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review and the Journal of Architectural Education.
