Exploring Everyday Landscapes

• Author(s): Adams, Annmarie, and Sally McMurry, eds.
• Series: Perspect Vernacular Architectu
• Imprint: Univ Tennessee Press
• Publication Date: 1997-12-30
• Status: Active
• Available in Paper: Price $30.00 | Buy Now

Bringing together contributions from scholars in diverse fields—architecture, geography, folklore, anthropology, urban studies, and many more—the seventeen essays in this volume confirm the transformations now occurring in the study of vernacular architecture. From a single vision of vernacular architecture that consisted only of “old, rural, handmade structures built in traditional forms and materials for everyday use,” scholars are currently paying increasingly close attention to “elite landscapes” and their relationship to more typical or common buildings.

Drawn from two conferences of the Vernacular Architecture Forum—one held in Charleston in 1994, the other in Ottawa in 1995—these essays address topics ranging from urban cemeteries in New Orleans to company towns in northern California, from agricultural housing in central Delaware to ethnic churches in Minneapolis. Part I of the volume features studies of “emerging vernacular forms” in eighteenth-century Virginia and Charleston. Part II investigates various urban forms, including the development of the commercial strip and the futuristic architecture unveiled at the Charleston Exposition at the turn of the century. Part III explores ways in which work spaces of various kinds have been redefined, while Part IV examines the intertwining of religious culture with built form. Contained in the last section, “House and Home,” are essays on owner-built suburban homes, the social implications of popular floor coverings, and the middle-class Jim Crow neighborhoods of early-twentieth-century North Carolina.