Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note Michael J. Chiarappa As most readers of Buildings and Landscapes (B&L) know, the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) emerged in 1980 from a cohort of researchers committed to liberating the compelling stories of buildings that were not being given adequate attention, or in some cases were simply being ignored. So, in no small way, while VAF is about buildings, it is also, in equal measure, about building a paradigm that democratizes our considerations regarding what is experienced and meaningful in the widely conceived realms of architectural tradition and cultural landscape. This double issue of B&L reflects these aspirations—both in its content and in the diversity of approaches taken by its authors. Throughout his career, longtime VAF member Joseph Sciorra has dedicated his energy to interpreting Italian American expressive culture, particularly as it has taken shape in the materiality of the group’s vibrant devotional displays of vernacular religiosity. While some Italian American street feasts (feste) honoring the Madonna and other Catholic saints are recognized through their sheer cultural endurance or historical imprint in a community’s collective memory, in other cases, they have gained wider public recognition through depictions in popular culture and cultural revitalization. But it is the “ephemeral constructions,” what Sciorra describes as “decorative illuminations, elaborate sidewalk altars, freestanding multistoried chapels, and various ambulatory structures,” that shape the contours of these ritualistic cultural landscapes. In the first exploration of its kind, Sciorra examines these fleeting material expressions and how they artistically imbue depth in devotions rooted in the Italian immigrant experience. Similarly, the theme of ephemerality is paramount in Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy’s article. She inverts the paradigm of architectural fixity, and instead, looks at place-making as a transient process inextricably connected to the bodies of women—soldaderas—who, while following soldiers, created fleeting domestic settings for them during the early twentieth-century Mexican Revolution. Central in constructing these settings were the improvised use of shawls that covered these women and the train cars that moved the troops. Shawls secured domestic items to women’s bodies and then transitioned to being temporary walls or tents when needed in settings where soldiers camped or were temporarily housed in train cars. The essays by Catherine Bishir and Alexander Wood take us into areas that have been a bedrock of vernacular architecture studies in the United States: the experience and occupational cultures of building artisans. Bishir’s work on enslaved building artisans in antebellum North Carolina has been central in wider national conversations concerning the roles African Americans played in constructing some of the country’s most well-known built environments. Along with illuminating the overlooked skill of enslaved artisans, Bishir provides vital methodological guidance for those investigating Black building artisans in other areas of the country and the tradition they established for themselves both before and following emancipation. Wood’s research takes us into a new building tradition following the Civil [End Page 1] War, focusing on the structural ironworkers of New York City during the second half of the nineteenth century. Seemingly taking a cue from the sublime sheen that would later be cast by Lewis Hine’s photographs of workers constructing the steel frame of the Empire State Building, Wood looks backward to the artisans who pioneered iron-framed structures, detailing the skill, tools, construction techniques, and unionization challenges they faced. This volume of B&L is rounded out by two essays, one by James Kelleher, whose content will be readily recognizable by vernacular architecture researchers—the framed buildings of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century New England—and one by Robert Craig, whose material may be less familiar: the use of fire insurance records and the insights they provide on vernacular buildings and landscapes. Kelleher aims to present new perspectives on what are variously known as New England’s “half houses” or end-chimney houses in southeastern Massachusetts, particularly the double-pile versions and how they structured interior organization. For Craig, the scarcity of documentary evidence that can sometimes accompany vernacular building and landscape patterns can be bolstered by the policy registers, daily reports, and graphic documents produced by insurance companies. Finally, if VAF is about work that liberates our thinking about...