Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum最新文献

{"title":"A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality by Claire W. Herbert (review)","authors":"Kelley Lemon","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2023.a911890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2023.a911890","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality by Claire W. Herbert Kelley Lemon (bio) Claire W. Herbert A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 ix + 340 pages, 16 color plates, 32 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9780520340084, $29.95 PB ISBN: 9780520340077, $85.00 HB ISBN: 9780520974487, $29.95 EB In her book A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality, author Claire W. Herbert, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon, examines Detroit through the lens of occupied space to document the conditions that spur the decline of urban centers, and to understand how those conditions promote informal practices within vacant and abandoned spaces. Her study also seeks to determine who participates and who ultimately benefits (and concurrently suffers) when such practices are recognized and formalized through rules. Property informality, as Herbert defines the term, encompasses the “informal practices that arise from the transgression of laws regulating real property—land, houses, buildings” (5). A Detroit Story is organized into three parts: “Social and Spatial Context,” “Informality in Everyday Life,” and “Informal Plans and Formal Policies,” with a total of nine chapters, plus a preface, introduction, and conclusion. Herbert’s preface primes the reader and essentially addresses the questions/assumptions the reader may have about her position as a White researcher studying a primarily Black community, as she acknowledges how her presence resembled elements of gentrification—a process often characterized as young, highly educated, and resourced Whites moving into and displacing communities of color and considered an undesirable effect of neighborhood and city investments. Herbert moved to Detroit with her family, and they lived in a neighborhood called Piety Hill from 2011 to 2016. Her observations, interviews, and documentation of people illegally using property (squatting, salvaging, homesteading, demolishing) in the neighborhood would become the foundation of her research and this book. In her introduction, Herbert tells the story of a resident named Jerome, who shows her his garden in a nearby lot and describes his experiences with the site. He observed the city’s lack of response to typical maintenance and infrastructural issues and then began identifying opportunities to improve conditions for himself and his neighborhood, including cleaning and growing food on vacant lots and clearing sewer grates of trash. The vacant lots on his block were owned by the city or Bank of America, but such ownership did not deter him, he said, because “nobody minds” (2). Jerome’s story is important because it represents the underpinning of Herbert’s research questions in Detroit. How is it possible to appropriate property informally or illegally in the city without consequences? Perhaps more imp","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White (review)","authors":"Mark C. Childs","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2023.a911889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2023.a911889","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White Mark C. Childs (bio) Carolyn L. White The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020 xvi + 262 pages, 75 black-and-white figures, 6 tables ISBN: 9780826361332, $75.00 HB ISBN: 9780826363930, $34.95 PB ISBN: 9780826361349, $75.00 EB The boundaries of disciplines and professions are evolving cultural constructs.1 Author Carolyn White—the Mamie Kleberg Chair in Historic Preservation, director of the Historic Preservation Program, and director of the Anthropology Research Museum at the University of Nevada—explicitly positions her own work within the ongoing construction of disciplines in The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City. Following anthropologist James Deetz’s view of “the fields of archaeology, history, and cultural anthropology as pursuing the same object,”2 White participated in and studied the “mundane” aspects of the place called Black Rock City, the annual encampment of the Burning Man Festival in northern Nevada, each year from 2008 to 2016 (23). The framing of the book may be of particular interest to readers of Buildings & Landscapes, as three main themes weave throughout it: documenting daily life, attention to temporality, and reconsidering practices of archaeology. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the framework for White’s research. In chapter 1, White situates her work in a review of the emergence of the practices of contemporary archaeology as well as the history and literature of Burning Man. She focuses primarily upon “how people live on a daily basis in the city and how the mundane character of daily life takes place in this temporary place” (31). Chapter 2 describes her theoretical grounding. To structure her documentation and interpretation of the site, White uses Lefebvrian tripartite space (conceived–perceived–lived), de Certeau’s strategies and tactics, Bataille’s framework on the social expenditure of wealth (the accursed share), De Landa’s meshwork, and Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth and striated space.3 There is a danger of overcomplication from such a conceptual toolkit, but White uses these concepts to clearly organize and ground her observations as she gives us the gritty details of building, inhabiting, and de-constructing the encampment. Chapters 3 through 8 follow a narrative arc from construction, to occupation, to decamping. Much of this work could inform the practical parts of a travel guide; however, its directness causes these chapters to read somewhat like a checklist. Construction of the Man starts the event (the Man is a multistory wooden effigy at the center point of the urban form, and the hub of the event). “In cooperation with the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], the central point of the city, the location where the Man will stand, is pinpointed. . . . The Golden Spike ceremony formally kicks off the build cyc","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence by Tara A. Dudley (review)","authors":"Charlette M. Caldwell","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2023.a911888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2023.a911888","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence by Tara A. Dudley Charlette M. Caldwell (bio) Tara A. Dudley Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence Austin: University of Texas, 2021 336 pages, 94 black-and-white and 22 color illustrations ISBN: 9781477323021, $50.00 HB ISBN: 9781477323045, $50.00 EB Engagement, as Tara A. Dudley defines it in Building Antebellum New Orleans, encapsulates the architectural and building histories of underrepresented communities, bringing to the fore the signification of commitment and conflict that faces a racialized group when acquiring property and asserting the right to build on their property. As Louisiana grew rapidly between the 1830s and the 1840s, the gens de couleur libres community—free people of color who were of mixed Black and European ancestry—prospered, engaging in building trades and property acquisitions that left an indelible mark on the built environment. As Dudley writes, these free people of color and their buildings have been unexplored fully in architectural history, leaving a crucial gap that she expertly fills to show these communities’ influences on American architecture. The free people of color in New Orleans trace their origins to informal relationships between White men and women of color. Laws were lenient regarding interracial relationships, which contributed naturally to the growth of a distinct mixed-race class. Two families in particular, the Dolliole family and the Soulié family, contributed significantly to the building industry in New Orleans, their work concentrated mostly in the Vieux Carré and Faubourg Tremé neighborhoods. And although the population numbers of the gens de couleur libres decreased in the city toward the end of the antebellum period, their presence nonetheless influenced the economic opportunities available for them. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, “Ownership: Possessing the Built Environment,” Dudley uses the property histories of the Dolliole and the Soulié families as case studies to structure the book, delving first into a detailed history of their property acquisitions before exploring their ramifications. In chapter 1, “The Gens de Couleur Libres’ Acquisition of Property,” Dudley details how the ownership of property “was the first step in the architecture-driven identity-building process by which many builders and developers of color established their place in antebellum New Orleans” (25). Members of these families often used inter vivos (between living people) donations to transfer or gift property to relatives. This was often the case after a family member passed away or gifted the property to their offspring. Despite increasing limitations placed on people of color during this time, through donations and working with business associates, families like the Dollioles and the Souliés acquired a significant amount of property, establishing birthrights for their","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roads, Race, and Retail: The Transformation of Short Pump, Virginia","authors":"William Tharp","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The transformation of once-rural Short Pump, Virginia, into a sprawling suburban shopping destination speaks to the evolution of numerous American edge cities—concentrations of new development on the outskirts of more traditional urban areas. Although such areas likely represent the future of urban growth, many accuse them of lacking history. The story of Short Pump, located west of Richmond, challenges this view. Developing in three main stages, the area began as a prominent local tavern during the early Republic that acted as the focal point for a community shaped by industry and slavery. While this business eventually declined, the early twentieth century brought new changes as residents responded to Richmond’s expansion by altering their environment and redefining what “Short Pump” was. The area’s most dramatic alteration, however, occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s when large-scale development arrived. Following a common pattern, Short Pump exploded because of White flight, the convergence of interstate highways, and the opening of a massive mall complex. Continually shaped by roads, race, and retail, Short Pump’s changing built environment demonstrates the complex interplay between past and present that influenced the development of edge cities across the United States.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72681907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Personal Reflection on People as “Subjects” for Built Environment Research","authors":"Sarah Lopez","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"As a historian of the built environment, I began talking to people “in the field” almost twenty years ago, when researching my master’s thesis at the University of California Berkeley. Human stories and experiences have been a critical source of primary evidence in my research since that time, and I continue to seek clarity and resolve about my own research methods. Here, I offer questions and reflections on my working process, as well as thoughts about how our discipline can further refine methods for engaging humans in built environment research. While my methods are not unique, I have developed working strategies from the ground up through the mistakes, awkward encounters, and surprising rewards that occur in the field. As a scholar who engages with living subjects, I am not only learning the terms of such engagement but also who I am as a subject in a shared field.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77925193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Fieldwork Forum for the VAF","authors":"Brent R. Fortenberry, J. Buckley","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88032044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb by Jeffrey A. Kroessler, and: Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young (review)","authors":"Timothy Kelly","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"new proposals for the site accountable to public review and local demands for more affordable housing. His vivid description of this contentious episode successfully conveys the sense of community desperation that is often the prime motivator, unfortunately, for members of the public to engage in preservation work. Passell concludes his study by reiterating his claim that the effects of historic district designations are determined by contingent historical and geographical factors, and then calling for additional placebased case studies of the historic districting process. Ultimately, the ambitions of Preserving Neighborhoods are modest. Never proposing to resolve the question of whether historic districts are ultimately good or bad for architecture or urban life, the book is an invitation to rethink a powerful historic preservation tool from a datadriven and communitycentered perspective.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82845759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making a Case for Serendipity in Architectural Fieldwork","authors":"Arijit Sen","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Surrounded by war, racial violence, injustice, climate catastrophe, and health disasters, I search for that little ray of hope that could make my work as an architectural historian meaningful. As Mariame Kaba prophetically declares, hope is not an abstract ideal we move toward, but a scrupulous mode of living and working. I remember a question that architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck once posed: “How can we make history do work” for the dream of a better future?2 The answer to that query is to create a history committed to social and environmental justice. Can fieldwork and fieldbased research go beyond collection, interpretation, and description of the material world, toward an expanded mode where one aspires to change minds and dreams and strives to act in order to build a more equitable future? That kind of fieldwork is timeconsuming and is driven by an ethical framework that goes beyond mere data collection.3 As vernacular architecture historians, we can collect information in an intense month of fieldwork, but to use that information toward change and action we must develop a deeper and longer commitment to the communities we engage. Collaborative fieldwork is aimed at transforming “the space of fieldwork from one of data collection to one of coconceptualization.”4 It takes time to gain trust. Cocreating knowledge with the people whose world we study requires myriad forms of engagement and conversations that exceed the measurements, documentation, and formal analysis of buildings.5 One way to expand the scope of fieldwork beyond an examination of material culture is to include oral histories and ethnographic methods.6 Appending such techniques to a historian’s toolkit is necessary, but not adequate. A scholar of the built environment needs to carefully examine how knowledge is produced in the academy versus how it is constructed in the everyday world. These processes are different and therefore our objective should go beyond adding new methods to focus on modes of discernment and how we construct knowledge. In this article I argue for a praxisbased fieldwork that produces transformative social actions.7 Central to this process is a commitment of time and a willingness to be open to fortuity. When we return to the community repeatedly in order to cocreate knowledge with residents, we open up opportunities and experience unexpected situations that offer us new ways of knowing that we never presumed in the first place. Serendipity offers new avenues, new stories, and new ways to act. Asking field researchers to pivot and allow for unexpected turns in their work can seem like an unwelcome challenge, but this is exactly how community members operate and how they produce knowledge in their world. ARIJIT SEN","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89516955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell (review)","authors":"Kevin P. Block","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82345498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape by Sara Jensen Carr (review)","authors":"Jennifer L. Thomas","doi":"10.1353/bdl.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bdl.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79358783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}