VAF 2026: Columbia River Plateau (Walla Walla, WA) 
May 27-30, 2026

The Vernacular Architecture Forum Conference returns to the Pacific Northwest for the first time in nearly thirty years—to the vast Columbia River Plateau and the vibrant, revitalized city of Walla Walla, Washington. This is a land of striking contrasts: breathtaking natural beauty, agricultural abundance, and surreal geology shaped by cataclysmic floods, all layered with histories of conquest, displacement, and the atomic legacies of plutonium manufacturing during the Manhattan Project. Here, the vernacular is provocative and politically charged: government-issued, suburban-style housing for nuclear engineers in the company town of Richland, Washington; rock formations along the Columbia River deeply imbued with Indigenous significance; and a built environment shaped by discrimination, resistance, and transformation—from the contested spaces of Pendleton, Oregon, where layered histories suggest activities both rumored and remembered, to the freshly reinterpreted Whitman Mission National Historic Site, to the rise of a once-segregated African American community in east Pasco.

Our tours will traverse southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon, crossing and recrossing parts of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Oregon Trail as we symbolically reverse their paths. Along the way, we’ll contemplate the architectural legacy of westward expansion while reckoning with the peoples and places removed, decimated, or transformed in its wake. We’ll explore historic farmsteads, experience the enduring culture of Pendleton’s iconic rodeo, and witness how land and water have been harnessed into electricity, wheat, and wine. Conference-goers will sample the region’s abundance and encounter Walla Walla as it’s now branded: a Pacific Northwest destination with a nationally-recognized main street historic district and more than 120 wineries, some of whose tasting rooms are inside rehabilitated buildings downtown—even as preservation practices invite deeper critical reflection. Together, we will carve into the haunting beauty of the remote inland Northwest, exposing its strata, interrogating its histories, and revealing how its vernacular built environment has shaped, and been shaped by, persistence, power, and place.

Atomic space. Native soil. Geologic time. Join us in Walla Walla, 2026.