Vernacular Architecture Forum VAN Winter 2020

Letter from the Editor

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 18:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Winter Issue of VAN. Feel free to use this link if you just want to scroll through all the stories directly on the website, or take a look below for highlights of the issue with links directly to each story.

We are gearing up for the annual meeting this summer in San Antonio, May 6-9 and registration opens February 3. In this issue is a story on documentation from the VAF-Utah Legacy Project as well as lots of opportunities for conferences, manuscripts and tours that cover all sorts of vernacular architecture topics. In addition, we have lots of member news, from profiles of board members to honors, publications, and presentations.

In publications news, the Winter Bibliography is packed with useful resources that contribute to vernacular studies. If you are thinking of contributing to the scholarly conversation, consider submitting to the VAF Journal Buildings & Landscapes. Thanks as always for the contributions to the newsletter, love to share all the wonderful work our community is doing!

Christine Henry, Newsletter Editor

VAF 2020 in San Antonio--registration opens Feb 3

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 16:00:00 GMT

The Vernacular Architecture Forum will visit Texas for the first time in 2020 for its annual meeting in San Antonio. The field days will introduce attendees to the diverse and rich history of San Antonio and its environs with tours of Fredericksburg in the Hill Country, the rural and ranching area east of San Antonio near Seguin and Gonzalez, and a tour of the border towns of Laredo and San Ygnacio. City tours will highlight San Antonio’s West Side and King William districts as well as the five colonial Spanish missions that constitute the San Antonio Missions National Park. The conference will culminate with a NIOSITA, a traditional fiesta in La Villita, a preservation success story in central San Antonio.

Together VAF 2020 will celebrate the rich material and built heritage of central Texas and explore the complicated histories and migration, creolization, and cultural exchange over the last five hundred years.

Registration Opens February 3, 2020

More information see here. http://www.vafweb.wildapricot.org/San-Antonio-2020

Field Notes: Utah-VAF Legacy Project Documents Station Before Demolition

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 15:00:00 GMT

by Alison Stone, Lead, Utah-VAF Legacy Project

After finishing my presentation on the Legacy Project at the Preservation Utah Annual Conference last May, I was introduced to Ross Jones who is the Vice Chair of the Preservation Commission in Bluffdale, Utah. Bluffdale had recently re-instated its Certified Local Government status with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) because of concern with the acceleration of housing developments in the area and the resulting loss of historic buildings. Ross was specifically concerned about a building which was believed to have been a booster station for the electric railroads; the dominant mode of public transportation along Utah’s Wasatch Front from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Eclipsed by automobiles, there is very little evidence of their existence left. Ross wanted us to help the Preservation Commission create some record of the building before it was razed for a new housing development.

Ross and I met at the site in August. Immediately, I was amazed by the size of the development and the amount of earth moving and grading equipment, dust, heat and lack of shade. The building was on a level area backing against a hill surrounded by makeshift roads with work vehicles roaring by. On closer inspection, it did not look any more inviting. In recent years, it had been used to house cattle in the winter and the floor was at least a foot deep in dried manure which would make measured drawing impossible if there was rain. Even better, there were three cow carcasses in various stages of mummification. Prickly weeds grew along the exterior walls. Clearly, this job would require hearty souls and a good reason for documentation.

With a little research, we discovered that the building was the Bringhurst Booster Station; one of four booster stations for the Salt Lake and Utah Railroad which was inaugurated in 1914 and originally ran 48.5 miles from Salt Lake City to Provo, Utah.¹ The railroad ran on DC current and required booster stations along the route to keep the current at the necessary voltage. The stations housed Westinghouse generators equipped with 250-KW, 60 cycle, three phase, 750-volt rotary converters which operated at 1500 volts in series.² Our research did not reveal any other known surviving booster stations; once a common sight along train routes. We decided to move ahead with the project.

We had to swing into high gear; the developer agreed to hold off on demolition for ten days. I sent out a call for volunteers willing to help and got a positive response from seven people. Considering the size of the building, the number of people available and the time limitation of one day, we realized that we would not be able to thoroughly document the station with traditional measured drawing methods. What presented was an unplanned opportunity to implement a more wholistic approach to modern documentation practices; adding a complementary technique and documentation tool. To that end, we used laser measures for the trusses in the ceiling and other highpoints and a drone operator who created a 3D model of the building’s exterior;³ these added to the measured drawings we were able to create of the same views. We are proud of the archive we are able to leave the city of Bluffdale and SHPO of this piece of the vernacular landscape.

During the afternoon the developer stopped by the because he was curious about what we were doing. On site Steve Cornell, Historical Architect SHPO, and David Amott, Acting Director, Preservation Utah, had an interesting conversation with the developer where he said that he had never considered saving the building. It was always slated for demolition because he was focused on creating flat spaces for more homes and the station’s site was going to be raised to meet the top of the hill it backed onto. It was more expedient to add enough dirt to raise the entire area by 8 ft. than keep the building for offices or as a club house. It was an amicable conversation during which he was pleased to tell us that they were going to save some of the brick for the entrance gate and possibly some markers throughout the development and could he have copies of the drawings for the club house. The irony is that the name of this huge new development is Bringhurst Station.

1. https://utahrails.net/utahrails/salt-lake-utah.php

2. https://utahrails.net/utahrails/swett-salt-lake-utah.php

3. Kellen Hatch, Bringhurst Station: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/bringhurst-booster01-0d5c119b139a489c9160137f2abbda3b

SAH Data Project--Contribute Your Experiences

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 14:00:00 GMT

The SAH Data Project is gathering quantitative and qualitative information about the status of architectural history as a field in higher education. The study is being conducted by the Society of Architectural Historians with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Data research and analysis are scheduled to be completed in December 2020; a full report of the findings will be available on the SAH website in early 2021.

One of the most important components of the study, a group of online surveys for architectural history faculty, students, and academic program administrators, will launch within the next month. Virtually anyone in higher education today who has taught or taken a course about some aspect of the history of the built environment will be eligible to complete at least one of these surveys.

Be sure to subscribe to the project’s email newsletter for regular updates. And feel free to reach out to the project’s Postdoctoral Researcher, Sarah M. Dreller, at any time: SDreller@sah.org.

VAF-NE Save the Date! April 4, 2020

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 13:00:00 GMT

New England Chapter of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

Annual Meeting, Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, MA

4 April 2020

Details to Follow!

For information on past NE Chapter Annual meetings, see the chapters section of the VAF website.

SAH Latrobe Chapter--13th Biennial Symposium April 18-19

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 11:10:00 GMT

for more information, see the SAH Latrobe chapter website https://www.latrobechaptersah.org/

HBFF of PA 12th Annual Meeting and Barn Tour, June 12-14, 2020

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 11:00:00 GMT

This coming June, the Historic Barn and Farm Foundation (HBFF) of Pennsylvania will be holding the organization’s 12th annual meeting and barn tour. This will be a three day event in Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, June 12th-14th.

In addition to touring and analyzing barns, this year’s meeting will address the geography of farm-related industrial developments. The theme is: “The Mid-Youghiogheny Valley: Where Farming Fathered Industry.”

The Youghiogheny (Yock-a-gain-ee) River has its source in West Virginia, just across a narrow ridge from the source of the Potomac. While the Potomac flows southeast to Chesapeake Bay, the Yough (pronounced “Yough”) flows northwest toward Pittsburgh and the Ohio Valley. Although it is better known today as a whitewater rafting river as it passes through the mountains, or for its relationship to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater on a minor mountain stream just off the river itself, early settlers saw a great possibility of using the Yough to connect the southeastern Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. The earliest effort to start settling English-speaking families west of the Allegheny Mountains began with a trial settlement in the Yough Valley in the late 1740s, a decade before the French and Indian War. George Washington expected the Yough to be a canal route, and he began developing a 1,600 acre farm on that basis, essentially a wheat plantation, which later became the site of the small town of Perryopolis.

After the New Purchase of 1768, in which about 20% of modern-day Pennsylvania was acquired from Native Americans by treaty, a rush of settlers laid claim to tens of thousands of farming tracts in the area south of Pittsburgh. About a dozen charcoal-fired iron furnaces were built near the Yough between 1789 and 1810. In the charcoal era, iron was produced at a kind of farm in the mountains where huge numbers of trees could be managed and where water power was available to operate bellows. These furnaces produced pig iron for forges and early mills, in or near Pittsburgh, some 50 miles away. As the era of charcoal smelting was coming to the end, farmers just west of the mountain area mined coal and started refining it into coke (the coal equivalent of charcoal), which became indispensable when smelting became more common in urban areas and when the Bessemer converter was introduced at new mills near Pittsburgh. By the 1880s, the initially agricultural landscape near the Yough was becoming a patchwork of mining towns, rows of coke ovens, rail yards, and industrial waste sites, side-by-side with thousands of farms. Today, farming is back on the rise in the tour area, although many farms derive significant income from natural gas wells, especially shale gas.

The HBFF event will begin at West Overton, a distillery village created by the Overholt family, who led a group of Mennonites from Bucks County west to this site about 1800. Henry Overholt and his son Abraham Overholt developed a large distillery farm here with about eight worker houses and various outbuildings built almost entirely of brick. Henry Clay Frick was born in a large stone springhouse at West Overton in 1849. After buying out the coking operations of many of his cousins during the Panic of 1873, his company became indispensable to Andrew Carnegie’s growing investments in the steel industry, and the fortunes of the two grew, simultaneously, despite an uncomfortable partnership, until they were two of the wealthiest industrialists in America.

Several of the brick barns at West Overton, as well as the four-story brick distillery building, will be open for tours on Friday afternoon, allowing those interested in framing and construction to study how they were built. This will be followed by a guided tour in which the story of the village and the Overholt and Frick families will be interpreted. The annual meeting will be held on Friday evening at the immense brick barn at West Overton, after which there will be a presentation on regional geography.

The Saturday part of the event will be an all-day barn tour, stopping to tour the interiors of at least five barns. Most of them are on the Glades Road, the first non-military route through the heart of the 1768 New Purchase area south of Pittsburgh. About half of the barns on the tour have unusual truss designs that bridge over the multi-bay open areas at the center (threshing floors and/or wagon bays). One of the stops will be at Searight’s Fulling Mill in Perryopolis, a water-powered mill built in the 1810s to process homespun woolens. The mill has wooden hammers that were used to pound the cloth, driven by an undershot waterwheel in the lower level. Similar to modern-day preshrinking, fulling is a process to remove lanolin and other substances from the wool fibers while simultaneously matting the fibers together to lock them in place. Fulling mills were once very common in Pennsylvania, but Searight’s is believed to be the only freestanding fulling mill in the country to retain wooden machinery from the water-power era. It is also a reminder that the area just west of here, from the Yough to the southeastern counties of Ohio, was the wool-raising capital of the United States for about half of the nineteenth century. After visiting the mill, the group will tour the National Register-listed St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church where an Eastern European lunch will be served. The area has a large number of people who came here from Slovakia around 1900 to work in the coal mines and coking complexes.

On Sunday, two more barns will be open, closer to the center of Westmoreland County, for a drive-on-your-own tour. Both are at National Register-listed properties. The Steel Barn at Hannastown Farm is frame, over 100 feet in length (5 bays long), and unusually large in overall size. It is a short distance from the reconstructed village of Hanna’s Town, the seat of Westmoreland County before it was destroyed during the American Revolution. The other Sunday Barn, built by David Pollins in 1849 at his family’s “Sewickley Manor Farm,” has lathe-turned walnut posts supporting the forebay. The landscape surrounding the Pollins Farm, which is breathtaking, features approximately one mile of well maintained osage orange live fence.

The HBFF visited Perry County, just north of Carlisle, in 2019, where long-time VAF member Jerry Clouse was tour host. The group began as a result of a tour held in Berks County in 2008. In other years, tours have been held in Chester, Lancaster, and about ten other counties. In Washington County, the emphasis was on sheep farming landscapes and widely varied barn types. In Franklin County, it was on brick barns, and in Schuylkill County it was on that county’s large inventory of log barns. For each area the HBFF visits, a full color booklet is prepared with photographs and drawings of the barns, a copy of which is given to each participant. In the last few years, the booklet has grown to about 60 pages in length.

Extra copies of the guidebooks are available for purchase after the tour (by contacting Patrick Donmoyer, publications chair, c/o HBFF, 22 Luckenbill Rd, Kutztown, PA 19530; the address is also listed on the organization's web site, at: http://pahistoricbarns.org/).

The registration form for the event will be released soon. Please watch the HBFF website, or contact Terry A. Necciai, RA, tour host at losghello@aol.com . When writing to us, please mention that you saw this in the VAF News.

---------

Happy Travels, everyone,

Terry A. Necciai, RA

Reference List of HBFF barn tours in reverse chronological order:

2019 - Perry County

2018 - Centre County

2017 - Union County

2016 - Schuylkill County

2015 - Lancaster County

2014 - Washington County

2013 - Saucon Valley/Northampton County

2012 - Lebanon/Berks Counties

2011 - Franklin County

2010 - Chester County (the book is sold-out)

2009 - Gettysburg area/Adams County

2008 - Initial meeting/Kutztown Area

NPS Heritage Documentation Programs Opportunities 2020, Deadline March 2

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 10:00:00 GMT

Member Profile: Jennifer Baughn, VAF Board Member

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 09:15:00 GMT

I’ve served on the VAF board since 2016, but my “real job” is as Chief Architectural Historian for the Mississippi SHPO, where I’ve worked for 23 years. I love the variety each day in survey and National Register-world brings; just in the last year—bowling alleys, African American boarding schools, tenant houses, free-range homesteads with tick dipping vats, suburban slave quarters, Elvis’s Circle G Ranch, 1960s apartment buildings, Freedom Summer sites, motels with fabulous Polynesian rooms, even a gas compressor station!

I came to historic preservation rather roundabout, but my love of common buildings goes back to my childhood in the red-dirt piney woods of the Florida Panhandle. My civil engineer dad spent two decades, beginning the year I was born, creating our house from decommissioned World War II triplexes moved from the nearby Navy air station. I enjoyed “helping” him as he laid up the brick veneer walls (using brick salvaged from the original chimneys) on homemade scaffolding.

Only as a graduate student studying southern history at Florida State University did I hear about historic preservation. When I became Survey Manager at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, a colleague introduced me to the VAF, pulling out a conference brochure and remarking, “You need to go to this—they are hard core.” I had my first hard-core experience at the Columbus, Georgia conference in 1999. On my first VAF bus tour I came to realize this was a group of friends and colleagues setting out to see interesting places that included buildings that I could relate to in Mississippi and Florida. Suddenly I realized that architectural history could be about those buildings too; it wasn’t just about expensive, architect-designed buildings in big cities.

In June 2000, I attended the VAF Field School called “Building Archaeology,” led by Myron Stachiw at Roger Williams University. This was my first formal education in how to examine and describe a building, with sessions on materials—nails are worth documenting! who knew?—structural systems, and floor plans. We learned about architectural photography and perspective control from David Ames, longtime HABS photographer, and we enjoyed visits from other VAF luminaries such as Orlando Ridout—it felt like a master’s program in architectural history crammed into three weeks. I returned to Mississippi to a statewide survey of historic schools that I had begun in 1999. Our office previously approached schools through the lens of architectural style, but the lens of vernacular studies highlighted the floorplans as the most significant feature. This vernacularist approach allows these common buildings to tell important stories about education, racial segregation, agriculture, rural culture, and progressivism in a southern context. In 2019, with the help of several VAF members including Carl Lounsbury, Ed Chappell, and Brent Fortenberry, we began a survey of 19th-century outbuildings around Natchez, one of the wealthiest districts of the Cotton Kingdom in the antebellum period, using methods I learned in VAF Field School to work out the evolution of these deceptively simple buildings, which taken as a whole inform the study of slavery and class in the Deep South.

Although a rural state with little political power, Mississippi is at the center of the national conversation about race, slavery, and civil rights. Working at the SHPO has given me access to the buildings that tell these stories; attending VAF conferences and field schools gives me the skills to analyze and interpret the stories they tell.

Member Profile: Chris Bell, VAF Board Member

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 09:10:00 GMT

How were you introduced to VAF?

Picture yourself sitting in a classroom on wintery Wednesday, it is 6 pm and you are about to start a 2-plus hour seminar in a windowless room with a post-burrito food coma coming over you. That was when VAF landed in my lap. Professor and long-time VAF member Howard Davis at the dais teaching American Vernacular Architecture. A class he largely fabricated months earlier having just assumed the role as the historic preservation program interim director. VAF went from 0-100 in under two slides.

How has your experience with VAF shaped your career, methods, and views?

Following graduate school, where I learned at the knee of many VAF masters, I went to work for what one of them called “the Dark Side” – that of a DOT. But conversely, working for an agency that often begets massive change in the landscape, I have had the great fortune of informing that change, and studying, avoiding and telling the stories of Oregon’s vernacular landscape in a way that very few jobs might have allowed. What is more, I have had the great fortune of teaching that viewpoint for a decade at the University of Oregon’s program in Historic Preservation, and subsequently hiring some of those students with whom I now work. VAF has not only shaped those who taught me, who then informed my perspective and work, but then allowed me to pass that on to the next generation. In sum, VAF is an infectious disease for me, and one that I happen to like.

What is one of your favorite VAF moments and how has it been being a part of the Board?

Foremost, the Board is an excellent group of passionate VAF folks, from all walks of our field, that I feel very fortunate to have been part of the Board for the last almost four years. It is both a practical bi-annual meeting in developing awards, preparing conferences, detailing budgets, but also a high-minded chance to think about how this organization has evolved in the last 40 years, and how it is responding to issues of the day without losing a sense of its original purpose and putting it on a path for success for another 40 years. It is a top VAF moment, that of serving and working with the Board. But beyond that, coming up with one is hard, since I find that every conference includes some transformative moment when you are in some church, grange, or fill-in-the-blank venue, eating lunch with and often prepared by a set of remarkable locals showing us their “place,” who are as moved as you are by this mutual passion for what they see, and you see, as the unsung. But I will close by remembering the time I walked with a handful of long-time VAFers, Kingston Heath among them, down a long dusty road from the bus in North Carolina, getting deeper and deeper into the tobacco fields, talking about what they saw, and collectively patching together the physical pieces of the undulating landscape, the buildings, and the remnant material culture. I came away with an entirely new sense of that working landscape. Plus, as I later found, a tick. But it stands out to me as one of my favorite memories and a reminder that with VAF, the learning never stops.

Thanks to all of you for letting me serve as a Board Member and I hope to see you in San Antonio!

Editor's Note: move cursor over image to see photo caption for contest to identify location! Send submissions to Christine Henry, VAN Editor.

Member Profile: Myron Stachiw, VAF Board Member

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 09:00:00 GMT

My first engagement with vernacular architecture studies began during my years as an undergraduate in anthropology and historical archaeology at Brown University in the early 1970s. I was fortunate to be at Brown when James Deetz was teaching there and also working at Plimoth Plantation, where he and Henry Glassie transformed the museum’s presentation and interpretation of early New England culture and material life, especially architecture. At Brown I also had the privilege of studying with an illustrious cohort of fellow undergraduate- and graduate students, many of whom have made significant contributions to the fields of historical archaeology and vernacular architecture studies during the past half century.

After several years working as an archaeologist, I undertook graduate studies in the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University, benefitting greatly from coursework and engagement with Dr. Abbot Lowell Cummings, then director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and founding member and first president of the VAF. I attended my first VAF conference in 1980 and have been an active and committed member ever since (except for the nearly nine years from 2004 -2012 when I lived and worked in Ukraine), serving on the VAF Board of Directors twice (1996-1999 and 2016- present), and chairing the VAF annual conference in Newport, RI, in 2001.

I have long had a close relationship with archaeological and architectural fieldwork, and joined a number of my VAF colleagues in the continued development and practice of buildings archaeology. Over the years I have organized and taught (with other VAF colleagues) six field schools in buildings archaeology throughout New England. During the past several years I have been involved with VAF’s Orlando Ridout V Fieldwork Fellowship awards program as chair and committee member, encouraging and supporting fieldwork as a key component of vernacular architecture studies.

The VAF and its members have been an important influence on my scholarly and professional development as an historian and interpreter of material culture and material life, both in the past and in the present. It has provided both inspiration and refuge. I am deeply indebted to my teachers, colleagues, and friends for all that I have learned with them and from them, and am committed to passing that knowledge on to others – students, scholars, and stewards of historical places, objects, and collective/contested memory.

Susane Havelka co-authors book on informal building practices

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 07:10:00 GMT

Susane Havelka, postdoc Fellow at Memorial University in St John’s Newfoundland, co-authored Blueprint for a Hack: Leveraging Informal Building Practices published by ACTAR and will be available in June.

Summary: Over five days, some 60 residents of a northern village teamed with designers from southern Quebec to conceive and build an outdoor community pavilion that activates a central recreational area."Blueprint for a Hack" aims to reimagine community spaces. Faced with extreme housing shortages, physical isolation, and a challenging climate, outdoor public spaces in northern communities remain largely undesigned and underused. These 'in-between' spaces are strewn with stuff. Most housing and civic buildings in the communities emerge from and stand like physical markers of Euro-Canadian values. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada has begun a discourse on design in northern Canadian communities, but discussions continue to dwell on housing and civic buildings. A strong need exists to open conversations about design and the public realm in northern villages, which this project tries to address, creating a unique experience in which northern and southern groups could apply a "hacking mindset" to reimagine community spaces.

Andrew Sandoval-Strausz publishes in Washington Post

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 07:00:00 GMT

On November 8, 2019, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz published perspective in Washington Post Outlook Section titled "How Latinos Saved American Cities" about "after whites fled and before the ‘creative class’ moved in, immigrants kept urban neighborhoods alive."

William Rhoads Working on Publication on Elverhoj

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 07:00:00 GMT

William Rhoads is preparing a publication on Elverhoj, the Arts &
Crafts colony active in Milton-on-Hudson, New York, c. 1912 to 1935.
Established by Danish-American silversmiths Anders Andersen and
Johannes Morton, Elverhoj attracted artists who produced metalwork,
jewelry, paintings, prints, textiles, and book-bindings in a rural
setting overlooking the Hudson River. The main building, a c. 1840
classical mansion, was transformed into a "Moorish Terrace" with
Viking decorative motifs, while huts and rustic cottages were added as
studios and seasonal homes. Elverhoj received a mixed review when
visited by C. R. Ashbee in 1915, but won a gold medal at the
Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco that year and was favorably
written up in Gustav Stickley's Craftsman magazine in 1916. Rhoads is planning an Elverhoj exhibition with the Ulster County Historical Society and seeks material made at Elverhoj and unpublished papers. Please contact him at rhoadsw@hawkmail.newpaltz.edu.

VAF Ambassadors from UMW present to peers

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 06:35:00 GMT

In November the VAF Ambassadors from UMW, Garek Hannigan, Brenden Bowman, and Emily Whaley, had the opportunity to present to their peers in the Preservation Club on their experiences in Philadelphia. Club members were reported to be very interested in the trip and hope to learn more about vernacular architecture. Thanks to the ambassadors for sharing. Bravo!

Day-Long Focus on Barns and Farms at PA statewide conference in 2019

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 06:30:00 GMT

by Terry A. Necciai, RA

At the 2019 Pennsylvania statewide preservation conference, held in 19-21 June at Wilson College (Chambersburg) a whole day-long track was reserved for presentations on farms and barns, by both the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission staff (with some others that they invited to share the first hour) and five board members of the Historic Barn and Farm Foundation of Pennsylvania (HBFF) including the author, also a VAF member.

There were presentations on how to use the state agricultural context in making National Register arguments. This included an update on what the state is now doing to revise the extensive agricultural context document (Multiple Property Documentation Form), first prepared about 5-10 years ago by a team led by Sally McMurry, a VAF member and a former HBFF board member.

There was also a presentation by an expert on barn decorations (Patrick Donmoyer, former HBFF President) such as the star patterns commonly called "hex signs," as well as a 2-person team presentation on the nomenclature for the parts of a historic barn by an architectural historian and a real-life timberframer (Jeff Marshall, another former HBFF President, and Michael Cuba, a VAF member).

One presentation was on the parts and field layout characteristics (as a kind of vernacular design) of Pennsylvania's pre-1880 farm landscapes. The landscape piece began with a concern that the "land" itself, in the sense of field surfaces and the vernacular design aspects of fence lines and field layouts, has not been very well represented in Pennsylvania National Register analysis to date. It was noted that the surfaces, shapes, terrain, and other layout characteristics are important historic resources in their own right as the evidence of the agriculture that occurred there since they are the places where plants actually grow and where animals actually graze. As a conservative estimate, the state may have historically contained as many as a million farm fields, nearly all "developed" over time through careful farming with clearing of trees and rocks and the gradual development of fertile topsoil, by an average of 10 generations of Pennsylvania farmers per farm. Certain field types and patterns relate to specific animals or crops, in what was once a large symbiotic system of plant and animal activities, with animals providing what plants needed and plants providing what animals needed. If seen as a form of vernacular design, the farm fields of Pennsylvania arguably represent the commonwealth's most abundant vernacular "typological" category as well as being one of the most important visual characteristics associated with Pennsylvania that should be preserved.

The symposium ended with a panel discussion on farms and barns, followed by a showing of a new public television film "Barns of the Susquehanna Valley."

Winter 2020 Bibliography

Christine R Henry — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 06:00:00 GMT

compiled by Travis Olson

Abramovich, Rebekah Burgess “Mending Fences: Visual Cycles of Municipal Remediation in the Archives.” Platform (blog), December 9, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/mending-fences-visual-cycles-of-municipal-remediation-in-the-archive.

Agarez, Ricardo Costa. “Philanthropy, Diplomacy and Built Environment Expertise at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the 1960s and 1970s.” The Journal of Architecture 24(7): October 3, 2019, 950–81.

Allen, Michael R. “Mass Housing Legacies: Former Yugoslavia Teaches the Enduring United States.” Platform (blog), September 16, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/mass-housing-legacies-former-yugoslavia-teaches-the-enduring-united-states.

Allison, Noah. “Little Arabia: A Southern California Ethnoanchor.” Platform (blog), October 24, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/little-arabia-a-southern-california-ethnoanchor.

Al Sayyad, Nezar. Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Amanik, Allan and Kami Fletcher, eds. Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

Ambaras, David R., Curtis Fletcher, Erik Loyer, and Kate McDonald. “Building a Multivocal Spatial History: Scalar and the Bodies and Structures Project (Part 1).” Platform (blog), June 24, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/building-a-multivocal-spatial-history-scalar-and-the-bodies-and-structures-project-part-1.

———. “Building a Multivocal Spatial History: Scalar and the Bodies and Structures Project (Part 2).” Platform (blog), July 1, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/building-a-multivocal-spatial-history-scalar-and-the-bodies-and-structures-project-part-2.

———. “Building a Multivocal Spatial History: Scalar and the Bodies and Structures Project (Part 3).” Platform (blog), August 19, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/building-a-multivocal-spatial-history-scalar-and-the-bodies-and-structures-project-part-3-1.

Anbinder, Tyler, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone A. Wegge. “Networks and Opportunities: A Digital History of Ireland’s Great Famine Refugees in New York.” The American Historical Review 124(5): December 1, 2019, 1591–1629.

Andrzejewski, Anna. “Writing Human(e) Histories of Architecture in South Florida.” Platform (blog), December 5, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/writing-humane-histories-of-architecture-in-south-florida.

Baker, Jean H. Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Barber, Daniel A. Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Baselice, Vyta. “The Way Concrete Goes.” Platform (blog), November 21, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-way-concrete-goes.

Beyer, Elke. “Building Institutions in Kabul in the 1960s. Sites, Spaces and Architectures of Development Cooperation.” The Journal of Architecture 24(5): July 4, 2019, 604–30.

Bocharnikova, Daria. “The NER Project: A Vision of Post-Industrial Urbanity from Post-Stalin Russia.” The Journal of Architecture 24(5): July 4, 2019, 631–54.

Botti, Giaime. “Influences, Identity and Historiography in Colombia: The Reception of Brazilian Modernism (1940s–1960s).” The Journal of Architecture 24(6):August 18, 2019, 731–55.

Campbell, Aurelia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020.

Campbell, Claire. “Whatever Happened to Pleasant Street? Rediscovering an Urban Shoreline.” Environmental History 25(1): January 2020, Pages 134–149.

Campbell, Linda, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky, and Tim Stallmann, eds. A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020.

Çaylı, Eray. “The Art Biennial as a Public Health Problem.” Platform (blog), November 7, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-art-biennial-as-a-public-health-problem.

Chandavarkar, Prem. “The State of a Nation Seen Through an Urban Design Competition.” Platform (blog), December 12, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-state-of-a-nation-seen-through-an-urban-design-competition.

Chattopadhyay, Swati. “Mapping Ephemerality.” Platform (blog), August 1, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/mapping-ephemerality.

Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

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Cossin, Zev A. “Community and the Contours of Empire: The Hacienda System in the Northern Highlands of Ecuador.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23(4): December 2019, 1039–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-018-0488-8.

Cummings, Alex Sayf. “The House That MC Escher and the Marquis de Sade Built.” Platform (blog), October 7, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-house-that-mc-escher-and-the-marquis-de-sade-built.

Cupers, Kenny, Helena Mattsson, and Catharina Gabrielsson, eds. Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present. Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Davis, Howard. Working Cities: Architecture, Place and Production. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Dawood, Azra. “Building ‘Brotherhood’: John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Foundations of New York City’s International Student House.” The Journal of Architecture 24(7): October 3, 2019, 898–924.

Day, Leanne and Rebecca Hogue. “Plantation Housing Isn’t the Answer to Homelessness in Hawaiʻi.” Edge Effects (blog), April 18, 2019. https://edgeeffects.net/kahauiki-village/.

Dethier, Jean, ed. The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future. Hudson: Princeton Architectural Press, 2020.

DeWitt, Lloyd and Corey Piper. Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.

Dodson, Michael S. “Excavating the Vishwanath Corridor in Varanasi, India.” Platform (blog), October 14, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/excavating-the-vishwanath-corridor-in-varanasi-india.

Drėmaitė, Marija. “Baltic Mikroraions and Kolkhoz Settlements within the Soviet Architectural Award System.” The Journal of Architecture 24(5): July 4, 2019, 655–75.

Eisenman, Peter, Elisa Iturbe, and Sarah Whiting. Lateness. Point: Essays on Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Ellenberger, Íris. “Transculturation, Contact Zones and Gender on the Periphery. An Example from Iceland 1890–1920.” Women’s History Review 28(7): November 10, 2019, 1078–95.

Esperdy, Gabrielle. “Who Needs the Top? An Ungentle Manifesto.” Platform (blog), July 22, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/who-needs-the-top-an-ungentle-manifesto.

Friedman, Alice T. “Max Ewing’s Closet and Queer Architectural History (Part 1).” Platform (blog), October 10, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/max-ewings-closet-and-queer-architectural-history-part-1-1.

———. “Max Ewing’s Closet and Queer Architectural History (Part 2).” Platform (blog), October 21, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/max-ewings-closet-and-queer-architectural-history-part-2.

Frost, Lionel. “Water Technology and the Urban Environment: Water, Sewerage, and Disease in San Francisco and Melbourne before 1920.” Journal of Urban History 46(1), January 2020, 15–32.

García, Guadalupe. “Rutas/Routes.” Platform (blog), November 14, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/rutasroutes.

Gaynor, Andrea. “Lawnscaping Perth: Water Supply, Gardens, and Scarcity, 1890-1925.” Journal of Urban History 46(1): January 2020, 63–78.

Gessler, Anne. Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

Goff, Lisa. “In Path of Pipeline, Descendants of Freedmen Fight to Preserve Historic Virginia.” Platform (blog), June 27, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/in-path-of-pipeline-descendants-of-freedmen-fight-to-preserve-historic-virginia.

González, Robert Alexander. “Bullets Over the Borderlands: Where Do We Memorialize the Dead? Part I: Dreaming of Free Landscapes.” Platform (blog), November 4, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/bullets-over-the-borderlands-where-do-we-memorialize-the-dead-part-i-dreaming-of-free-landscapes.

———. “Bullets Over the Borderlands: Where Do We Memorialize the Dead? Part II: Assaulted Landscapes, Porous Borders.” Platform (blog), November 11, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/bullets-over-the-borderlands-where-do-we-memorialize-the-dead-part-ii-assaulted-landscapes-porous-borders.

Granger, Willa. “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.” Platform (blog), August 15, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-eyes-of-texas-are-upon-you.

Greendeer, Kendra. “The Land Remembers Native Histories.” Edge Effects (blog), November 21, 2019. https://edgeeffects.net/native-histories/.

Grubiak, Margaret M. Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America. Midcentury : Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Guillebaud, Christine, and Catherine Lavandier, eds. Worship Sound Spaces: Architecture, Acoustics and Anthropology. Research in Architecture Series. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Gutman, Marta. “A Better United States, c. 1937.” Platform (blog), October 17, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/a-better-united-states-c-1937.

———. “Who Is the Global? Part 1: The Global Is My Classroom.” Platform (blog), August 26, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/who-is-the-global-part-1-the-global-is-my-classroom.

———. “Who Is the Global? Part 2: The Meaning of Your Last Name.” Platform (blog), September 5, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/who-is-the-global-part-2-the-meaning-of-your-last-name.

Harris, Richard. “Creativity in Making the Built Environment.” Platform (blog), September 30. https://www.platformspace.net/home/creativity-in-making-the-built-environment.

Heathcott, Joseph. “Urban Agenda: Beneath National Party Politics Lay Cities in Grave Distress.” Platform (blog), June 24, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/urban-agenda-beneath-national-party-politics-lay-cities-in-grave-distress.

Herscher, Andrew. “Settler Colonial Urbanism: From Waawiyaataanong to Detroit at Little Caesars Arena.” Platform (blog), August 8, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/settler-colonial-urbanism-from-waawiyaataanong-to-detroit-at-little-caesars-arena.

Himes, Adam. “The Embedded Politics of Type: Sedad Hakkı Eldem and the Turkish House.” The Journal of Architecture 24, no. 6 (August 18, 2019): 756–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1684972.

Huard, Mallory. “In Hawaiʻi, Plantation Tourism Tastes Like Pineapple.” Edge Effects (blog), November 12, 2019. https://edgeeffects.net/dole-pineapple-plantation/.

Joyce, H. Horatio. “Disharmony in the Clubhouse: Exclusion, Identity, and the Making of McKim, Mead & White’s Harmonie Club of New York City.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78(4): December 1, 2019, 422–41.

Kalisch, Manuel Arturo Román. “Construction Technology Development in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.” Construction History 32(2): 2017, 109–30.

Kelly, Timothy and Margaret Power. “Norvelt: Workers’ Haven and Missed Opportunity.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 86(3), 2019.

Kolowratnik, Nina Valerie. Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truths in United States Legal Forums. Berlin: Sternber Press, 2020.

Knoblauch, Joy. Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Kulić, Vladimir, ed. Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society under Late Socialism. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018.

Kusno, Abidin. “Middling Urbanism and the Contradictory Space of the Kampung in Indonesian Capitalism.” Platform (blog), September 23, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/middling-urbanism-and-the-contradictory-space-of-the-kampung-in-indonesian-capitalism.

Landeschi, Giacomo. “Rethinking GIS, Three-Dimensionality and Space Perception in Archaeology.” World Archaeology 51(1): January 1, 2019, 17–32.

Larson, Magali Sarfatti. Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

Lasansky, D. Medina. “Towards Teaching Popular Culture.” Platform (blog), October 31, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/towards-teaching-popular-culture.

Loeb, Carolyn S. Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’ Subdivisions in the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Lopez, Sarah. “Ties That Bind: Migrant Placemaking at the U.S.-Mexico Boundary and Beyond.” Platform (blog), July 8, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/ties-that-bind-migrant-placemaking-at-the-us-mexico-boundary-and-beyond.

Malaia, Kateryna. “Individually Generated Building Modifications in Response to Housing Precarity.” Platform (blog), December 16, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/individually-generated-building-modifications-in-response-to-housing-precarity.

Maliepaard, Emiel. “Spaces with a Bisexual Appearance: Re-Conceptualizing Bisexual Space(s) through a Study of Bisexual Practices in the Netherlands.” Social & Cultural Geography 21(1): January 2, 2020, 45-63.

Mansure, Adil and Skender Luarasi, eds. Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque. Research in Architectural History. New York: Routledge, 2020.

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Maruyama, Hana C. “The WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans Is an Environmental Story.” Edge Effects (blog), February 19, 2019. https://edgeeffects.net/connie-chiang-nature-behind-barbed-wire/.

Mathews, Vanessa. “Reconfiguring the Breastfeeding Body in Urban Public Spaces.” Social & Cultural Geography 20(9): November 22, 2019, 1266–84.

Matteo, John A., and Nicole Ferran. “New Light on Baltimore’s Cathedral of Books.” APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 50(2/3) 2019, 59–66.

McCarthy, Patricia. Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

McCullough, Malcolm. Downtime on the Microgrid: Architecture, Electricity, and Smart City Islands. Infrastructures. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.

Michney, Todd M., and LaDale Winling. “New Perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy: Explicating and Mapping HOLC Loans to African Americans.” Journal of Urban History 46(1): January 2020, 150–80.

Mitchell, David S. Conservation of Architectural Ironwork. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Morton, Patricia A. “Herbert Gans, Displacement, and the Real Estate State.” Platform (blog), September 9, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/herbert-gans-displacement-and-the-real-estate-state.

Paolini, Federico. Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Pieper, Richard. “The Granite Streets and Sidewalks of Lower Manhattan.” APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 50(2/3): 2019, 5–16.

Pieris, Anoma. “Architecture without Aesthetics,” August 12, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/architecture-without-aesthetics.

Pyyry, Noora and Sirpa Tani. “More-than-Human Playful Politics in Young People’s Practices of Dwelling with the City.” Social & Cultural Geography 20(9): November 22, 2019, 1218–32.

Rainey, Reuben M., and J. C. Miller. Robert Royston. Masters of Modern Landscape Design. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2019.

Raitz, Karl B. Making Bourbon: A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

Rizvi, Kishwar. “The Other Side of Paradise, or ‘Islamic’ Architectures of Containment and Erasure.” Platform (blog), June 24, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-other-side-of-paradise-or-islamic-architectures-of-containment-and-erasure.

Sachs, Avigail. “Research and Democracy: The Architectural Research Division of the Tennessee Valley Authority.” The Journal of Architecture 24(7): October 3, 2019, 925–49.

Sandoval-Strausz, A. K. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books, Hachette Book Group, 2019.

———. “The Death and Life of Public Space in Great American Cities.” Platform (blog), December 19, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-death-and-life-of-public-space-in-great-american-cities.

Santiago, Etien. “Notre-Dame Du Raincy and the Great War.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78(4), December 1, 2019, 454–71.

Scheele, Judith. “Saharan Prisons.” History and Anthropology 30(5): October 20, 2019, 509–14.

Schmitz, Lucas. “Die Frauen Der Revolution Straße.” Platform (blog), December 2, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/die-frauen-der-revolution-strae.

Siddiqi, Anooradha Iyer. “Histories of Architecture and Feminism.” Platform (blog), August 29, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/histories-of-architecture-and-feminism.

Smith, Michael G. “The First Concrete Auto Factory: An Error in the Historical Record.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78(4): December 1, 2019, 442–53.

Snyder, Robert W.. “Making History at Bear Mountain: Family Memories, the Palisades, and an Inheritance Worth Preserving.” Platform (blog), July 29, 2019. https://www.platformspace.net/home/making-history-at-bear-mountain-family-memories-the-palisades-and-an-inheritance-worth-preserving.

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Steiner, Henriette and Kristin Veel. Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.

Stewart, Susan. The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Stojiljković, Danica Milan, and Aleksandar Ignjatović. “Towards an Authentic Path: Structuralism and Architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia.” The Journal of Architecture 24(6): August 18, 2019, 853–76.

Strange, Jason G. Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

Tanović, Sabina. Designing Memory: The Architecture of Commemoration in Europe, 1914 to the Present. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Townshend, Dale. Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

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Van Acker, Wouter, and Thomas Mical, eds. Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.

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Venkat, Bharat Jayram. “A Vital Mediation: The Sanatorium, before and after Antibiotics.” Technology and Culture 60(4): 2019, 979–1003.

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Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020.