Upcoming events

    • 14 May 2025
    • 4:00 AM
    • 17 May 2025
    • 8:00 PM
    • Wilmington, Delaware
    • 201

    Delaware is excited to welcome the Vernacular Architecture Forum for our 2025 annual conference! Based in Wilmington, the state’s largest city, attendees will have an opportunity to explore historic buildings and landscapes in all three counties of our small state, ranging from the 17th century to the 20th century, highlighted through a series of bus tours. Delaware’s small size and geographic positioning between several cultural hearths resulted in a uniquely diverse settlement landscape, often reflecting influences from Pennsylvania (in the north) and the upper Chesapeake region (in the south). Its landscapes were predominantly agricultural, interspersed with small service villages and river towns, until suburbanization and expansive commercial development dramatically transformed many of its landscapes during the twentieth century–a trend that continues today. As such, the theme of preservation will be present in much of the conference programming.

    Our bus tours will reveal Delaware’s variegated early settlement and architectural expression. Diverse examples of eighteenth-century religious architecture and spaces will be showcased, with opportunities to see examples of Swedish Lutheran, Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican houses of worship. Colonial and Federal-era River towns will serve as nodes of exploration on two different tours. Historic farmscapes, now surrounded by modern developments, will highlight evolved dwellings and a variety of outbuildings. VAFers will have an opportunity to consider contrasting landscapes of enslavement, seeing coinhabited buildings on northern farms and separate quarters on southern Delaware plantations. Tour-goers will notice different expressions of the suburban ideal, as one tour will highlight the multifaceted nature of the country house movement in Delaware, while another tour considers suburban housing options for Black Delawareans during the mid-twentieth century. The conference will be based in downtown Wilmington, Delaware.  

    • 14 May 2025
    • 5:00 AM
    • 17 May 2025
    • 5:00 AM
    • Delaware

    Delaware is excited to welcome the Vernacular Architecture Forum for our 2025 annual conference! Based in Wilmington, the state’s largest city, attendees will have an opportunity to explore historic buildings and landscapes in all three counties of our small state, ranging from the 17th century to the 20th century, highlighted through a series of bus tours. Delaware’s small size and geographic positioning between several cultural hearths resulted in a uniquely diverse settlement landscape, often reflecting influences from Pennsylvania (in the north) and the upper Chesapeake region (in the south). Its landscapes were predominantly agricultural, interspersed with small service villages and river towns, until suburbanization and expansive commercial development dramatically transformed many of its landscapes during the twentieth century–a trend that continues today. As such, the theme of preservation will be present in much of the conference programming.

    Our bus tours will reveal Delaware’s variegated early settlement and architectural expression. Diverse examples of eighteenth-century religious architecture and spaces will be showcased, with opportunities to see examples of Swedish Lutheran, Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican houses of worship. Colonial and Federal-era River towns will serve as nodes of exploration on two different tours. Historic farmscapes, now surrounded by modern developments, will highlight evolved dwellings and a variety of outbuildings. VAFers will have an opportunity to consider contrasting landscapes of enslavement, seeing coinhabited buildings on northern farms and separate quarters on southern Delaware plantations. Tour-goers will notice different expressions of the suburban ideal, as one tour will highlight the multifaceted nature of the country house movement in Delaware, while another tour considers suburban housing options for Black Delawareans during the mid-twentieth century. The conference will be based in downtown Wilmington, Delaware.  


    • 11 Jun 2025
    • 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
    • Zoom
    • 464
    Register

    How might the history of the built environment come alive to undergraduate students, and perhaps the broader public? And how might that history be relevant, accessible, and legible relative to contemporary familiar landscapes?

    These guiding questions fueled a multi-semester urban history research project called, “Before Displacement: An Urban History,” at College of the Holy Cross in 2021-2022. The project presents the work of 50 undergraduate students across two semesters who together documented the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban history of a 1.5 mile corridor of Boston land that was cleared for an elevated highway in the 1950s, and subsequently redeveloped as the Rose Kennedy Greenway via the infamous Big Dig. Students researched this land via far-ranging archival materials, and with the support of digitization, community partners, and one another, ultimately compiled their resulting cultural and architectural histories in a collaboratively-built, public-facing website. The project privileges the distinct stories of everyday citizens who resided, owned buildings, operated businesses, or frequented this swath of land, and highlights the specter of displacement as a frequent component of urban change. It also sets a benchmark for archivally-engaged scholarship that can expand collaboratively across time, and which can connect distinct repositories and institutions.

    This webinar talk by Amy Finstein will explore the goals, methods, and prospects for this kind of research project, highlighting the potential for digitization to empower new scales of research and engagement.

    Amy Finstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA), where she teaches modern architectural and urban history. Her research unpacks the modern built environment at multiple scales, including the study of high-style houses by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, the history of urban changes that accommodated the automobile, and the stories of individual designers and municipal leaders. Her book, Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America (Temple University Press, 2020), received the 2021 Fred B. Kniffen Award from the International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture, and Honorable Mention for the 2021 Kenneth T. Jackson Prize from the Urban History Association. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Brandeis University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. In 2024, Finstein received VAF’s Paul E. Buchanan Award for “Before Displacement.”

    There is no registration fee for this webinar. The webinar will offered live only and will not be recorded for dissemination.

    Registrants will receive a Zoom link via email the day before the webinar. If you do not see the email, please check your spam folder.

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