Buildings & Landscapes

Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

Buildings & Landscapes is the leading source for scholarly work on North American vernacular architecture.  Under its new name, the journal continues VAF’s tradition of scholarly publication going back to the first Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture in 1982. Published since 2007 through the University of Minnesota Press, the annual journal will move to two issues per year beginning in 2009.

Buildings & Landscapes examines the built world--houses and cities, farmsteads and alleys, churches and courthouses, subdivisions and shopping malls--that make up the spaces that most people experience every day. Strongly based on fieldwork and archival work that views buildings as windows into human life and culture, articles are written by historians, preservationists, architects, cultural and urban geographers, cultural anthropologists, and others whose work involves the documentation, analysis and interpretation of the built world.  Please see our Call for Papers.

All VAF members receive Buildings & Landscapes as a benefit of membership. Subscriptions are also available through the University of Minnesota Press:
Subscription rates:
Individuals:  $30.00
Libraries:  $65.00
Outside USA add $5.00 for each year's subscription.

Buildings & Landscapes is available as full text through Project MUSE and JSTOR.

Call for Papers

From commercial buildings in American Chinatowns to seasonal communities in Idaho, from linoleum flooring in middle-class kitchens to garrets housing urban slaves, from farmsteads to urban tenements, vernacular architecture and its settings shape everyday life. Charged with dense cultural meanings that speak to both makers and users, buildings, towns, and landscapes comport behavior, shape identity, orchestrate ritual, and negotiate social relationships.

The editors of the Vernacular Architecture Forum's scholarly refereed journal, Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of he Vernacular Architecture Forum, invite submissions of articles that explore the ways vernacular architecture constructs the everyday. Our subject matter includes all aspects of vernacular architecture and everyday urban and rural landscapes seen through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary methods. The editors encourage the submission of articles on topics within and beyond North America. We are particularly interested in articles that incorporate field work as a component of the research.

Buildings & Landscapes has recently changed from a bi-annual volume to an annual journal, and will become semi-annual in 2009. It is not necessary for articles to have been presented at VAF annual meetings. All scholars in the field are eligible to submit manuscripts.

Manuscripts should be prepared to conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Contributors agree that manuscripts submitted to Buildings & Landscapes will not be submitted for publication elsewhere while under review by the journal. Two hard copies of the manuscript and photocopied reproductions of the illustrations should be sent directly to each of the two editors. Please feel free to direct any inquiries to either editor via email:

Howard Davis
Professor of Architecture
School of Architecture and Allied Arts
1206 University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1206
hdavis@uoregon.edu

Louis P. Nelson
Associate Professor of Architectural History
School of Architecture
Campbell Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122
Lnelson@virginia.edu

Announcing Buildings & Landscapes

After much conversation over a two-year period, the Board of Directors of the Vernacular Architecture Forum voted in November 2006 to change the name of the VAF's journal, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, to Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. In many ways Buildings & Landscapes represents what we see as a shift of vernacular architecture studies from the margins of scholarship on the built environment to its center. Through VAF’s work over the last decades, many scholars in the field have come to recognize that the built environment that is experienced by most people, every day, is the vernacular. Yet, to a large extent, the scholarship on vernacular architecture is still seen by many scholars who are outside the field as relating to curiosities that have little relevance to the traditional concerns of historians or to practice in the contemporary world. The term vernacular architecture itself implies that scholarship on the subject is a subset of something larger. Our view is just the reverse. Our goal is to promote the study of the everyday built environment through the close examination of real buildings and landscapes to examine the ways such places shape the human experience. What this journal aims to explore is central and inclusive, and it may be that some "traditional" scholarship is in fact a subset of our concerns. Including the word landscapes in the title represents a recognition that buildings—and human habitat in general—do not exist in isolation, but in context. These contexts connect buildings to place, another increasingly significant word in recent scholarship. Landscapes are not just physical buildings gathered together in a place; they are also buildings that realize innumerable human relationships.

PVA has been ably led by a long series of editors, beginning with Camille Wells and most recently, before the current editors, Pam Simpson and Jan Jennings. Buildings & Landscapes will continue the volume numbering of PVA, but most importantly will continue the tradition, set by those earlier editors, of publication of the best peer-reviewed scholarship in the field. We see this change as a natural evolution as the VAF is itself evolving, and we look forward to the continuation of Buildings & Landscapes as a respected journal that is inclusive of diverse methodologies, historical periods, geographic areas and types of buildings and landscapes.