Editors’ Introduction

Welcome to the first of the biannual editions of Buildings & Landscapes. With this edition, we begin to pick up the pace of publication, doubling the number of articles that will appear in print each year. The Vernacular Architecture Forum has long been committed to the publication of excellent scholarship in the study of everyday, ordinary, and vernacular architecture, and with biannual editions we will do so with even greater frequency. We are encouraged by the positive feedback we continue to receive from readers about the material in the new journal, and we hope that more articles each year will augment conversation and debate about the significance of recording, preserving, and interpreting vernacular architecture.

We open this volume with a Viewpoint essay that offers a new perspective on an icon of American vernacular studies: the balloon frame. Iain Bruce joins his voice to the many who have complicated Sigfried Gideon’s attribution of the balloon frame to George Snow, or any single author for that matter. But Bruce does so in an entirely new way: by finding evidence for balloon frame technologies in Scotland. His viewpoint on this historically American debate is international. In many ways, he parallels the arguments of Fred Peterson, whose excellent essay on the balloon frame in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000) blurred the boundary between braced frame and balloon frame construction through a careful analysis of surviving examples in the Midwest. Similarly, Bruce’s essay emerges from observations made in the field. Yet by locating examples far removed from middle America, Bruce questions the association of those discrete technological advances with the peculiarities of place.

If Bruce asks us to consider new perspectives on vernacular architecture, the same can be said of the four articles that follow. In her article on the Pennsylvania barn, Sally McMurry offers a challenge to the interpretive tradition that sees this much-studied building type as evidence in the narratives of ethnic continuity and change, and as a signal of the functional and structural hybridity that marks so much of the early American landscape. In the tradition of Bernie Herman and The Stolen House, McMurry turned to court records, and there she found evidence of a tradition of tenancy that complicates the vision of the independent Yeoman farmer and his barn. Then turning to examples in the field, the documentary evidence casts the physical evidence of these barns in an entirely new light. Rather than asking questions about where they came from and how they developed and proliferated, she asks how they functioned.

Moving to the towns of the early nineteenth-century West—specifically Ohio—Whitney Martinko examines the ways Ohioans appropriated earthworks of the long-disappeared Adena and Hopewell peoples into the making of new towns. Rather than entirely wiping away the evidence of earlier settlements, town planners selectively incorporated earthworks into their places and, Martinko argues, into their own histories of place. Like McMurry, Martinko turns to the documentary record to illumine the meanings of architectural choices. Using both travel narratives and local accounts, Martinko finds that the physical appropriation of these sites paralleled a narrative appropriation that enlisted these venerated American antiquities into the making of Ohio’s place in the new nation.

As yet another hurricane slams into the Gulf Coast—the mayor of Galveston today called for continued evacuations in the aftermath of Ike— Jay Edwards’s article defending the New Orleans shotgun house seems all the more timely. Framing this distinctive building type in the context of the larger debates over the preservation, restoration, and reconstruction efforts in New Orleans, Edwards revisits John Vlach’s now canonical and much-debated essay on the origins of the shotgun house. Edwards argues that in this case, architectural history has the capacity to fundamentally reframe the implications of race in the effort to revitalize the city so devastated by Katrina. If the shotgun is associated with early black life and identity in New Orleans, as Edwards argues it does, then the persistent drive to extensively revamp the “shotgun crescent” simply exacerbates the racial inequity that hovers over so much of the recovery effort.

Our...