Editors' Introduction

This volume of Buildings & Landscapes continues the themes that we described in the last issue and extends the long-standing themes of the journal, with articles dealing with both North American and non–North American subjects, with both the urban landscape and the individual building, with the process of making the vernacular environment, and with the idea of seeing buildings in their larger contexts. The articles treat very different places: Cuba, the American Southwest, Boston, Milwaukee. Three deal with distinctively urban subjects, all deal with the physical environment as the locus of interaction between different cultures, and all provoke a new reading of environments that might otherwise seem familiar.

"Civic Order on Beacon Hill," by Jeffrey Klee, describes how buildings, streets, and alleys on Beacon Hill provided a refuge for fugitive slaves during the nineteenth century while at the same time being seen by Bostonians as a place of insalubriousness and crime. The residents of the area understood their environment as a spatial network that included back alleys, minor buildings, and the spaces between them. This network—and the intricate social world that it knitted together—was virtually invisible to other residents of the city. By demonstrating how a single physical environment may be perceived completely differently by different cultural groups, Klee makes clear the importance not only of seeing buildings in their larger urban contexts but also the idea that a city naturally has diverse readings and multiple meanings.

While Jeffrey Klee's article describes different perceptions of Boston at a single time in its history, Lynne Dearborn's article "Socio-spatial Patterns of Acculturation: Examining Hmong Habitation in Milwaukee's North-side Neighborhoods" shows how such multiple readings of a single environment may happen over time. In recent years, neighborhoods of Milwaukee that were originally built for German immigrants have become the home of Laotian Hmong people. Dearborn focuses on the house and the immediate neighborhood, and shows how Hmong have adapted to houses built for a completely different ethnic group, sometimes changing the buildings themselves. Here, as well, the building is interpreted as part of its immediate urban context, as extended family and kinship ties continue to be supported by the close proximity of buildings. Dearborn's work shows the resilience of both people and buildings, and how both the use and meaning of buildings are culturally framed.

"Inventar: Recent Struggles and Inventions in Housing in Two Cuban Cities," by Patricio del Real and Anna Cristina Pertierra, describes how Cubans provided housing for themselves during years when official socialist, top-down housing policy failed to meet everyday needs. In this way, the culture of housing provision, in which people "invented" housing solutions for themselves in a variety of makeshift ways, was in opposition to the official bureaucratic culture that by the 1990s emphasized health and education. So although the Cuban case differs from those analyzed in the previous two articles, in that cultural differences based on ethnicity did not play a role, there were still two cultures in conflict with each other: that of the Cuban revolutionary government and that of an indigenous building culture, which, like that of the fugitive slaves on Beacon Hill, existed in the physical and legal interstices of the dominant political culture. Del Real and Pertierra's article also deals with the question of production and describes not only the building made as a result of "inventar" but also that process itself, and how such skills as building, engineering and materials procurement contribute to the built result.

The article by Rachel Leibowitz, "The Million Dollar Play House: The Office of Indian Affairs and the Pueblo Revival in the Navajo Capital," looks at an extreme example of cultural misinterpretation by a dominant culture, using the building activities of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) in the American Southwest. The OIA commissioned the design of buildings on Navajo lands that imitated Pueblo buildings, but had nothing to do with Navajo life and represented a cultural caricature that was essentially rejected by the Navajo themselves. The article focuses on a place that is rural, away from Boston, Milwaukee, and the Cuban cities...