Editors’ Introduction

We all know people shape the landscape. They alter natural features, develop infrastructure, erect buildings. Sometimes it is harder to visualize the effect the built environment has on humans. Over time and across place, however, people—from politicians and policy makers to religious leaders and social reformers—have recognized that the cultural landscape can shape behavior, and they have tried to use that fact to their advantage. The people who experience their designs then add to the equation, adapting and appropriating the built environment to suit their own needs, beliefs, and activities.¹

In this issue we see how community leaders and those who challenge them invest the built environment with meaning: a meaning that is not merely about symbolic representation but rather becomes an active force in community life, a meaning that is either embraced or rejected by those who interact with it. We are reminded of the complex and multidirectional relationships between people and the things they create, from milk houses to meetinghouses to slave markets. B&L readers will find many of the themes in this issue familiar. The Vernacular Architecture Forum has been a pioneer in bringing attention to North American agricultural buildings, religious and ethnic landscapes, and those places that give voice to the oppressed. Yet in compiling the contents, we have chosen to push the boundaries of time and place. Three of the articles and multiple books reviewed focus on the twentieth century and force us to think about placemaking that has occurred as recently as the 1980s. While the bulk of the material focuses on North America, we are also delighted to offer scholarship with an international perspective. The work featured here not only explores European influences on American architecture but also transports us to South America to examine the critical role of architectural production outside the United States.

We begin with a tribute to our friend and colleague Orlando Ridout V, and it is perhaps fitting that we do so in an issue that features scholarship on farm buildings, eighteenth-century meetinghouses, and the landscape of slavery. In recognizing that people shape the physical landscape, we must also recognize the way people affect our perceptions and understanding of the physical world. Orlando, through his generosity of time and talent, involvement with numerous public initiatives and historic sites, and commitment to nurturing the next generation, assumed an extensive role in how we collectively study and interpret the built environment. Orlando was among the founders of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and his unwavering dedication to fieldwork modeled the essence of what it is we strive to do. In recognition of his role as organizer and ardent supporter of the VAF and its principles, he was awarded the Henry Glassie Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2012. Ed Chappell’s essay provides a personal testament to his role in our field and expresses how much he will be missed.

Orlando encouraged the close reading of the physical components of the built environment, and while our Viewpoint essay addresses a very different time and place than Orlando usually studied, it builds on a similar approach. Dorota Biczel introduces us to Los Bestias, a Peruvian group composed largely of architectural students who during the height of the conflict in Peru in the 1980s began creating ephemeral installations using local and found materials. Biczel focuses on the creative energy and egalitarian principles behind the projects created by Los Bestias, showing how their work fostered community engagement and participatory democracy at a time when both were lacking in Peru. Through her chronicle of the major installations of the loosely formed collective, she asks us to pay more attention to shortlived elements of the built environment. Furthermore, she demonstrates that meaning varies depending on audience and circumstance. In the case of Los Bestias, much like that of the more recent Occupiers of Wall Street and other U.S. locations, purportedly worthless materials, coupled with the control of space, became meaningful enough to challenge repressive political norms.

Sally McMurry puts the role of government in a different light. In the U.S. dairy industry of the early twentieth century, regulation, brought...