A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2010
From iconic neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District to more economically modest but no less culturally vibrant areas, architecture is a key element that makes New Orleans an extraordinary American city. Delirious New Orleans began as a documentary project to capture the idiosyncratic vernacular architecture and artifacts—vintage mom-and-pop businesses, roadside motels, live music clubs, neon signs, wall murals, fast-food joints, and so on—that helped give the city's various neighborhoods their unique character. But because so many of these places and artifacts were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Delirious New Orleans has become both a historical record of what existed in the past and a blueprint for what must be rebuilt and restored to retain the city's unique multicultural landscape.
Stephen Verderber starts with the premise that New Orleans's often-overlooked neighborhoods imbue the city with deep authenticity as a place. He opens Delirious New Orleans with a photo-essay that vividly presents this vernacular architecture and its artifacts, both before Katrina and in its immediate aftermath. In the following sections of the book, which are also heavily illustrated, Verderber takes us on a tour of the city's commercial vernacular architecture, as well as the expressive folk architecture of its African American neighborhoods. He discusses how the built environment was profoundly shaped by New Orleans's history of race and class inequities and political maneuvering, along with its peculiar, below-sea-level geography. Verderber also considers the aftermath of Katrina and the armada of faceless FEMA trailers that have, at least temporarily and by default, transformed this urban landscape.
A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today’s experience.
Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation—the ways that we move through a house—analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings.
This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.
The kind of extraordinary domed house constructed by Chad and Cameroon’s Mousgoum peoples has long held sway over the Western imagination. In fact, as Steven Nelson shows here, this prototypical beehive-shaped structure known as the teleukhas been cast as everything from a sign of authenticity to a tourist destination to a perfect fusion of form and function in an unselfconscious culture. And in this multifaceted history of the teleuk, thought of by the Mousgoum themselves as a three-dimensional symbol of their culture, Nelson charts how a singular building’s meaning has the capacity to change over time and in different places.
Drawing on fieldwork in Cameroon and Japan as well as archival research in Africa, the United States, and Europe, Nelson explores how the teleuk has been understood by groups ranging from contemporary tourists to the Cameroonian government and—most importantly—today’s Mousgoum people. In doing so, he moves in and out of Africa to provide a window into a changing Mousgoum culture and to show how both African and Western peoples use the built environment to advance their own needs and desires. Highlighting the global impact of African architecture, From Cameroon to Paris will appeal to scholars and students of African art history and architectural history, as well as those interested in Western interactions with Africa.
Pioneer Texas Buildings opened people's eyes when it was first published in 1968. At a time when "progress" meant tearing down the weathered houses, barns, churches, and stores built by the original settlers of Central Texas, this book taught people to see the beauty, simplicity, and order expressed in the unadorned geometric forms of early Texas buildings. It inspired the preservation and restoration of many of the remaining pioneer buildings, as well as the design of modern buildings that employ the same simple geometries.
This revised edition of Pioneer Texas Buildings juxtaposes the historic structures with works by twenty contemporary architects who are inspired by the pioneer tradition to show how seamlessly the basic geometries translate from one era to another. As in the first edition, sketches and brief commentary by Clovis Heimsath explain how squares, triangles, and circles take shape in the cubic, triangular, and cylindrical forms that comprise houses and other buildings. Then black-and-white photographs, the heart of the book, illustrate these geometric forms in historic and modern buildings. The book also includes two essays in which Heimsath discusses the factors that led him and his wife Maryann to document early Texas buildings and the results in historic preservation and timeless architectural designs that have followed from their efforts.
Her study is unique in its use of historic photographs to document and understand abandonment processes and apply that knowledge to prehistoric sites. Photos taken by tourists, missionaries, and early anthropologists during the late nineteenth century portray original structures, while later photos show how Orayvi buildings changed over a period of almost eighty years. Census data relating to house size and household configuration shed additional light on social change in the pueblo.
Examining change at Orayvi afforded an opportunity to study the architectural effects of an event that must have happened many times in the past--the partial abandonment of a pueblo--by tracing the effects of sudden population decline on puebloan architecture. Cameron's work provides clues to how and why villages were abandoned and re-established repeatedly in the prehistoric Southwest as it offers a unique window on the relationship between Pueblo houses and the living people who occupied them.
Profusely illustrated with over one hundred images, Tennessee Log Houses traces the evolution of log houses from one-room (or single-pen) dwellings to more elaborate homes of various types, such as saddlebags, Cumberland houses, dogtrots, and two-story I-houses. Rehder discusses the historic settlement patterns and building traditions that led to this variety of house types and identifies their particular occurrences throughout the state by drawing on surveys conducted in forty-two counties by teams working for the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC). Similarly, he explores disparate barn and outbuilding types, including the distinctive cantilever barns that are found predominantly in East Tennessee. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging anecdotes that convey just what it is like to conduct field research in remote rural areas. Rehder also describes in detail a number of the state’s exceptional log places, among them Wynnewood, an enormous structure in Middle Tennessee which dates back to the early nineteenth century and which suffered severe tornado damage in 2008.
As the author notes, many of the buildings originally identified in the THC investigations have now vanished completely while others are in serious disrepair. Thus, this book not only offers an instructive and delightful look at a key part of Tennessee’s heritage but also makes an eloquent plea for its preservation.
Until his death in 2011, JOHN B. REHDER was a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He first joined the UT faculty in 1967. He was the author of Appalachian Folkways, which won the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award in 2004, and Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape, which won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2000 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.
Allen’s refreshing perspective illuminates the vibrant vernacular architecture of Jefferson County, connecting the housing of this area to the rich history of the Shenandoah Valley. Varying features of house siting, plan types, construction techniques, building materials, outbuildings, and exterior and interior detailing illustrate the blending of German, Scots-Irish, English, and African cultures into a distinct, regional style.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press