VAF Chicago 2015

The Vernacular Architecture Forum's 35th Annual Conference heads to Chicago from June 3-7, 2015.

Our theme is "Out of the Loop," and we will venture beyond downtown to explore Chicago's bungalows and bascule bridges, settlement houses and slaughterhouses, corner bars and commercial centers, factories and fencing all beckon analysis.  We invite you to take a closer look at the city's building forms to see the effects of constant change and neighborhoods relentlessly in flux.  The influences of immigration, segregation, gentrification, and de-industrialization are readily apparent on the city's landscape.

Please visit our VAF Chicago 2015 Conference Website for more details on the dramatic venues, off-the-beaten path tours, and engaging lectures in store.

On Saturday, June 6, the conference will include a day of paper sessions.  The Call for Papers is available on the conference website and also in included here in the newsletter.

Roosevelt University will serve as conference headquarters, and they are offering affordable private dorm rooms to keep costs surprisingly affordable.

We look forward to seeing you in Chicago in June 2015!

Call for Nominations: Serve on the VAF BOARD

VAF’s nominating committee is seeking nominations for individuals to serve as members of the Board of Directors and as officers for the organization.

 Board members serve three-year terms. Individuals nominated this year will begin service in May 2015.

The Vernacular Architecture Forum is administered by an all-volunteer Board of Directors made up of dedicated professionals and scholars from diverse disciplines who live and work in all parts of the United States and Canada. The Board meets twice a year, once during our annual conference in the Spring and again in the Fall. Each Board member is expected to attend Board meetings and participate in committee work.

Nominations for Board membership should be sent to Claire Dempsey at nominations@vafweb.org. Please include a short letter (not exceeding one page) indicating the qualifications of the person being nominated and a short vita/resume (not exceeding two pages). Self-nominations are encouraged. Nominees must be members of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. A list of VAF Board members and officers (both current and recent past) is available here.

Deadline for Nominations:  August 1, 2014.

—Claire Dempsey, 1st Vice President

Save the Date – 2014 National Preservation Conference

Attend PastForward, the premier educational and networking event for those passionate about saving places, in Savannah, GA, Nov. 11-14. Learning Labs, Field Studies, Intensive Workshops and Preservation Studio provide participants with the tools and resources to improve their own communities. In 2014, a virtual audience will join Savannah attendees with the live-streaming of TrustLive, presentations exploring the intersection of preservation and the world at large. 

Visit www.preservationnation.org/conference to sign up for updates and for more conference details.

Early New England House Joinery Seminar at Historic Deerfield

Historic Deerfield will offer a one-day program focused on Early New England House Joinery on Saturday, July 12, 2014. The day will explore the work of 18th century joiners, including their workshops, tools and the trade from framing to finish. Participants will also have an opportunity to see examples of early architectural fragments in Historic Deerfield’s collection not usually on view.

This first annual program focused on the building trades will feature presentations by James L. Garvin, J. Ritchie Garrison, Jack Sobon, Ted Ingraham, and Bill Flynt.

For more information and to register, please visit Historic Deerfield’s website at

www.historic-deerfield.org

VAF Creates the Orlando Ridout V Fieldwork Fellowship

To honor founding member Orlando Ridout V, who died in 2013, the Vernacular Architecture Forum has established a fieldwork fellowship in his name. Orlando, a mentor to so many of us, asked that donations in his memory be made to the VAF to support students in fieldwork. To fulfill his request, the Orlando Ridout V Fieldwork Fellowship will support students in their field-based research and in their efforts to learn fieldwork through apprenticeships and field schools.

Orlando also encouraged post-graduate training and fieldwork projects as continuing development for professionals in the field. To honor his own emphasis on field work and his support of continuing learning in the field, the fellowship will also be available to professionals engaged in continuing education and training projects. The Fieldwork Grants Committee appointed each year by the VAF President will administer the program.

The new Fellowship combines the former Fund for Fieldwork, established by a generous gift from long-time VAF member Thomas Carter in 2012, and contributions to the Ridout memorial fund into this newly-named fellowship program.  

Guidelines:

The guidelines for the Orlando Ridout V Fieldwork Fellowship allow all VAF members, as well as students participating in field school programs to apply to the VAF Fieldwork Grants Committee for monies to support their field-based projects and training opportunities.

Applicants to the Ridout Fieldwork Fellowship should outline their projects or training programs in a letter of intent that includes a description of the activity and a short budget to explain how the funds will be expended. All applicants need to submit a letter of support, preferably from a faculty member, field school instructor, or workplace supervisor. The two letters should be submitted to the Chair of the Fieldwork Grants Committee for consideration; applications are accepted and acted on throughout the year with no formal deadline.

The Fellowship awardees will report to the Fieldwork Grants Committee at the end of their grant period (1 year maximum). The report will take the form of a one-page summary letter describing what he or she accomplished during the fellowship.   

The VAF Fieldwork Grants Committee reserves the right to post information about the awardee and their project in VAF’s publications or website.

Awards: Each fellowship provides up to $500 per awardee.

The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Urban Field School

by Arijit Sen, Associate Professor of Architecture; senA@uwm.edu

Author Dr. Arijit Sen with students at BLC field school

Landscape - the scene - undeniably offers itself to us as a transparent totality, coherent and final. Compared to the ephemeral nature of human consciousness and social action, the continuity of the material world and its apparent unchangeability seem to promise constant or certain meaning. Yet the stability of physical form falsely certify stability of meaning...^[i]

In 1977, Dell Upton urged us to explore the seen as well as the unseen aspects of the landscape and understand the relative roles of “vision and the intangible in the interpretation of landscape.” Later developed in the work of scholars such as Pocius (1991), Williams and Young (1995), Herman (2005) and Nardone (2003) a method of analysis has emerged that intertwines interpretations of the material, experiential, ephemeral and the affective characteristics of the built environment.^[ii]

The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures summer field school at Milwaukee and Madison borrows from multiple disciplinary sources to expand and explore ways to study the built environment. We include scholarship of historic preservation and material culture emerging from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, oral history methods and digital humanities scholarship developed by Randforce Associates LLC[iii] and myriad new media practices in order to rethink, document and interpret the material world. The five-week field school integrates a rigorous analysis of sensate information collected through architectural field studies, sound recordings, oral history interviews, storytelling workshops and digital media. Students make their own portable sound recorders in order to capture ambient sound. Soundscapes allows us to consider an aspect of the sensate material world that visual analysis misses. Field school projects demonstrate how multi-sensory fieldwork methods can render an otherwise invisible world of power, labor, and identity.[iv] Our projects seeks to employ the enduring creativity of storytelling, the power of digital humanities, and depth of local knowledge in order to galvanize Milwaukee residents to talk about their built environment as repositories of community memory, spaces of caring and markers of civic pride. 

The five-week course calendar covers a broad array of academic skills. Workshops during Week 1 focus on photography, measured drawings, documentation and technical drawings. Week 2 workshops focus on sounds, oral history interviewing and digital ethnography. Week 3 is centered on mapping and archival research. Weeks 4 and 5 are devoted to producing final reports, website, exhibits and multi-media documentaries. Nationally recognized faculty directing portions of this school include Jeffrey E. Klee, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Anna Andrzejewski, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michael H. Frisch, Professor and Senior Research Scholar, University at Buffalo, Judith Weiland, Randforce Assoc., Erin Dorbin, photographer, documentarian and historian from Hey Man, Cool! Digital History Productions, Jasmine Alinder, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Michael Gordon, Associate Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Steve Wetzel, Assistant Professor of Film, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Arijit Sen, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and Matthew Jarosz, Associate Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Historic Preservation, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The field school integrates traditional hand drawing documentary methods with digital tools.  While on-site documentation of buildings are hand-drafted by students, these documents are then converted into CAD files. At the end of each day, students add metadata to their digital photographs, CAD files, and other digital images before storing them in a password protected Flikr® site.  All interview data are stored as .wav files in Soundcloud®. Using a map-application we organize all visual, aural, archival, and cartographic information by geocodes (latitude and longitude information) and the data is then accessed using google maps. That means that as soon as a student clicks on any predetermined study location on google maps, they have instant access to all images, sounds, and other forms of digitized data on that site. This “digital desktop” allows everyone to access collected information on any study location at any time. This reduces the need to organize paper data in files and helps us work around the limited desk and countertop spaces available in the field. It also allows collaborative work afterhours, when students work on their projects remotely from home. You may see partial use of the map interface app here: http://blcfieldschool.weebly.com/main-street.html. (Partial because, raw data access is limited to public due to privacy reasons. So you will not see interview and photograph archives on the public site).

A central concern in the use of digital tools is the issue of privacy. Many programs like Panoramio® (www.panoramio.com) make all data public over google maps; a common mistake that the researcher misses (and we did too initially). Figuring out the privacy and data use policy of each application and program may be a wise thing to do.

The field school received a national award from the American Association for State and Local History and was showcased in the American Folklore Association’s 2013 annual meeting. We thank the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Cultures and Communities Program, the Provost’s Office, the Department of Architecture and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for their financial support. 

The Field School is admitting students for the Summer 2014 field school at Washington Park and more information is available at www.TheFieldSchool.weebly.com or by contacting me at senA@uwm.edu

Check us out at www.TheFieldSchool.weebly.com

---

^[i] Dell Upton, “Seen, Unseen and Scene,” in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, edited by Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 174-79.

[ii] Gerald L. Pocius, A Place to Belong: Community Order and Everyday Space in Calvert, Newfoundland, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

Michael Ann Williams and M. Jane Young, “Grammar, Codes, and Performance: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Models in the Study of Vernacular Architecture,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 5: Gender, Class, and Shelter (1995), 40-51.

Jennifer Nardone, “Roomful of Blues: Jukejoints and the Cultural Landscape of the Mississippi Delta,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 9: Constructing Image, Identity, and Place (2003), 166-175.

Bernard L. Herman,  “Time and Performance: Folk Houses in Delaware,” American Material Culture and Folklife: A Prologue and Dialogue, edited by S. Bronner (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 155-175.

[iii] http://www.randforce.com; The website explains, “Randforce Associates LLC is led by Michael Frisch, Principal, Professor of American Studies and History/ Senior Research Scholar at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He established Randforce in the University at Buffalo's Technology Incubator to advance oral history scholarship and public practice in the digital age. … He is joined by Douglas Lambert, Director of Technology, with a background in engineering and information cartography, and Judith Weiland, Director of Operations, with expertise in institutional projects, local history, media production, and technology. Melanie Morse, whose background is in education and video production, and Arnold Alt, editor and performing artist, are Associates. Since its founding in 2002, Randforce has been using new digital media tools to "put the oral back in Oral History"--to mobilize the power of voice and image for professional, community, institutional, family, and research applications.”

[iv] see http://blcfieldschool.weebly.com/institutions.html

See also, the FORUM section in the 2012 and 2013 field school websites at www.seeschool.weebly.com.

Endowment Grows Thanks to Anonymous Donor

by Don Linebaugh, VAF Treasurer

Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, the VAF endowment just grew by another $100,000! It appears that this is the same donor who contributed $100,000 in each of the last 3 years. In which case, the total donation is now at $400,000. Thanks to these donations along with the generosity of all of our members who have contributed to the endowment via the 30^th anniversary campaign, the Fund for Fieldwork, or special annual gifts, our endowment now stands at over $550,000! This endowment corpus is invested in a variety of funds and the investment income is starting to make a major contribution to the VAF’s annual budget, allowing us to fund fellowships, scholarships, etc.  As VAF President Chris Wilson wrote in his thank you to the donor, “a substantial contribution to a permanent endowment such as yours plays a particularly important role in the life, stability and continuity of an organization. A dependable on-going source of income allows an organization to weather rocky time, to augment its current programs and to take on new initiatives.” A great thanks is in order for this wonderful donation to support the organization that we all cherish so very much.

Annual Conference Begins May 7

Excitement and email traffic among VAF members builds as the annual conference, May 7-11, nears. In addition to the traditional opening reception on Wednesday evening, the papers day and a banquet followed by dancing to a local band, tours will explore “Down Jersey: From Bayshore to Seashore.” Weather is forecast in the mid-60s with a chance of rain some days.  The Thursday and Friday tours are closed, but registration remains open for the Saturday paper sessions. 

For more information please use these links:

Conference Website

Seaview Conference Hotel

Paper Sessions Program

Treasurer Stepping Down

Photo Courtesy of Don Linebaugh

Don Linebaugh, VAF Treasurer the past ten years, is stepping down. Long-time Director of Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland, Linebaugh will be taking on the additional role of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which will prevent him from continuing his VAF work.

            

“Dennis Domer, the previous Treasurer, got me to say yes when I had had one too many beers,” remembers Linebaugh. “I continued because I enjoyed getting to meet great folks who have become close friends and colleagues over the years. I also liked the sense that I was contributing to an important organization that is close to my heart.”

            

“Don has not only given many years of valuable serve to the organization,” responded Chris Wilson to the news, “but also was an indispensable advisor to me as I got up to speed as VAF President this past year. He and Secretary Gabrielle Lanier have provided similar continuity for a succession of new presidents.”

           

The Nominating Committee, chaired by VP Claire Dempsey, is working to identify a replacement. Basic financial and accounting experience is sufficient for the position, although the establishment of a VAF endowment also makes investment experience desirable. The job requires about a day a month of work, then multiple days before each of two board meetings, and around tax and audit times.

             

Please contact Claire Dempsey, dempseyc@bu.edu, if you are interested in the job, or if you know of someone who might have the necessary experience . . . and also might like to share a glass of Leinenkugel’s.