Announcing Buildings & Landscapes

After much conversation over a two-year period, the Board of Directors of the Vernacular Architecture Forum voted in November 2006 to change the name of the VAF's journal, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, to Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

In many ways Buildings & Landscapes represents what we see as a shift of vernacular architecture studies from the margins of scholarship on the built environment to its center. Through VAF’s work over the last decades, many scholars in the field have come to recognize that the built environment that is experienced by most people, every day, is the vernacular. Yet, to a large extent, the scholarship on vernacular architecture is still seen by many scholars who are outside the field as relating to curiosities that have little relevance to the traditional concerns of historians or to practice in the contemporary world. The term vernacular architecture itself implies that scholarship on the subject is a subset of something larger. Our view is just the reverse. Our goal is to promote the study of the everyday built environment through the close examination of real buildings and landscapes to examine the ways such places shape the human experience. What this journal aims to explore is central and inclusive, and it may be that some "traditional" scholarship is in fact a subset of our concerns. Including the word landscapes in the title represents a recognition that buildings—and human habitat in general—do not exist in isolation, but in context. These contexts connect buildings to place, another increasingly significant word in recent scholarship. Landscapes are not just physical buildings gathered together in a place; they are also buildings that realize innumerable human relationships.

PVA has been ably led by a long series of editors, beginning with Camille Wells and most recently, Pam Simpson and Jan Jennings. Buildings & Landscapes will continue the volume numbering of PVA, but most importantly will continue the tradition, set by those earlier editors, of publication of the best peer-reviewed scholarship in the field. We see this change as a natural evolution as the VAF is itself evolving, and we look forward to the continuation of Buildings & Landscapes as a respected journal that is inclusive of diverse methodologies, historical periods, geographic areas and types of buildings and landscapes.