Reviewed by: Chardak Between Heaven and Earth: Tracing Vernacular Space in Balkan Architecture by Judith Bing Serena Acciai Judith Bing Chardak Between Heaven and Earth: Tracing Vernacular Space in Balkan Architecture Maine, USA: Procyon Lotor Press, 2018. 303 Pp. ISBN 978-1-73321994-1-5 The research carried out by Professor Judith Bing, together with Professor J. Brooke Harrington, has evolved over thirty years. In its opening passages, it recalls Nicolas Bouvier’s discovery of the Balkan world, which stretched from Belgrade to the idyllic Šumadija farmland. There, Bing first encountered the subject she would delve into for the following decades. In one sense, it is a travel book, much like Le Corbusier’s experience recorded in Le Voyage d’Orient in 1911. Bing unearths the poetic meaning of the vernacular element chardak, a wooden veranda, and “an element that could expose and join together a region of rich cultural complexity”. The book has a poetic levity as it describes how the same architectural element found its way into different cultures over a vast geographical area. It also bridges the controversial, and, at times tragic, history of the last 30 years in the Balkans. The author highlights the ancient iconographic sources of this kind of space and also explores the etymological origin of the word chardak. Her research is ample and even takes into consideration the military chardak type constructed along the “wooden line” on the Sava River as a frontier between the warring Hapsburgs and Ottomans. Particularly fruitful was Bing’s reading of the Romanian chardak tradition, which influenced greatly Le Corbusier’s building and theoretical expertise, and was described in the famous juvenile trip recorded in his book. Herein lies the link between Le Corbusier’s five points for architecture and his early encounter with the Ottoman-Balkan housing tradition. The Swiss master was one [End Page 197] of the first XX century architects to recognize the similarities between this historic house type and the modern house: a similarity which lies in the up-to-date relationship between the ground plan and the elevation, in the independence of the inner disposition of a room from the wall structure, in the built-in furniture, in the architecture of the outer rooms, in the plastic modeling of the house above its supporting walls, in the harmony of architecture with nature, and in the desire for a view. She deals with the multicultural complexity of the region by showing some shared aspects of Balkan cultures. Literature, material culture, history, many good sketches, and architectural surveys are the tools that Bing employs for her fascinating tale. These same documents are also the corpus of the marvelous Balkan Vernacular Architecture portal edited by Bing and Harrington (available at http://www.balkanarchitecture.org/). The site is well worth visiting as their life-long research is an extraordinary tool for any scholars wanting to explore the rich vernacular housing heritage in these lands. The book is a thesaurus of the terminology used to indicate this type of space prevalent in the Balkan lands, from Croatia in the west West to Anatolia in the East. It gathers many case-studies based on literature by the most influential scholars of the region. She particularly regards Dusan Gabrijian’s studies on Bosnian and Macedonian chardak because they are, after Le Corbusier, a fundamental step for the work in this field and one of the best typological analyses carried out in (the former) Yugoslavia by a modern architect. Any formal and functional variant of this vernacular wooden veranda is contemplated and explained by Bing in relationship to the domestic culture of the land under study. The reader travels with her on this journey from West to East and throughout time, until reaching Istanbul, where the chardak is usually called kiosk and is a variant of the main gathering space called sofa. The section dedicated to the use of the chardak in monasteries starts from the same consideration made by the Balkan architect Aleksandar Deroko about the persistence of some characteristic vernacular elements in monastic complexes. Over time, monasteries’ housing complexes have often been rebuilt, but always in the same manner, and have permitted the conservation of this building type...