Vernacular Materials Research Articles

A Different Aspect of the Architectural Education

Vernacular materials and construction techniques are very important in architecture. However, information about vernacular architecture education is generally not given to the student in architectural education. Conservation of the vernacular texture in the rural cultural landscape is important issue in the last years. It has vernacular architectural property 90% of the world's structuring. It is a living area of 800 million people. However, vernacular architecture researches as important as urbanely and structuring researches. In addition, a questionnaire is developed to architectural students who from different countries and levels about willingness to learn vernacular architecture.

Environmental Ethics and Sustainability in Housing Design

House was probably the first freestanding building of the prehistoric humans. This field of architectural design and construction remains of crucial importance from the social, cultural, economic, and environmental points of view until today. Take, for example, the influence of housing construction sector on the environment due to the development of industrial construction technologies, and the increasing world’s population, or the emotional, psychological impact of the closest everyday built environment on the human development. Considering this, we have decided to analyze the links between types, forms, and features of housing and ethical approaches towards the environment. This research has a historical dimension: we have analyzed the importance of different land management (landscape architecture) criteria in housing development in different historical periods and tried to identify the genesis of and conditions for the environmental concern in this field. The analysis of challenges of the present situation in the housing sector development has allowed us to identify main conditions of uncertainty, constant change, and diversity of possible architectural, technological, and ethical approaches that shape this field today. We propose that housing solutions may vary from low-tech buildings made with vernacular technologies and local building materials to ecological high-tech buildings still maintaining the environmentally friendly approach; however, taking into account the constant housing shortages and the increasing world’s population, the sector of affordable sustainable housing should be given a priority. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.62.4.2358

<em>Viewpoint:</em> Self-Construction, Vernacular Materials, and Democracy Building: Los Bestias, Lima, 1984–1987

<em>Viewpoint:</em> Self-Construction, Vernacular Materials, and Democracy Building: Los Bestias, Lima, 1984–1987

Protest Song and Verse in Cape Breton Island

On Cape Breton Island, where coal mining and steel making were once an essential part of the region’s culture and economy, protest song and verse are found in abundance. This article explores some previously unexamined protest songs and verses of Cape Breton Island. The body of songs is culled largely from theMaritime Labour Herald, a newspaper of the 1920s that included both locally and internationally composed works. Some earlier folklorists ignored protest songs because their paradigms did not permit them to view these forms as authentic cultural expressions. Their approach raises complex issues of how authenticity is constructed and by whom. My intent is to show that a well-developed protest song tradition was alive and well, and played an important role in the labour struggles of the 1920s. Indeed, these vernacular materials were used for solidarity during times of upheaval and change in Cape Breton Island.

4. A PRAGMATIC RESPONSE1

ABSTRACTIn the years since its twin publication in 2001 (Indian edition) and 2003 (U.S. edition), Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 (and thus in the centuries before the consolidation of colonial rule) possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or śāstric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist (and Barthesian) language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized (and impoverished) view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule.

When West Looks East: Some Recent Studies in Early Modern Muslim Cultures

NANCY BISAHA, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 320 pp. $59.95.JONATHAN BURTON, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. Newark, DE: Delaware University Press, 2005. 319 pp. $55.00.CAROLINE FINKEL, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923. London: John Murray, 2005. 704 pp. £30.00.L. P. HARVEY, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 462 pp. $40.00.WALTER G. ANDREWS AND MEHMET KALPAKLI, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 440 pp. $94.95Few will need reminding how greatly the world has changed since 1937 when Samuel C. Chew's study, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance, first appeared, priced at $5. Yet in terms of Anglophone scholarship on Chew's general topic, any impartial jury would surely conclude that a great deal of work is still waiting to be done. Following Chew's comprehensive survey of how English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the peoples and cultures of the Ottoman and Persian empires, Clarence Dana Rouillard in 1940, Dorothy Vaughan in 1954, and Robert Schwoebel in 1969 produced general accounts of French, Italian, and German writings about the so-called Turks. These scholarly surveys remain indispensable for their broad coverage of the contemporary vernacular materials. The limitation of this first wave of pioneering surveys-and it is one that continues to reappear in studies being produced in the field today- might be their one-way approach, for none of these scholars knew or cared very much about the peoples that their European sources purported to represent (other than what they could deduce from those very sources.) In all fairness to Chew, Rouillard, Vaughn, and Schwoebel, none ever claimed that they were doing more than investigate the ways that early European writers regarded those they called Turks and the world of Islam they inhabited, but their indifference to who and what was being represented marks a cautionary absence. For the result of this one-way analysis is that misinformation all too often reappears as fact, past prejudices resurface as reliable judgments, and before very long fantasy returns as history. All four scholars, for instance, recycled the early modern European usage of Turk as synonymous with both -regardless of origin-and with Ottoman, while to the Ottomans themselves, the term referred disparagingly to the Anatolian peasantry over whom they had come to rule.1 Many continue in this habit, one rendered even more confusing and potentially misleading since the Turkish Republic declared all inhabitants to be Turks in order to erase Kurds, Armenians, Laz, and other ethnicities from the national landscape.Examining how and why Europeans represented the Muslim world during our period is arguably the most exciting and certainly the most important scholarly endeavor on the agenda of early modern cultural studies today. Understanding what those representations or images meant then, and might mean today, however, necessarily requires accurate knowledge of the peoples and cultures being described. We must also grasp how, and to what ends, those early images distorted and misrepresented the populous and complex world that they claimed to be portraying, and we must be able to recognize when and why they were accurate. How did the early modern Muslim world record and represent itself?The immediate challenge facing scholars who would avoid the one-way method arises from two distinct directions. The first is the enormous difficulty of access to, and interpretation of, sources in languages such as Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, and the various Arabic dialects-a difficulty greatly compounded by the unfamiliar nature of such archives as do exist and are available. …

Linguists, Literacy, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

In 1970, the Pacific and Asian Linguistics Institute of the University of Hawai'i launched a fourteen-year effort designed to document and support the languages of Micronesia. The first goal of this undertaking was to prepare grammars and dictionaries of these languages, the second was to train Micronesian educators in the principles and practices of bilingual education, and the third was to develop vernacular materials for use in Micronesian schools. This paper assesses the consequences of those endeavors, both intended and unintended. In particular, it focuses upon the concept of "standard orthography" and how that notion, in Micronesia and elsewhere, has sometimes impeded the development of vernacular language literacy. More contentiously, it considers the possibility that the conventional goals of vernacular literacy programs might, in some circumstances, be counter-productive; that is, rather than enhancing linguistic vitality, they might, in fact, diminish it.

Regulating the Vernacular: The Impact of Building Regulations in the Eighteenth-century Highland Planned Village

The planned villages founded by the British Fisheries Society in the late eighteenth century were among the earliest in the Highlands of Scotland. The Society's villages of Ullapool and Tobermory established a planning and architectural template for successive Highland planned villages, based upon classical architectural principles of regularity and order. Within each village, the quality and design of the settlers' self-built dwellings was checked by the introduction of building regulations, devised to eradicate vernacular materials and construction and establish ‘improved’ practices in terms of both materials and design. The extraordinary effectiveness of this regulation permanently altered the nature of Highland domestic architecture.

Library provision to the Tamil community in Singapore

Library provision to the Tamil community in Singapore

Religion and Canon Formation: Buddhism, Vernacular Literature, and the Case of Jin Shengtan (1608-1661)

of power, privilege, and wealth. Such had clearly been the case with the examination curriculum during late imperial times in China. Although the core texts of the curricular canon did not change during this time, a significant number of literati, including the key figure of the current essay, Jin Shengtan ~ ~ ~, entertained doubts as to whether the officially sanctioned genres and styles were the sole or most appropriate for the selection of worthy candidates. The collapse of the established political order in 1911 took such questioning to new levels. Intellectuals and scholars debated over whether textual labor mattered, and if so, which texts furthered political stability or reform. In the wake of Liang Qichao's ~~m claim that fiction could empower the masses, reform-minded critics favored broad-based linguistic and symbolic access. As a result, after having previously been consigned to the margins of literary respectability, traditional vernacular forms such as fiction [xiaoshuo /J\~] and short and long operatic drama [zaju ~ iJU; chuanqi l' ~] were suddenly catapulted into prominence. The precise mechanics and effects of canonization, however, even as they pertain to well-known works such as the novel Shuihu zhuan 7J,im:1$ [Water Margin] or the romantic comedy Xixiang ji gs a§ ~c. [The Story of the Western Wing], remain to be investigated. The ubiquity of religious elements in vernacular materials put reformers in a quandary. They were aware that vernacular novels and dramas were widely read among non-elite

Self-help Housing in the Weimar Republic: The Work of Ernst May

This paper examines the work of the architect Ernst May with regard to self-build housing initiatives during the Weimar Republic (1918-33).Among the many attempts to assuage the housing shortage in early 20th-century Germany, self-build housing initiatives were the last resort, emerging only in times of dire economic crisis. During the hyper-inflation years from 1919 through to 1924 and then with the onset of the world depression in 1930, the state encouraged housing authorities to develop self-build strategies, along with experimentsin 'recovered' vernacular building materials and techniques. This paper examines the work of the architect Ernst May with regard to these initiatives. May's career is unique in its productivity,in the inventiveness of his strategies and the relentlessness with which he pursued economising measures. At the same time, it is typical in the types of self-build experiments he developed to deal with the crisis. Further, the paper traces through May's career the formative impact of the political and social context that shaped and delimited the building programme, its meaning and ultimate utility to society self-build programmes in the Weimar years.

The Cobb at Lyme Regis, Dorset.<BR> A Sideways Look at Vernacular Materials and Techniques

The Cobb at Lyme Regis, Dorset.<BR> A Sideways Look at Vernacular Materials and Techniques

The Cobb at Lyme Regis, Dorset. A Sideways Look at Vernacular Materials and Techniques

AbstractAnyone researching the history of traditional building materials and techniques is bound to arrive, sooner or later, at the question of when (if ever) they cease to be vernacular and, following on from this, a return to the knotty problem of what defines 'vernacular'. Thatching, for example, is claimed in some quarters to be the last living vernacular building trade, although the water reed used for thatch today may be imported from China, the craftsman schooled through a national training scheme and the transaction with the client may involve selling insurance as well as re-roofing. Traditional Devon mud construction can be found in the unvernacular context of 1790s symmetrical sash-windowed houses designed to attract very polite company to the south coast resort of Exmouth and pairs of Victorian villas on the outskirts of Exeter. It would not be difficult to argue that the inter-war self-built plotlands developments, using corrugated iron or old railway carriages, produced perfectly vernacular b...

A Fifteenth-Century Confession Sermon on “Unkyndeness” (CUL MS Gg 6.26) and Its Literary Parallels and Parodies

The later Middle Ages was the high moment of the popular, vernacular sermon, yet relatively few examples of extraliturgical sermons can be recovered from the written evidence. Latin collections of sermon cycles—those preached in the context of the mass liturgy and saints' days—were produced in large quantities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, functioning more or less directly as exemplars for the actual sermons that would then be preached in the local vernaculars of western Europe. In England, such Latin sermon collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often include some vernacular materials, especially lyrics, and many treatises are extant that provide priests with the materials to make sermons on a wide range of topics and for an indefinite number of occasions. Of the relatively few English sermons and sermon collections extant from the period, however, by far the greatest number are, like the Latin cycles, those keyed to the cycle of Sunday texts and to saints' days, whose very formality militates against a sense of them as representative of the most common forms and themes of vernacular sermons, particularly those earnestly preached on the occasions like that which Chaucer satirically describes in theSummoner's Tale, when “ther wente a lymytour aboute / To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doubte” (3.1711–1712). With so few examples of non-liturgical sermons extant, our sense both of the reality and of the satire is incomplete.

Using the OCLC CJK350 at the University of Oregon Library

This article describes the use of the OCLC CJK350 cataloging system at the University of Oregon Library beginning with the field test in 1986. Hardware, software, catalog maintenance and workflow are discussed. Suggestions are made for other libraries considering automation of the cataloging of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean vernacular materials.

The Development of CJK Bibliographic Databases in North America and East Asia

The successful development of computer technology for automating Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CIK) vernacular scripts and the completion of the RLIN CJK system in 1983 marked the beginning of online operations of East Asian libraries in North America and helped keep them in the mainstream of library automation. The RLIN CIK system and the subsequently developed OCLC CJK system are building CJK bibliographic databases which have made East Asian cooperative cataloging and resources sharing a true reality. The emergence, features, current conditions, and future plans of the two CJK systems are discussed. So are the automated programs of national libraries in East Asia in terms of their building national databases for vernacular materials and designing and producing national MARCs for exchange of bibliographic information among libraries. The outlook of cooperation between the CJK systems and international exchange of CJK bibliographic information is also examined.

South Asia in Vernacular Publications: Modern Indian-Language Collections in the British Museum and the India Office Library, London

The discovery and use of vernacular sources is a critical task for South Asia specialists. Area centers have produced scholars who are dissatisfied with English books and records as the primary source for understanding South Asia. The development of vernacular materials, however, has not kept pace with the new interests and attainment of language skills. Although individuals have unearthed caches of vernacular documents, no systematic effort is being made to publicize existing collections or to locate additional ones.