Search Results (5)

This paper investigates the cultural landscapes established by nineteenth-century German immigrants in South Australia and the southern Riverina of New South Wales, with particular attention to settlement patterns, architectural traditions and toponymic transformation. German immigration to Australia, though numerically modest compared to the Americas, significantly shaped local communities, especially due to religious cohesion among Lutheran migrants. These settlers established distinct, enduring rural enclaves characterized by linguistic, religious and architectural continuity. The paper examines three manifestations of these cultural landscapes. A rich toponymic landscape was created by imposing on natural landscape features and newly founded settlements the names of the communities from which the German settlers originated. It discusses the erosion of German toponyms under wartime nationalist pressures, the subsequent partial reinstatement and the implications for cultural memory. The study traces the second manifestation of a cultural landscapes in the form of nucleated villages such as Hahndorf, Bethanien and Lobethal, which often followed the Hufendorf or Straßendorf layout, integrating Silesian land-use principles into the Australian context. Intensification of land use through housing subdivisions in two communities as well as agricultural intensification through broad acre farming has led to the fragmentation (town) and obliteration (rural) of the uniquely German form of land use. The final focus is the material expression of cultural identity through architecture, particularly the use of traditional Fachwerk (half-timbered) construction and adaptations such as pug-and-pine walling suited to local materials and climate. The paper examines domestic forms, including the distinctive black kitchen, and highlights how environmental and functional adaptation reshaped German building traditions in the antipodes. Despite a conservation movement and despite considerable documentation research in the late twentieth century, the paper shows that most German rural structures remain unlisted and vulnerable. Heritage neglect, rural depopulation, economic rationalization, lack of commercial relevance and local government policy have accelerated the decline of many of these vernacular buildings. The study concludes by problematizing the sustainability of conserving German Australian rural heritage in the face of regulatory, economic and demographic pressures. With its layering of intangible (toponymic), structural (buildings) and land use (cadastral) features, the examination of the cultural landscape established by nineteenth-century German immigrants adds to the body of literature on immigrant communities, settler colonialism and landscape research. Full article

Interest in vernacular architecture and vernacular buildings has grown significantly during recent decades. Nevertheless, despite the number of important studies that have been proliferating, there is a lot of material in various geographic localities that still requires further scrutiny. Vernacular architecture in the post-Soviet/post-communist space is one such area. In the Lithuanian context, vernacular buildings have been long neglected and marginalized in research projects, even though traditional Lithuanian architecture (previously often referred to as “folk architecture”) has been quite well-researched and remains an object of interest. There are, however, certain particular forms of contemporary vernacular architecture—urban and suburban in particular—that have rarely been scrutinized for numerous reasons. The former suburb of Šnipiškės, now being converted into a new center of the city of Vilnius, is an area where modern housing and office towers co-exist with older vernacular buildings. Having been constructed in different historical periods and socio-cultural contexts, they represent the features of local vernacular architecture as well as certain relations to rural vernacular architecture. As an urban quarter, Šnipiškės is comparable to the kampungs (or urban villages) that exist in Indonesia and some other countries. The peculiarities of vernacular buildings in Šnipiškės are discussed in this article. The other type of vernacular discussed is the suburban “collective garden” house, largely constructed during the Soviet period when city-dwellers were allowed to maintain small pieces of land for individual semi-urban farming and erect simple structures on their sites. After the fall of the regime, this type of house underwent numerous changes: some of them, designed with the help of architectural professionals, were eventually reshaped and reconstructed by their owners according to the “Do it yourself” principle. Both types represent a culture of contemporary urban and semi-urban vernacular architecture. As cities in the eastern part of Europe, including Lithuania, are undergoing rapid and often heedless transformations, understanding the value of vernacular buildings and preserving some legacy of surviving vernacular structures of various types is culturally important. Full article

The vernacular architecture in many regions in Eastern Austria was characterized by the use of unfired clay, at least until the 19th century, and in some areas until the 20th century. Farmhouses and associated farm buildings, such as storage buildings or press houses for the production of wine and cider, were erected using different earth construction techniques. The study area stretches from the Weinviertel, a region located in the province of Lower Austria in the north-east of Austria, to the Burgenland, a region located in the south-east of Austria, which belonged to Western Hungary until 1921. From a geological point of view, in the east of Austria—in the Vienna Basin and the Molasse Zone—huge areas of Tertiary clay are covered with loess deposits, which is the best-known basic material used in local earth-building traditions. A core question in the research on vernacular earthen heritage focuses on the impact of the geological conditions in Eastern Austria on the local earth-building techniques. The mineralogical composition of the different clays had an impact on the local building techniques. From a material-culture point of view, research on the relationship between the mineralogical properties of clay resources and local building techniques sheds light on the factors which influenced the evolution of certain vernacular building features. Tertiary clays and loess from the Pleistocene favoured the making of earth lumps, cob walls and adobe bricks over the whole Eastern Austrian region. Contrarily, regions in Burgenland with a high amount of gravel preferred, by tradition, to make walls by ramming. The clay mineral smectite acts as a binding agent in earth-building techniques over the whole investigated region—Weinviertel, Burgenland and Western Hungary. Full article

Over the centuries, farm buildings, which accompany the development of agriculture, have played an important role in defining spatial and environmental planning. In some European countries in particular, these rural structures have been built based on traditional agricultural needs and typical land characteristics. Considering the land abandonment that has occurred over the last five decades, with farmers moving to more comfortable residences in neighboring urban settlements, historical farm buildings have often been abandoned, thus causing a leakage of the historical-cultural heritage of the rural landscape. Nowadays, open data and geographic technologies together with advanced technological tools allow us to gather multidisciplinary information about the specific characteristics of each farm building, thus improving our knowledge. This information can greatly support the protection of those buildings and landscapes that have high cultural and naturalistic value. In this paper, the potential of Geographic Information Systems to catalogue the farm buildings of the Basilicata region (Southern Italy) is explored. The analysis of these buildings, traditionally known as masserie, integrates some typical aspects of landscape studies, paving the way for sustainable management of the important cultural heritage represented by vernacular farm buildings and the rural landscape. Full article

The industrialization after World War II marked a severe discontinuity between rural heritage and contemporary farm buildings. Rural landscapes have thus become more and more uniform; historical buildings are often abandoned and degraded, while contemporary buildings are often disconnected from their surrounding environment. Besides aiming to protect and restore rural heritage—more and more acknowledged as a common good contributing to societal identity—attention should be paid to increasing the quality of new buildings, a crucial issue to improve landscape quality in everyday landscape contexts. Based on a series of previous studies carried out to develop and test a robust methodology allowing the analysis of the main formal features of rural buildings, organized in a comprehensive framework known as the FarmBuiLD model (Farm Building Landscape Design), this study aims to perform an integrated and compared analysis of sets of traditional and contemporary rural buildings through experimental trials on an Italian case study. In particular, the study focuses on defining and measuring indexes allowing the quantification of the level of consistency of contemporary buildings with the traditional typologies. A contemporary farm building is evaluated based on the distance of each of its formal features from those which proved to be representative of the corresponding traditional building type, evaluated through a cluster analysis of the typological characters of traditional buildings in the study area. The results showed that different degrees of dissonance can be detected. Similarities have been found, in particular with respect to the shape of buildings and their closure with regards to landscape. The major dissonances are related to the perception of buildings as flattened on the ground, due to their excessively elongated shape, and in the case of buildings completely permeable to landscape, this being necessary for structural purposes and for the type of use of historic buildings. The expected impact of this study is to provide designers and planners with indicators allowing the evaluation, on an objective basis, of the level of consistency of new buildings with local rural heritage, thus supporting both design phases and project evaluation as well as building management processes (maintenance, restoration, extension, change in use, etc.). Full article