Vernacular Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources brings together for the first time a collection of essential and foundational readings in the study of vernacular architecture and the traditional building cultures of the world.

Collating scholarly historical texts from the last 200 years from a wide range of sources, this four-volume set offers a key knowledge resource for the field. It creates for the first time a comprehensive framework through which to understand the critical aspects and diverse interpretations of vernacular architecture studies, vital to much ongoing research in the built environment, in heritage studies, and material culture studies.

Each volume includes a substantial contextualizing introduction, while the texts are arranged according to themes which correspond to the chronological and intellectual development of the field, reflecting the subject's evolution from primarily rural, romantic and traditional interpretations through to thoroughly contemporary and interdisciplinary definitions of the field. These contemporary perspectives connect to new scholarship on the explosive growth of cities and the global urban future - and are thus the concern not only of scholars who are seeking to understand the built world but also of professional architects, planners and citizens who continue to draw lessons from the vernacular and to apply them to design, procedures and political formations. Accordingly, this is a reference collection which enables both a critical understanding of the subject and a way to connect theory with contemporary professional practice.

This work will represent an essential addition to libraries and a major scholarly resource for architecture, building conservation / historic preservation, town planning, material culture, art history, geography, and heritage studies.

Howard Davis is Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and director of the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism.

He is a co-author, with Christopher Alexander and others, of The Production of Houses (1985), author of The Culture of Building (1999, 2006), and of Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life (2012). He was the founding co-editor of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, book review editor of the Vernacular Architecture Newsletter, a member of the Board of Directors of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and a member of the editorial boards of Urban Morphology, the Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review and the Journal of Architectural Education.