Marcel Vellinga

• Oxford Brookes University

Southeast Asia and Oceania have a long tradition of outstanding scholarship that studies the rich and diverse vernacular architectural heritage of the region. Up until the early twenty-first century, this work tended to focus on traditional forms of vernacular architecture, emphasising their regional distinctiveness and analysing the ways in which...

During a career that spanned six decades, the architect, planner and historian Erwin Anton Gutkind consistently argued for the abandonment of the concept of the city and for the emergence of a new form of environmental organization where communities lived in settlements that did not stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another. Such an ‘expa...

Throughout a career that spanned nearly 45 years, Paul Oliver consistently put forward his ideas on why an anthropological approach to architecture would be beneficial to the understanding of the design, use, and meaning of buildings. This article intends to explore Oliver’s views and writings on the relationship between architecture and anthropolo...

In recent years many publications have appeared that stress the sustainable character of vernacular architecture, emphasising its ecological friendliness and appropriateness. Commonly this literature represents vernacular architecture as a more sustainable alternative, or predecessor, to conventional contemporary forms of architecture and their ass...

A paradoxical situation exists where vernacular building traditions are in a state of decline and are being replaced by modern counterparts, but they are repeatedly cited in the academic literature as exemplary models of environmental practice. This paradox is examined through research on whether vernacular passive cooling systems in the hot and dr...

The House in Southeast Asia: A Changing Social, Economic and Political Domain. Stephen Sparkes and Signe Howell, eds. Hardcover, London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. xiv + 271 pp., notes, bibliography, index. The Material Culture Reader. Victor Buchli, ed. Oxford: Berg, 2002. xi + 274 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Materiality. Daniel Miller, ed. Durh...

The issues surrounding the function and meaning of vernacular architecture in the twenty-first century are complex and extensive. Taking a distinctively rigorous theoretical approach, this book considers these issues from a number of perspectives, broadening current debate to a wider multidisciplinary audience. These collected essays from the leadi...

The ethnographical collections of Edward Horace Man, who worked as a colonial administrator on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, constitute a comprehensive record of late-nineteenth-century Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture. Looking at the way in which Man compiled his ethnographical collections provides us with insights into the personal a...

In a well-known paper on ‘the cultural biography of things’, Kopytoff (1986) shows that the application of meaning to ‘things’ is of a processual rather than a fixed nature. Mainly focusing his attention on commodities, Kopytoff demonstrates that, like people, ‘objects’ such as slaves, cars, huts and paintings have a social life of their own. The b...

Knapp, Ronald G. and Kai-Yin Lo, eds. 2005. House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. xxi + 453pp. ISBN 0 8248 2953 0