The book is an attempt to bridge the gap between the past and the future the vernacular and the contemporary. It questions the relevance of the vernacular in contemporary times and illustrates the inherent sustainability in vernacular built form. Emphasizing on the fact that apart from the preservation of vernacular architecture it is more important to carry forward the valuable lessons of the past into the future, the book presents myriad examples of contemporary architectural works and showcases how vernacular traditions can be reinterpreted to form contemporary buildings. It encourages young designers to look within India for models of sustainable design rather than importing international designs which may or may not be relevant to the Indian context.

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Though Latin dominated medieval written culture, vernacular traditions nonetheless started to develop in Europe in the eleventh century. This volume offers six essays devoted to the practices, habits, and preferences of scribes making manuscripts in their native tongue. Featuring French, Frisian, Icelandic, Italian, Middle High German, and Old English examples, these essays discuss the connectivity of books originating in the same linguistic space. Given that authors, translators, and readers advanced vernacular written culture through the production and consumption of texts, how did the scribes who copied them fit into this development?

In these images, white arabesques dance on red walls, and abacus-like mud colonnades shield farmers from sun and wind; mud is "twisted" into playful columns, sculpted into ornate facade relief, and massed into lofty towers of majestic mosques. This edition's new afterword discusses adobe politics in New Mexico, and illustrates the authors' own adobe home.

Old English verse and prose depict the human mind as a corporeal entity located in the chest cavity, susceptible to spatial and thermal changes corresponding to the psychological states: it was thought that emotions such as rage, grief, and yearning could cause the contents of the chest to grow warm, boil, or be constricted by pressure. While readers usually assume the metaphorical nature of such literary images, Leslie Lockett, in Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions, argues that these depictions are literal representations of Anglo-Saxon folk psychology. Lockett analyses both well-studied and little-known texts, including Insular Latin grammars, The Ruin, the Old English Soliloquies, The Rhyming Poem, and the writings of Patrick, Bishop of Dublin. She demonstrates that the Platonist-Christian theory of the incorporeal mind was known to very few Anglo-Saxons throughout most of the period, while the concept of mind-in-the-heart remained widespread. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions examines the interactions of rival - and incompatible - concepts of the mind in a highly original way.

In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing, and displaced transnational space. The Trans-Caribbean is therefore understood as a space suspended in a double dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, "inner plantation" (Kamau Brathwaite), whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion.

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 leading experts in the field focus on theory, education and practice in this essential sector of architecture, and help to formulate solutions to the environmental, disaster management and housing challenges facing the global community today.