Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide

Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide by Oliver, Paul. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780714842028.

The architecture of ordinary people represents more than ninety per cent of the worlds buildings, including some 800 million homes. Dwellings is about the types and forms of vernacular houses around the world. It documents the form of traditional buildings that are self-built by their owner-occupiers or built by members of a community, recording the means of construction and decoration of the house in many different cultures. First published by Phaidon in 1987, Dwellings, in its new updated, revised and expanded format, takes into account new scholarship in the field, including the authors own fieldwork, and also acknowledges theoretical developments in the areas of cultural geography, gender studies, sociology and anthropology. Dwellings is a fascinating reference work on domestic buildings and also a useful survey for understanding how different communities cope with issues of climate, migration, mass development, and symbolic and cultural meaning in architecture. Paul Oliver is the Chair of the Masters course in International Studies in Vernacular Architecture at the School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of numerous books, notably Shelter and Society and Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies, and is the editor of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World.