Vernacular Transformations

Paul Oliver’s 1997 “Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World” (EVAW) was the first comprehensive compilation of Southeast Asia’s and Oceania’s vernacular houses, and work on the second edition (EVAW 2) has been under way since 2015 under the editorship of Marcel Vellinga at Oxford Brookes University. EVAW 2 will continue the outstanding scholarship on the region’s rich and diverse vernacular house architecture highlighting its distinctiveness and relationships with social and cultural structures. However, in the updating of entries,1 clear signs of transformation of traditions have emerged due to rapid social, cultural, economic and technological changes in Southeast Asia and Oceania’s vernacular houses. These transformations could not be further explored in the brevity of the Encyclopaedia entries, and so this issue of Fabrications called for higher-level reflections and theorisations of these dynamic transformations and their relationships with modern worlds. It seeks to understand the tensions brought about by regional and sub-regional modernisation and cultural change, and the effect of these tensions on the historical morphologies and building typologies of vernacular house architectures.