ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2008) "A building designed to recapture the past may bring nostalgia, but the end product may not capture current realities of a place, says Kingston Heath, a professor of historic preservation at the University of Oregon. It is a humanistic inquiry that recognizes that buildings and settings, alone, do not make place," he said in a talk Dec. 13 at the annual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments in Oxford, UK. "People, in their interaction with the natural and built environment, make place. Heath draws attention to a small group of architecture and urban design professionals who in recent years have begun to challenge the practice of designing modern structures that simply strive to produce mirages of the past. The emerging field is called "situated regionalism." - Anna Haro from Bookmarklet

This is a design-and-planning approach that considers the current human and environmental situation," Heath said in an interview before his talk. "We look at the regional filter -- the collective forces that shape place." Heath's approach to the field will be more fully detailed in his upcoming book "Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design: Cultural Process and Environmental Response." His talk Saturday -- during the session "Regeneration and Tradition" chaired by UO architecture colleague Mark Gillem -- aimed to define vernacular architecture as a way to explores both current and past uses and needs of populations living in a particular place to better understand regional dynamics. - Anna Haro