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While academic architecture has tended toward a narrow range of styles and forms historicaly accepted and requested by a wealthy minority of human beings, vernacular architecture shows a variation equal to the requirements and imagination of all shelter producing life forms on the planet. Vernacular architecture is the most common form of construction in the built environment, and comprises the majority of human architecture, as academic schools of architecture are a relatively new invention. Even today architects are involved in only a small percentage of built structures. Once seen as obsolete, vernacular architecture is now the subject of serious academic study, and is increasingly considered a potential component of '', based on his MoMA exhibition. The book was a revolutionary reminder of the legitimacy and "hard-won knowledge" inherent in vernacular buildings, from Polish Salt-caves to gigantic Syrian water wheels to Moroccan desert fortresses, and was considered iconoclastic at the time. The most comprehensive work is the "Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World" published in 1997 by Paul Oliver of the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development. Oliver has argued that vernacular architecture will be necessary in the future to "ensure sustainability in both cultural and economic terms beyond the short term." Christopher Alexander , in his book A Pattern Language , attempted to identify adaptive features of traditional architecture that apply across cultures. Howard Davis 's book The Culture Of Building details the culture that enabled several vernacular traditions. Some extend the term to include any architecture outside the academic mainstream. The term "commercial vernacular", popularized in the late 1960s by the publication of Robert Venturi 's "Learning from Las Vegas", refers to 20th Century American suburban tract and commercial architecture. Unlike traditional vernacular, however, the design and construction of these types of buildings is remote from their eventual users, and does not represent long cultural traditions; those who study traditional vernacular architecture hold that these characteristics define a more useful and fundamental partition of architecture into vernacular and non-vernacular, rather than whether or not a kind of architecture is accepted within academia. SEE ALSO
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