In Conclusion: categories and critiques of vernacular archi - PowerPoint Presentation

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In Conclusion: categories and critiques of vernacular architectureSlide2

Read Critically

Reading actively?

What to read for?

Context

Text

SubstanceSlide3
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Vernacular as a concept

Asserts that the sources of construction details, formal arrangements, and decorative elements are local.

Asserts that the social, economic, and cultural meanings of these features lies within the value structure of local communities and the individuals who have a vested interest in how and why the buildings look that waySlide5

Vernacular Assumptions

Build with available materials and technologies

Everything changes

Read as a metaphor of description or interpretation. “The study of artifacts requires pictorial and graphic documentation.Slide6
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What is to be avoided

Analytical perspectives help “withstand the physical attractiveness of common architecture . . . That distracts scholars [who] . . .squander their talents on mere description.”

Whose interpretation:

Cultural historians, geographers, folklorists, architects, cultural historians, archaeologists, social historians, decorative arts scholars, art historians, preservationists, and American studies specialists.Slide8

What and how do we ask questions?

This class is about learning to pose questions and form answers not merely learning the stuff.

However, ability to think is situated

within a framework of previous work

Defines how we pose questions

Defines how we frame answers.

Vernacular Architecture has been vigorous in searching other disciplines for new ways to pose questions and form answers.

Many of the articles that you will read are post-facto Vernacular Architecture research, since they were written before the consolidation and naming of the discipline in the late 1960s. Slide9

Commonplaces-five questions

What is vernacular architecture: content

How is it made: construction

How does it work: function

How does it change: history

How is it thought: designSlide10

Reading for writing

How are articles structured and how the evidence it presented.

Statements of method

Explanation of basis of understanding

Expand the boundaries

Contest the methods

Defend the disciplines involved in this form of research. Slide11

Definition of Vernacular Architecture

More frequently, definitions are provided through a listing of buildings classified as vernacular.

1. Unpretentious buildings

2. “Originally used in the 19th century by architectural theorists to refer to traditional rural buildings of the pre-industrial era.” Dell Upton

3. More recently vernacular has been taken to be “any buildings not obviously the product of an upper-class, avant-garde, aesthetic movement.” Dell UptonSlide12

Dell Upton

Upton finds that vernacular architecture is a multidisciplinary activity. Researching buildings not covered by academic architectural history.

Inclusive approach to the study of all architecture, that eliminates the need for names. Slide13

Upton’s Five Questions

1. What is vernacular architecture? Involves a judgment about the intensity of social representation as well as about appropriate content.

2. How is it made? Why all wood buildings?

3. How does it work? Function vs Functionalism. The anachronistic projection of one's point of view into the past.

4. How does it change? As social demands change then spaces change to meet them. Abandonment and adoption, or addition

5. How is it thought? How does a traditional design sense work? Slide14

Not Definitions- Camille

Makes the case for using artifacts in researching history.

Old, rural, handmade, built in traditional forms and materials for domestic and agricultural use. pre industrial, cooperative, more humane, more noble.

"All ordinary buildings are the results of complex mental processes that have been shaped by learned-cultural-priorities."

"The difference between a profound and a trite study is not the subject matter but the degree of skill with which it is examined."

Less a kind of building than an approach to looking at buildings

"Today VA is a mildly unstable and semantically indefensible mixture of evidence, method and theory.

Her conclusion: It occupies a poorly worked-out frontier where new and significant things are likely to occur."

All the Good ideas are past and gone. "It is reasonably clear that the time for audacious declarations is past." Slide15

What is the history of vernacular architecture?

Fred Kniffen

Henry Glassie, --Is

Patterns

his dissertation?

Abbott Lowell Cummings

Friends of Friendless Farm BuildingsSlide16

What do Dell Upton and John Vlach say?

Definition: mostly non-definitions. p. xv Define by examples

non High Style, not designed by professionals, non-monumental, unsophisticated, it is mere building positive: ordinary, everyday, commonplace.

Vernacular is asserted to be the dominant form. What is not vernacular? only 5%

Wishes and taste of common people is as significant as the buildings themselves.

Local version of a widespread academic style?

Answer to why old buildings? The more self-sufficient and socially secure a community is, the more definite is its sense of identity and the more fixed are its architectural conventions. (xvi)

Some buildings have only a few elements that are vernacular, others are mass cultural, or elite. Slide17

What are the important categories of VA research?

Demonstrations and definitions

1. Construction

2. Function.

The provision of space for activities

The less tangible shaping of perceptions and social relationships.

The transformation of space to place. Mostly multi-functional

History. Change is in the nature of the vernacular (xx)

Two trajectories of change

socially defined spacial needs

patterns of the consumption of goods and ideas

must investigate strategies of builders. abandon and adopt/ adding/ rethink and incorporate. Slide18

Tom Carter and Betsy Cromley

“Vernacular Architecture is part of the larger study of “material culture.” Historians lost, Anthropologists won?

Vernacular Architecture as a field of study, “the study of those human actions and behaviors that are manifest in commonplace architecture.”

They substitute common place for vernacular. Methods

The metaphor of reading buildings.

Interpreting buildings. Carson “Rule of the least and best.”

Ethnographic interpretation.

For people who left no written record.

Reveal aspects of mundane behavior that writing may not.

To understand the artfulness of culture.Slide19

Domains of Scholarly intension

A. Object oriented studies. Best ex. Abbott Lowell Cummings

1. First studies in 1890s in America--

Isham

& Brown

1. What do they seek to explain?

2. What are their assumptions?

a. common sense Functionalism.

b. implicit assumptions of change

c. aesthetic trickle down

d. assumptions about social life explained buildings until last 20 years.

B. Socially oriented studies.

1. Assumes architectural forms vary with social and economic conditions.

2. First developed by English scholars--What did they ask? What did people have?

3. How were artifacts arranged within houses--naming patterns

4. Typically use the prescriptive literature, but using buildings and room inventories can avoid these stereotypic descriptions.Slide20

Domains of Scholarly intension

C

. Culturally oriented studies?

1

. What are the collections of knowledge shared within a community.

2

. Begun by cultural geographers as a mapping and cataloging

exersize

.

3

. Often attracted to questions of ethnicity and interethnic influence. John

Vlach

.

4

. Assume the importance of the building typology. Are these

trully

useful cultural signs? Mental template.

5

. More recent works have attempted to identify tensions between the shared body of ideas and the individual inclination and social context.

a

.

Glassie

uses artifacts to understand mental structures.

D

. Symbolically oriented studies.

1

. Deep cognitive structures

2

. No compulsive documentation.

3

. Super-organic, a-historical--personal history is unimportant.

4

. What are the connotative messages of architecture.

5

. What is popular--accumulative symbolic structures, rather than integrated wholes.

E

. Move to understand architecture as a primary system of understanding, not a reflective system.

1

. Move to include issues of power and ideology in the models.