Vernacular Architecture Studies

Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes, is a manual for exploring and interpreting vernacular architecture, the common buildings of particular regions and time periods. Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley provide a comprehensive introduction to the field. Proposing a methodology, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture provides a systematic approach to vernacular architecture fieldwork. The authors walk readers through the process of examining and documenting a building, explaining in detail how to define a research area and create a research plan. They guide students step-by-step in how to take accurate measurements of sites and of building exteriors and interiors and explain what to look for at each level. They show how to find patterns and how to organize information to yield sound interpretations of buildings' meanings. As a complement to this practical approach, Carter and Cromley present current scholarship on vernacular architecture and explain the need for a broad theoretical perspective. They show how analysis of facts related to a building can reveal important insights into the behavior and culture of people who lived in a certain area at a certain time. The authors then present a single ordinary house as a case study to explore the different points of view that scholars have brought to the study of vernacular architecture. Rich with illustrations and written in a clear and jargon-free style, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture is an ideal text for courses in architecture, material culture studies, historic preservation, American studies, and history, and a useful guide for anyone interested in the built environment.

A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today's experience. Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation-the ways that we move through a house-analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings. This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.

In countless neighborhoods across America, the streets are lined with houses representing no established architectural style. Many of the 80 million homes in the United States today have only loose-fitting, general names like ranch, duplex, bungalow, and flat. Most, however, cannot even be identified by these common names, much less by an architectural type such as Colonial, Italianate, or Queen Anne. The few regionally recognized vernacular terms- shotgun, Cape (Cod), three-decker, and the like-remain exceptions rather than the rule. In this innovative, copiously illustrated guide, Thomas C. Hubka considers why most ordinary, working-class houses lack an adequate identifying nomenclature and proposes new ways to name and classify these anonymous structures, shedding a fresh light on their role in the development of American domestic culture and its housing landscape. Popular, developer-built, tract, speculative, everyday-whatever they are called, these common homes constitute the largest portion of American housing in all regions and historic periods. Without classification, these dwellings tend to be left out of histories of American building, neglected in preservation surveys and plans, and ignored when it comes to considering their impact on American culture. Current methods of interpreting common houses need not be replaced, Hubka shows, but only modified to include a broader, more complete spectrum of common dwellings. As Hubka explains, by applying an order of census and a floor-plan analysis, scholars can adequately characterize the actual homes in which most Americans live, particularly in recent times after the widespread growth of suburban homes. Based on years of field observations, measured drawings, and surveys of regional house types, this handbook provides a working vocabulary for the study and appreciation of America¹s common houses and will prove useful to preservationists, academics, and architects, as well as owners and residents of America¹s most ubiquitous residences.