Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture

Author(s): Paul Groth

Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Sep., 1999, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), pp. 444-451

Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/991538

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture

Thirty years ago, readers who explored the literature of vernacular architecture may have felt as though they were entering Indonesia’s “Realm of the Diamond Queen”—as described by anthropologist Anna Tsing (1993): their search led them away from the central realms of wealth and power to a land of people who were clearly marginal, if not also mildly insane, but who were creating exciting alternatives to the dominant culture. Indeed, to many architectural historians, vernacular architecture was once seen as a quaint and not very important interest, very much at the edges of the discipline.

Today in vernacular-architecture studies, the Diamond Queen feeling is much less apparent than it was in 1970. Writing about vernacular architecture may still be at the margins of architectural history, but it no longer seems eccentric to be immersed in the study of ordinary buildings. Over the last thirty years, scholars have begun to shift the definition of vernacular architecture away from its earlier, essentially folkloristic emphasis on preindustrial construction and ethnicity, and also away from the geographer’s fascination with regional patterns. Today’s writers in the field have moved toward much richer interdisciplinary approaches, and also toward urban and twentieth-century subjects (Figure 1).

The most succinct of the new definitions of vernacular architecture has been expressed by Dell Upton, who writes that “vernacular building is ordinary building.” This definition slices away the old cumbersome insistence (stemming from the early roots of the word vernacular) on associating the study of plain architecture solely with low-caste, low-income, or traditional groups whose material culture appeared to be timeless and unchanging. Upton and John Michael Vlach add that vernacular architecture is distinguished by its “communally sanctioned” qualities and its “intensity of social representation,” as opposed to individual expression.

Attention to vernacular architecture often assumes an interest in the meanings of the everyday lives of ordinary people. It can and does include professionally designed buildings, particularly when they are commonly accepted building types of the time (schools and suburban tract houses come to mind). Within these wider definitions, students of vernacular architecture have forged a series of connections with the center of architectural history and with promising research frontiers.

Connecting High-Style and Vernacular Architecture

Before 1970, historians had an unfortunate tendency to see vernacular and high-style buildings as being in entirely disconnected spheres. Today, it is increasingly easy to see the ordinary and the official as parts of the same cultural landscape. Haymarket Revisited (1976), William Adelman’s straightforward guidebook to Chicago, is an early suggestion of what a complete urban-landscape approach to vernacular architecture might include, even though its

discussions of individual buildings leave a great deal unsaid. Haymarket Revisted reads as well at the desk as it does on site; indeed, almost half of the guidebook is a social-history introduction to the three eclectic tours. Site by site, Adelman presents key human players on both sides of the 1886 Chicago McCormick reaper plant strike, its related labor meetings (some of which turned into riots), and police retaliations. The sites include not only the streets, squares, and courthouses involved, but also bars, churches, theaters, police stations, cemeteries, hotels in which trial jurors stayed, homes of the various participants, even the site where the famous dynamite bomb landed—essentially, the whole texture of public space in Chicago as seen by labor activists of 1886. Significantly, high-style buildings such as City Hall and the Cook County Bureau plant strike are presented not only as carriers of the official messages intended by their designers and governmental users, but also as sites that workers used in different ways and to which they attached alternative meanings. Tracing the tours re-creates for the reader a genuine sense of the spatial networks of lived space in central Chicago.

Reyner Banham’s book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) also crosses easily and creatively between high-style and vernacular realms. To do the essential field research, the British-born Banham had to learn how to drive a car. Furthermore, although he was properly educated as an architectural historian, to write about Los Angeles he found he had to adopt the methods and questions of urban geographers and cultural-landscape historians. With these eclectic tools, he identified the four most important types of districts he found in Los Angeles (the so-called “ecologies”): the beach, the interurban train lines followed by the famous freeways, the foothills, and the flatlands he calls “the Plains of Id.” The chapters in the book alternate: first, Banham’s brilliant interpretations of an ordinary, everyday Los Angeles ecology and its typical spaces and building types; then reviews of high-style architectural responses to that geographic realm. Banham wrote his appreciative introduction to Los Angeles in 1971, long before that city was intellectually in vogue.

Banham, in a fairly short book, succeeds in explaining the built environments of an entire city. Also in a single book, Anthony King links houses of both high and ordinary design on several continents. King’s intellectual background combines history, architecture, economics, cultural studies, and sociology. He puts all these to use in his book The Bungalow (1984), which studies a single building type (or actually, building image) through several centuries and across India, Britain, North America, Africa, and Australia. A virtual blizzard of illustrations accompanies the text, but King’s theme remains clear: the bungalow as a global phenomenon—from the Bengali open-lot house adopted by British overlords, to the miles of tiny houses lined up along out-of-the-century American streets—remains essentially one of the footprints of economic imperialism. Such overt political and economic interpretations are rare in the study of vernacular architecture, yet pointed questions about economics and social class, like those asked by King, are essential if we are to understand, on the one hand, the forces that bring buildings into being and maintain them, and on the other hand, some of the most powerful meanings of buildings (Figure 2).

The implications of social class and social stratification were important issues for my book Living Downtown (1997), an architectural history of the four social groups of hotels used as permanent housing, from palace hotels through rooming houses to hobo flophouses. The study connects each rank of people and buildings to the work and workplaces that created the demand for furnished single-room residences by the day, week, and month, and to the eating and social-life alternatives for each group. Perhaps most important for other studies is the book’s working definition of ordinary, which borrowed from very standard social-history methods. For three key years between 1880 and 1930, I chose a random sample from the many categories of lodging listings in San Francisco’s city directories. Then I tracked down in records (and site visits) all of the 300

buildings in the random sample. A few of the hotels, of course, had already shown up in published accounts and historical photographs; the overwhelming majority of the sample, however, were truly ordinary buildings that would have remained invisible in a study based on a literary or stylistic sampling method. In fact, for social analysis, facades proved not very useful, while interior details such as plumbing ratios (toilets to sleeping rooms) and size of airwells proved to be highly important.

Retail environments of both monumental and mundane sorts have found increasing interest in the history of vernacular architecture. Pioneers in giving ordinary, everyday environments the same kind of close attention often devoted to rarified urban design were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Their now famous study, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), proved that the highway strip could be the basis for serious cultural analysis as well as a springboard for looking at all types of modern architecture.

The work of another pioneer scholar of roadside architecture, and still one of the best starting places for study of the highway strip, is Main Street to Miracle Mile (1985) by Chester Liebs. His two introductory chapters examine the history of roadside retail development and the realities of designing buildings to be seen from automobiles. Each of the remaining chapters is a succinct review of the forms, issues, and literature of one element of the strip (for instance, the gas station, the supermarket, the motel, or the miniature golf course).

The most architecturally complete history of automobile-oriented retail spaces can be found in two books—really two parts of the same study—by Richard Longstreth: City Center to Regional Mall (1997) and The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles (1999). In the first book, Longstreth traces the changes in downtown retail environments as well as the early experiments in and alternatives to the suburban mall, all between 1920 and World War II. The second book fills in the story, particularly about commercial strip developments. In both books, Longstreth focuses effectively on the links between architecture and selling strategies—from street to parking lot to building to interior.

Connecting Urban and Rural Buildings

Urban writers used to see the countryside at the edge of the city or suburb as a foreign and separate realm. Just as leading writers in vernacular architecture have linked professional and vernacular design, so too they have found ideas and methods that link farm and small town to city and suburb. One of the central crusaders in this movement was John Brinckerhoff Jackson, an independent writer and the publisher and editor, from 1951 to 1968, of Landscape magazine. His lasting importance may prove to be his wide

Figure 3 Farmhouse, road, and fields on the Great Plains, probably in western Nebraska, 1971. J. B. Jackson set the meaning of ordinary landscape elements like farmhouses within the social contexts of fields, rangelands, and roads. Photograph by John Brinckerhoff Jackson

range of subjects. His central theme was the deep social importance of the cultural landscape of the United States, and he considered it not so much as an architectural or landscape historian (although he often wrote about historical landscape elements), but essentially as an environmental philosopher searching for the means of built space for social identity. In the same essay he could range from the farm to the city. He focused seriously on front yards, workplaces (from garage and barn to warehouse and factory), highways, farm fields, farmsteads, small towns in the South and the Great Plains, and small cities. Jackson set all of these within a wide speculative frame (Figure 3). His questions were not about forms but about the provenance of commonly (if often unconsciously) held social ideas about space and society. His theme in later years became the contradictions between the official landscapes of permanence and centralized power, and the more ephemeral and ad hoc elements of the vernacular. Although Jackson read constantly and widely, and in several languages, he eschewed footnotes, and freely mixed his talents of novelist and nonfiction writer. He said repeatedly that he cared most about being interesting, rather than being fashionably correct in any academic sense. He wanted readers to think creatively about their ordinary surroundings. These same characteristics have made many academics suspicious of, or downright hostile to, Jackson’s writings. A recent collection, Landscape in Sight (1997), contains most of the best-known Jackson essays. Helen Horowitz’s expert editing and substantial introductory essay show new sides of Jackson’s oeuvre.

On a more site-specific level than Jackson, Gabrielle Lanier and Bernard Herman have summed up their own and others’ work of many years in Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic (1997). This book is something of a primer for looking at ordinary houses, barns, outbuildings, and Main Street shops in small towns. The inclusion of towns with farms is notable. A West Coast predecessor of Lanier and Herman’s work, published in two elegantly designed volumes, is Space, Style and Structure: Building in Northwest America (1974). For the Oregon Historical Society, editors Thomas Vaughan and Virginia Guest Ferriday brought together more than a dozen authors, each looking at a particular element in the Oregon landscape over two centuries. These separate essays were woven into a chronological scheme. The breadth of this collection—in its rural-to-urban range of subjects as well as in its intellectual diversity—still sets a high standard for any introduction to historical (and contemporary) environments. Fashionable architecture is included, but it is balanced with very creative sections on town form and urban growth, farm buildings, and precise detail about farm and field life, yards and gardens, and industrial buildings.

Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic and Space, Style and Structure are books that make readers want to rush out, probably by car, to see these landscapes. These books also supply enough basic intellectual and visual skills so that the readers turned-tourists will be able to interpret much of the landscape for themselves, or at least form hypotheses and questions about what before would have been seemingly inert, intellectually impenetrable countrysides and small towns.

Greg Hise’s Magnetic Los Angeles (1997) also skates creatively between farm and country. The book traces several threads of the twentieth-century suburban city: the minimal house (and minimal-house experiments in rural New Deal migrant worker projects), the leading role of large employers in expanding the city, and the effects of planners in creating and directing the shape of the suburban enterprise. Better than most writers about suburbia, Hise keeps his focus on the truly ordinary small house that dominated postwar housing and is comfortable discussing the interiors of a house as well as the scale of an entire development.

Connecting Buildings to Their Larger Contexts

Most students of any kind of architectural history struggle with the challenge of connecting their subject to its immediate surroundings as well as to larger intellectual constructs. Although this may seem axiomatic, it is often not done well, not even for farm buildings. Thomas Hubka, in Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected

MAKING NEW CONNECTIONS IN VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE 447

Farm Buildings of New England (1984), shows the way. He begins with what seems at first glance to be a deeply parochial subject. (Really, who outside New England could be expected to care about connected farm buildings?) Nevertheless, Hubka's cultural history, supported by his spectacularly well-drawn plans, sections, and axonometrics (Figure 4), not only explains barns, houses, outbuildings, and farmsteads, but also interprets more than 125 years of farmstead development, maintenance of gender realms, and cycles of work on the farm as a whole. Most particularly, Hubka shows the full farmstead, and on occasion the whole farm, not just the house. Thanks to his exposition of the entire farm landscape, these small New England farms become genuinely intriguing. They can be seen as places of farm production and social production, not only as vaguely arcane objects.

Good connections between ecology and American farms and farm buildings are surprisingly few and far between. An exemplary study is J. Ritchie Garrison's Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts (1991). Garrison links ecology and markets to what one can see on the farm. Seeing through Garrison's eyes, one can discern the effect of soil types, the impact of hilly versus flat land, the importance of connections to town, and the influence of those connections on the farmstead's buildings and its seeming prosperity (or lack thereof).

Peirce Lewis's book New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (1976) does the same thing for a city that Garrison does for farms. Lewis's clear prose, well interpreted photographs, and brilliantly clear diagrams of neighborhood land uses and pending change make this monograph one of the best introductions to the shape and shaping forces of any American city. Lewis, a geographer, loves buildings and includes studies of several key New Orleans building types and neighborhoods. However, to explain the present-day growth, size, and forms of New Orleans, Lewis begins with the entire Mississippi River watershed and the creation of the natural river levees that dictated the city's early settlement. He ends with the influx of Texas oil wealth in the 1970s.

In spite of their ubiquity, suburban houses and the suburbs themselves have long eluded sustained vernacular architecture study. A brilliant example of how to approach the complexity of the suburban built environment, and one that has not been surpassed, is the now classic Streetcar Suburbs (1962) by Sam Bass Warner. Warner did not set out to study the individual house, and he includes no plans and no discussion of house interiors. However, with his close study of individual building records, and a text that explicates more than sixty highly illuminating site photographs in a few inner suburbs of Boston, Warner's book clarifies the repeating patterns of vast stretches of the generic American city built between 1870 and the early 1900s. More than most other architectural and urban writers practicing today, Warner may be the absolute master of teaching readers how to see details and general patterns of urban environments. He makes architecturally visible the suburban processes of employment, migration, social clustering, and fear of the center city—what Warner calls "the weave of small patterns" resulting from the logic of small-scale carpenter-contractor development.

Figure 4 Thomas Hubka's visual analysis of farmstead development from 1795 to 1980 on the Nutting Farm, Otisfield, Maine. Drawing by Thomas C. Hubka, Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England (Hanover, N.H., 1984), p. 89

Connecting People and Buildings

Another critical research frontier looks inward to the connections between people and buildings. Students of vernacular architecture, like other architectural historians, are often drawn (at least initially) to buildings as an end in themselves. Putting people in the buildings is at times forgotten. James Borchert's study Alley Life in Washington (1980) successfully puts ordinary (and usually overlooked) buildings in the nation's capital into citywide and, indeed, national contexts, but also keeps the local residents in focus. Borchert, a social historian, begins by linking the demographics and employment status of alley residents, both black and white, along with land-use and ownership patterns of salient examples.

He goes on to present the social history, everyday family life, and childhood life of African-American alley dwellers, building up to an analysis of the relationship between the details of urban form and community life. Maps and photos give a strong sense of building and street relationships. Most importantly, his astute use of folkore, songs, tables of social data, urban fabric, and religion show how to put people into a place—especially where those are low-income people and minorities who do not necessarily own or build their own homes, and whose homes represent the best surviving archive of their lives.

Michael Ann Williams's elegant study of rural North Carolina folk houses, Homeplace (1991), presents another useful approach. She writes about the years around 1900, drawing largely from her exhaustive interviews about house use in Appalachian cabins, some with one room (albeit a fairly large room), others with two and three rooms. Her interviewing method, of course, has sharp historical limits; firsthand or secondhand tales about how people used their homes, and what they meant to them, can reach back only so far in living memory.

Henry Glassie, looking only at the physical evidence of a group of rural Virginia houses, puts people into place in a much more abstract way. His Folk Housing in Middle Virginia (1975) caused a small sensation when it first appeared, in part because he showed that the most sophisticated social theory could be applied to simple rural structures as well as seemingly more complex urban settings. Consciously avoiding written records for his sites, Glassie used his own variant of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and then-current sociolinguistic theory and transformational grammar as scaffolds for speculation about the psychological and social meanings of the changing forms that builders and clients molded into their houses.

Writing at the same time as Glassie, the historical archaeologist James Deetz brought people into his (long-empty) Colonial buildings in two very short, extremely readable books, Invitation to Archaeology (1967) and especially In Small Things Forgotten (1977). Deetz makes vivid the everyday use of houses—together with all types and scales of material culture—all with enough sprightly theory and a sense of general patterns so that architectural historians could make similar leaps to other places and times, and even to high-style design. Architecture does not appear at all in Invitation to Archaeology, but it is at the core of In Small Things Forgotten. It demonstrates how the behavior traces of pots, furniture, houses, and foodways all can show shifts in the social mind, in what people thought about the universe, their society, and themselves.

Using architecture to interpret the daily-life histories of ethnic and racial groups is another important way that the history of vernacular architecture puts people into place. The literature is enormous, but a Michelin-guided introduction to ethnic building traditions in the United States neatly indexes much of the rural tradition in the study of ordinary building. America's Architectural Roots (1986), edited by Dell Upton, introduces twenty-two racial and ethnic groups, arranged by century. Each short chapter is written by an area specialist and is generously illustrated, as befits a guidebook, and there is a succinct bibliography for each group. The strength of the book—the success with which it discusses Colonial and nineteenth-century migrations and buildings—also points up the problem in dealing with strictly ethnic or racial divisions and questions: there is very little discussion of cities and no discussion of the twentieth century. Only recently, and primarily in the periodical literature, have more urban and more recent ethnic subjects come to light.

Indeed, those readers looking for the core of vernacular architecture studies may not find it in books. Like two of its parent disciplines, anthropology and geography, vernacular architecture relies upon a literature of articles, often scattered in hard-to-find journals. Three edited collections that make the scattered articles more accessible are Common Places (1986), edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vach; Images of an American Land (1979), edited by Thomas Carter; and Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (1997), edited by Paul Groth and Todd Bressi. Four useful review articles for ordinary architecture of the United States are Peirce Lewis's “Learning from Looking,” Dell Upton’s “Outside the Academy,” Upton’s “Ordinary Buildings,” and Camille Wells’s “The Multistoried House.”

As the examples in the preceding discussion make clear, the study of vernacular architecture is highly interdisciplinary. Architectural history, like urban history, may never have been the precinct of any one discipline. Just as scholars of vernacular architecture have reached out to an invigorating

Figure 5 Suburban ranch-style house near Milford, Massachusetts, c. 1970. Houses, yards, and plantings like these may be America’s most common built landscapes of the twentieth century, although no full-length cultural interpretation has yet been published. Photograph by John Brinckerhoff Jackson

range of related disciplines, so too scholars from other disciplines have reached into vernacular studies, making possible stronger cultural as well as architectural interpretation.

The amount of exciting and important research remaining to be done about vernacular architecture in the United States is still great (Figure 5). A lively organization, the Vernacular Architecture Forum (founded in 1979), has more than 800 members, friendly annual meetings with stellar papers and even better local tours, and a publication series, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Currently in seven volumes and published by University of Tennessee Press, Perspectives features the best of the papers presented at the VAF meetings.

If, in the early 1970s, the study of vernacular architecture seemed like a venture into the Realm of the Diamond Queen, at the end of the 1990s the field enjoys a very different kind of marginality—the excitement of being part of several creative frontiers that are expanding the field. The study of vernacular architecture may still be at the edges of architectural history, to be sure, but those edges now have clear bearings, legitimate and discernible frameworks, and connections across heavily traveled bridges into the realms of nearby disciplines.

Notes

Dell Upton, “Vernacular Building,” in Diane Maddex, ed., Built in the U.S.A.: American Building from Airports to Zoo (Washington, D.C.), 1985, 166.
Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, Georgia), 1986), xvi-xvii.
Reyner Banham, Loa Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Harmondsworth, 1971), 161-178.
Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 67-117.

Selected Texts

Adelman, William J. Haymarket Revived: A Tour Guide of Labor History Sites and Ethnic Neighborhoods Connected with the Haymarket Affair. Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1976.
Banham, Reyner. Loa Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1971.
Borcher, James. Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Carter, Thomas, ed. Images of an American Land: Vernacular Architecture in the Western United States. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Deetz, James. Invitation to Archaeology. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1967.

In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. Expanded and revised edition, 1996.
Garrison, J. Ritchie. Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1700-1860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Gassie, Henry. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Airports. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975.
Groth, Paul. Living Downstairs: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Groth, Paul, and Todd W. Bressis, eds. Understanding Ordinary Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Hise, Greg. Magnetic Loa Angles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Hubka, Thomas C. Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1884.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. Edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
King, Anthony D. The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Lanier, Gabrielle M., and Bernard L. Hermann. Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Lewis, Peirce. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1976. Also published in John S. Adams, ed., Nineteenth-Century Ports. Contemporary Metropolitan America, vol. 2. Association of American Geographers Comparative Metropolitan Analysis project. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1976.

This content downloaded from 185.14.222.46 on Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

“Learning from Looking: Geographic and Other Writing about the American Cultural Landscape.” American Quarterly 35 (1983): 242-261.

Liebs, Chester H. Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

Longstreth, Richard W. City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

“The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles*, 1914-1941. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (PVA). Volumes 1-4 were published under the series title Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture by the University of Missouri Press between 1982 and 1991. Volumes 5-7 were published by the University of Tennessee Press between 1995 and 1997, under the following titles: Gender, Class, and Shelter, PVA V; Shaping Communities, PVA V1; and Exploring Everyday Landscapes, PVA VII. Volume 8, People, Power, Places, PVA VIII, is due to be published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2000.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Upton, Dell. “Ordinary Buildings: A Bibliographical Essay on American Vernacular Architecture.” American Studies International 19 (Winter 1981): 57-75.

“Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890-1990.” In Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, ed., The Architectural Historian in America. Studies in the History of Art, no. 35, 199-213. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990.

Upton, Dell, ed. America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups that Built America. Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1986.

Upton, Dell, and John Michael Vlach, eds. Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Vaughan, Thomas, and Virginia Guest Ferriday, eds. Space, Style and Structure: Building in Northwest America. 2 vols. Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1974.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972.

Warner, Sam Bass. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Wells, Camille. “The Multistoried House Twentieth-Century Encounters with the Domestic Architecture of Colonial Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (Autumn 1998): 353-418.

Williams, Michael Ann. Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwellings in Southwestern North Carolina. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

MAKING NEW CONNECTIONS IN VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE

This content downloaded from 185.14.222.46 on Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:06:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms