Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork, Glassie’s Vernacular Architecture synthesizes a career of concern with traditional building. He articulates the key principles of architectural analysis, and then, centering his argument in the United States, but drawing comparative examples from many locations in Europe and Asia, he shows how architecture can be a prime resource for the one who would write a democratic and comprehensive history.
Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork, Glassie’s Vernacular Architecture synthesizes a career of concern with traditional building. He articulates the key principles of architectural analysis, and then, centering his argument in the United States, but drawing comparative examples from many locations in Europe and Asia, he shows how architecture can be a prime resource for the one who would write a democratic and comprehensive history.
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Overview
Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork, Glassie’s Vernacular Architecture synthesizes a career of concern with traditional building. He articulates the key principles of architectural analysis, and then, centering his argument in the United States, but drawing comparative examples from many locations in Europe and Asia, he shows how architecture can be a prime resource for the one who would write a democratic and comprehensive history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2000 |
| Series: | Material Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Vernacular Architecture
By Henry Glassie
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2000 Henry GlassieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33756-6
CHAPTER 1
Vernacular Architecture
Buildings, like poems and rituals, realize culture. Their designers rationalize their actions differently. Some say they design and build as they do because it is the ancient way of their people and place. Others claim that their practice correctly manifests the universally valid laws of science. But all of them create out of the smallness of their own experience.
All architects are born into architectural environments that condition their notions of beauty and bodily comfort and social propriety. Before they have been burdened with knowledge about architecture, their eyes have seen, their fingers have touched, their minds have inquired into the wholeness of their scenes. They have begun collecting scraps of experience without regard to the segregation of facts by logical class. Released from the hug of pleasure and nurture, they have toddled into space, learning to dwell, to feel at home. Those first acts of occupation deposit a core of connection in the memory.
Were it me, were I the one who would come to build, there would be red clay and pale curls of wood. There would be an orchard outside and shotguns in the hallway. Thick white paint on rough pine boards would connote home and call to mind the soft sounds of dogs and old men on the porch, the cool feel of linoleum on the kitchen floor, the smells of bacon frying. A woman's lilt, an endless melody strung of hymns to Jesus, would wander through it, accompanied by the brisk whisks of a broom.
As we grow, memory runs wild, undirected by future projects. Culture accumulates into an inner resource of association and gathers order aesthetically. This feels good, that bad, while experience widens, memories deepen, and culture complicates through learning.
When the builder's attention is narrowed by training, whether in the dusty shop of a master carpenter or the sleek classroom of a university, past experience is not obliterated. It endures in the strange caves of the brain and in the old habits of the muscles as they seek smooth routes through the air. Education adds a layer. In precept and admonition, in pedagogical technique, if not in content, the teacher brings cultural values into the process of transmission. Students obey or rebel. Inwardly, new ideas mix and coexist with old ones, and the mind, fed by the senses, continues to bounce about, unfettered by consistency. Resolution will come in performance, in dedicated, situated instants of concentration, while planning meets accidents and learning continues.
Despite the rigors of training, the architect remains a full person, at once competent and confused. The building shares in its builder's confusions. It seems right, as a result, because it incorporates the experience that the architect shares — not completely, of course, but completely enough — with those who do not build, but who look at buildings and go into them. The building works because it integrates the tight routines of professional practice with the loose expanse of cultural association. The overtly architectural contrivance covertly absorbs the norms of beauty and social exchange and political order with which the architect, as a member of society, has come to feel at ease.
Architecture is like any realization of potential, like any projection of thought. The things of the world — this sentence, that palace — preceded themselves in the mind as plans. Plans blend memories with a reading of the immediate situation. They are realized in things. They can be reversed in analysis. Things become plans, plans disaggregate into sets of decisions, decisions become intentions. All creations bespeak their creators. They stand before us as images of will and wit. In this, architecture is like other things, and there are no differences among kinds of building. All are cultural creations, orderings of experience, like poems and rituals.
If every building is a cultural fact, the consequence of a collision between intentions and conditions, if differences of culture and circumstance adequately account for differences among buildings, the question is why we persist in calling some of them vernacular. There are answers.
Few kinds of building have been accorded full study. When we isolate from the world a neglected architectural variety and name it vernacular, we have prepared it for analysis. The term marks the transition from the unknown to the known. The study of vernacular architecture is a way that we expand the record, bit by bit. At work, moving toward a complete view of the builder's art, we bring buildings into scrutiny and toward utility in the comprehensive study of humankind.
Buildings are neglected for different reasons. Some are the exotic products of indigenous people in places unknown to us. But others are familiar, maybe too familiar. The architectural historian who lavishes attention yet again on some canonical monument probably lives in a house of a kind that has wholly eluded serious study. Pondering why some buildings get studied and others do not, we are likely to argue that some buildings are important and others are not. Then pondering the emptiness of that answer, we find that important buildings can be interpreted as displays of the values we value — grandeur, perhaps, or originality — while unimportant buildings display values that we have not yet learned to appreciate. Neglect is a sign of ignorance. The term, I repeat, marks the transition from the unknown to the known: we call buildings "vernacular" because they embody values alien to those cherished in the academy. When we called buildings "folk," the implication was that they countered in commonness and tradition the pretense and progress that dominate simple academic schemes. Folk buildings contained a different virtue. The study of vernacular architecture, through its urge toward the comprehensive, accommodates cultural diversity. It welcomes the neglected into study in order to acknowledge the reality of difference and conflict.
Should we wonder why architectural study has aped the study of art in its erection of a canon of important buildings, we will find, on reflection, a host of causes. One of them has to do with the ease of procedure. Selecting a few buildings, a few architects, and then linking them up chronologically, we can borrow the facile techniques of the historian of great men and events. But taking the comprehensive view and recognizing diversity, the study of vernacular architecture drives toward better historical procedures, ones that focus existentially on action and lead to the construction of a multiplex idea of time. We call buildings vernacular to highlight the cultural and contingent nature of all building.
Proposing distinctions and labeling buildings along the way, the study of vernacular architecture is an approach to the whole of the built world. It favors completeness, recognizes diversity, and seeks ways to use buildings as evidence in order to tell better versions of the human story. In the future, it will be obsolete, but now the term "vernacular" is one of the tools we use when we face architectural objects with a wish to crack them open and learn their meanings.
Materialization
Architecture works in space as history works in time. History interrupts time's ceaseless flow, segmenting and reordering it on behalf of the human need for meaning. Architecture intrudes in the limitless expanse of space, dividing it into useful, comprehensible pieces. Converting space into places through disruption, architecture brings meaning to the spatial dimension.
With astronomy as the extreme instance, the architectural impulse begins in exploration and naming. The baby crawls upon a softness that matures in meaning as time passes and names pile up: the softness is a rug, it is a red rug, it is a mediocre late nineteenth-century eagle Kazak. The explorer ventures into unknown territory to parcel and claim it with names that commemorate his heroism. Through time, names accumulate on the land and combine to recall its history: the sequence of settlement, the conflict between the invader and the native.
The name is a fleeting means for bringing history into space and marking the land as meaningful. Marking becomes firmer with physical alteration, when a trail is blazed through a forest, or one stone is piled on another to set a limit. More stones confirm the limit and rise into walls: the wall the Chinese built that turned the mounted warriors westward toward Europe, the wall the Romans struck across Britain to cede the heathy highlands to the wild men of the north, the walls of forts along the borders, the walls of prisons and gated communities, the walls of the cottage where the bold thresherman, his day's work done, dandles the baby on his knee.
With the act of physical alteration that calls time into space, implying a past and a future, and with the walls that divide space, at once including and excluding, architecture has happened.
Architecture gives physical form to claims and names, to memories and hopes. As a conceptual activity, architecture is a matter of forming ideas into plans, plans into things that other people can see. Architecture shapes relations between people. It is a kind of communication. The mode of its thinking connects architecture to all of culture, but its mode of realization distinguishes it from other varieties of communication. To be architecture, it must be realized in materials.
The decision to create a building is the decision to destroy some part of the material universe. Things are wrecked — trees are toppled, stone is broken, old houses are razed — to make life better. The desire is for improvement. The process of the desire is technological.
Technology is a corollary of human existence. It is the means of our extension into space, as natural to people as swimming is to fish. As life unfolds, every technological act brings changes in two great relations: the one that always connects the human and nonhuman spheres, the other that is built to connect people with one another.
Architectural Technology
The relation of the human and nonhuman begins its transformation in the first step of technology, the selection of materials. A distinction between local and imported materials was among the first criteria that writers, in England particularly, used to define vernacular architecture. Vernacular buildings are composed of local materials, they argued. During travel, they enjoyed watching the substrate of the earth rise and form into buildings, crossing the land in bands of sandstone, limestone, and granite, and they deplored the rash of red brick buildings that spread along the railways, oblivious to geological differences. Their taste was built on conventional dichotomies: natural and artificial, native and alien, old and new, local and national, handmade and industrial. The contemporary cynic would find their view easy to deconstruct as elitist and dismiss as sentimental. But they were on to something.
During architectural fieldwork, I have taught myself to concentrate on form, but everywhere I go the people whose houses I study classify buildings by materials, and especially by roofing. I found in Turkey that the local historians separated old houses with flat roofs from new houses with pitched roofs covered by purchased materials. In Bangladesh, village people, thinking less about history than social class, divide buildings by the materials of their walls — stuccoed brick versus puddled mud or bamboo lashed in tension — and by their roofs of thatch or tin. In Africa and Latin America, thatch is comparably yielding to tin, and in the rural United States one age gave way to another when wooden shingles were replaced by shiny sheets of metal.
I learned the lesson of this change first in Ireland. In Ballymenone, a farming community where I drew a plan of every house and classified them into four distinct types, the people classified them into two groups by materials, separating houses that were thatched from those that were roofed with slate or metal.
Joe Murphy, Johnny Drumm, and Tommy Love, masters of thatching, taught me the logic that lay beneath their distinction. Thatch makes good insulation. It is warm in the winter, cool in the summer. Environmentally efficient, thatch is also beautiful. Looking downhill at a house he had recently roofed, Tommy Love said, "When it is new with straw, it shines like gold. The sun glints off it, and it is lovely. It is lovely, right enough."
Efficient and beautiful, thatching is also economical. Its main demand is time, and in Ballymenone they say that the man who made time made plenty. Thatch also requires a knowledge of growing things, the understanding of seeds and soil and weather that farmers develop during time passed in place. The material grows from the ground. It is an endlessly renewable resource, and it is processed and applied by hand, with no need for expensive machinery. Thatching takes knowledge and skill, it is a job for the man called handy, but it is a technology that requires no money.
The problem is that thatch demands regular maintenance and frequent replacement. The metal roof obviates the need for constant intervention; it is effectively permanent. The householder is not obliged to be a craftsman or to be connected — as they were in Ballymenone through trades of aid — with neighbors who are skilled. He manages alone without effort or knowledge or talent or social connection. But metal does not suit the climate. It works little better in cool, humid Ireland than it does in hot, humid Bangladesh, where the tin roof roasts you in summer. And metal is not beautiful. Ellen Cutler said it broke her heart when she used the royalties she received from my first book on Ballymenone to strip the thatch from her home and roof it with metal. Her house, she said, had turned ugly. But she made the change because of "the times that are in it."
Those times, in Ellen Cutler's mind, were characterized by the melting away of intimate social orders in the heat of Ulster's political troubles, and they were marked by shifts in fashion. Mrs. Cutler belonged to a small rural community where it was satisfying to live in the largest, loveliest thatched house. Dick, her son, lived in the same place, but he belonged to a vast rural proletariat. He worked for wages paid by an agricultural entrepreneur. She knew he would never move into a thatched house — so old and cranky, so very Irish — so she ruined its looks, turning it ugly to make it suit him. She was successful. When Mrs. Cutler died in 1981, Dick moved his family up the hill, and, as she had hoped, Cutler blood kept flowing on Cutler land. Her change brought continuity.
The metal roof fits the times. The times demand money. Manufactured in a mill beyond the horizon, moved by rail and road, sheet metal roofing obliges people to collect specimens of their national currency. They are drawn into paying jobs, becoming the little wheels in the big machine that gathers wealth for distant capitalists. Out of the house for most of the day and beat at its end, people have no time to build through cordial conversations the friendships that once brought a thatcher to the house in exchange for agricultural produce.
The connections shaped by thatching — between people and nature, between people and people — were direct and intensely local. The change from thatch to tin signals the surrender of local autonomy. In Ireland, as in Bangladesh, people have chosen to adjust to the times. They have chosen permanence, reliance on distant producers, and participation in the international cash economy.
Not from the perspective of a privileged observer, whether cynical or sentimental, but from the perspective of the people who live the life, we can sum things up. In the shift from local to imported materials, there is a loss in environmental efficiency and a loss in beauty. There is a gain in permanence, which is compensation for a loss of skill and social connection. The loss of the pleasure taken from a job well done, and the burden of the need for cash, must be set against the prestige that is supposed to accrue to the one who purchases expensive objects. Become a consumer, one reorients. Breaking away from the neighbors with their delicate sense of local hierarchy, people come into comparison with others who, they say in Ballymenone, have money like hay. What is lost is security. What is gained is the hope that commodities will somehow balance the account.
The meanings that lie in the selection of materials are social and economic as well as environmental. But the environment sets the stakes. Living wisely in a tight place, people learn the environment. They know how to select from it the right materials for the job. The prime virtue in materials is their ability to alter the climate, shaping a little environment within which architecture can be forgotten and life can go on. It is a matter on which cultures differ, but when people seek separation from nature, which all of them do in bad weather, their actions often glide out of the pragmatic and into the aesthetic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Vernacular Architecture by Henry Glassie. Copyright © 2000 Henry Glassie. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Vernacular Architecture
Architectural Technology
Social Orders
Composition
Architectural Decoration
Complexity in Architectural Time
Compositional Levels
History
The American Landscape
An Entry to American History
Comparison to Ireland
The United States in the Nineteenth Century
Pattern in Time
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index