Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century

Theory, Education and Practice

Lindsay Asquith, Marcel Vellinga, Lindsay Asquith, Marcel Vellinga

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134325535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The issues surrounding the function and meaning of vernacular architecture in the twenty-first century are complex and extensive. Taking a distinctively rigorous theoretical approach, this book considers these issues from a number of perspectives, broadening current debate to a wider multidisciplinary audience. These collected essays from the leading experts in the field focus on theory, education and practice in this essential sector of architecture, and help to formulate solutions to the environmental, disaster management and housing challenges facing the global community today.

Part I
The vernacular as process

Chapter 1
Building tradition
Control and authority in vernacular architecture

Simon J. Bronner

Introduction

Eminently visible, persistent and complex, buildings are artefacts people allow to enclose them rather than to control in their hands. As artefacts, they therefore bring into question control, human ability to create anew and alter the old. Bound up with control is the issue of authority: by whose standards, by what precedents, with whose skills, creation and alteration will occur. Since buildings commonly combine a public façade with a private interior, control and authority are often contested for the physical boundaries between public and private space, and their social borders. After all, buildings rise above human scale, and extend the social interaction that occurs within and around them. Paul Oliver has argued that indeed, they are of a ‘scale and complexity that exceeds all man’s other artefacts, demanding in many cases considerable investments of labour and resources’ (Oliver 1986: 113).

Those buildings that belong to a place, that express the local or regional dialect, are often called vernacular. The linguistic analogy of the vernacular speech of building and dialect is significant because it allows for comparison of grammar and syntax, as well as style or manner of expression in material and verbal forms (Oliver 1997b: xxi). It names a category of expression for the majority of the world’s buildings that come into being without schooled architects, and that in fact offer long-standing reminders of the labour and resources in a cultural environment. Drawing on the root of vernacular from the Latin vernaculus, or ‘native’, these buildings tell what is indigenous, common and shared in a community or region. Vernacular identifies buildings as social representations and links them to coherent cultural systems of values and beliefs. This point is evident in Oliver’s influential definition of vernacular architecture used in his monumental Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997a):

Vernacular architecture comprises the dwellings and other buildings of the people. Related to their environmental contexts and available resources, they are customarily owner- or community-built, utilizing traditional technologies. All forms of vernacular architecture are built to meet specific needs, accommodating the values, economies and ways of living of the cultures that produce them.

(Oliver 1997b: xxiii)

The above definition apparently is an answer to the question of visibly locating vernacular architecture in the broad global landscape. It emphasizes, after all, the building as a text within environmental contexts and available technologies. The last sentence, however, suggests another question of process, for if buildings represent the cultures that produce them, then how is it and why is it that they are produced? The answer emanates from the ways that a people’s values, ‘ways of living’ and ways of building are transmitted and inherited. In short, we are led to issues of tradition to interrogate the visibility, persistence and complexity of architecture as a problem of continuity and change. Considering tradition should allow us to answer not only textual questions of why buildings look the way they do and why they are located where they are, but also processual questions of why they came into being and how they changed along the way.

Central to the explanation of continuity and change is the control and authority by which ‘owner’ and ‘community’ conceive the public environments they see and feel, and the ones they allow to enclose them. Those thorny matters often carry a reference to tradition since decisions about the shape of the future are based on the influence of precedent. Lest one assume that vernacular architectural texts are static points on the globe, tradition takes into account the balance of individual innovation and social custom in the generation of material culture (Martin 1983; Bronner 1992, 2000a; Glassie 1993). Concern for the traditional in architecture therefore poses not only the question of what tradition is within a society or community, but even more importantly, what it does (see Riesman 1961; Shils 1971; Milspaw 1983; Glassie 1985; Rapoport 1989).

Tradition, transmission and creativity

Tradition can refer to both a cultural context as well as a performed text. Oliver offers an analogy from linguistics of parole as the ‘rule system’ (or competence) governing langue, the expression or performance (see De Saussure 1972; Hymes 1972; Jakobson and Bogatyrev 1980; Ben-Amos 1984: 121-4; Bauman 1992). Tradition can be both subject and object; tradition shapes building and buildings embody traditions. The common use of ‘traditional’ to describe building is a reference to the structure as an object within a broader category of vernacular or indigenous, although as a subject all vernacular dwellings embody traditions.

If the vernacular implies a culturally based, generative grammar for material texts, then tradition is a reference to the learning that generates cultural expressions and the authority that precedent holds. This construct of tradition as a process of socially shared knowledge and transmission across time and space is the source of conceptualizing a model of explanation in vernacular architecture. Oliver underscores this direction for explanation by suggesting usage of ‘vernacular know-how’ or the ‘faculty of knowing’. He writes:

within the context of vernacular architecture it embraces what is known and what is inherited about the dwelling, building, or settlement. It includes the collective wisdom and experience of a society, and the norms that have become accepted by the group as being appropriate to its built environment.

(Oliver 1986: 113)

In making decisions about building, tradition is a constant social reference, and in vernacular building, implies a certain force of authority. It is not equal to ‘rule’, and in fact, implies unwritten or even unconscious codes of doing things that foster variation, since a single tradition as it has been interpreted (especially in religion) can spawn many versions (see Shils 1971; Glassie 1974; Bronner 1986a). Tradition as a reference to precedent is therefore not fixed, and as a social construction, it is often renegotiated in every generation and in every community. Tradition as an idea invites commentary and interpretation, and negotiation of allowable innovation, which might later become part of the dynamic of tradition. As Henry Glassie has observed, ‘Tradition’s detractors associate it with stasis and contrast it with change, but it is rooted in volition and it flowers in variation and innovation.’ In relation to control and authority, tradition ‘opposes the alien and imposed’ (Glassie 1993: 9).

Just as the individual (or in reference to control, the ‘owner’) responds to the perception of tradition belonging to the group or community and works identity into this relationship, so then is creativity a necessary component of tradition because the possibility of change is inexorably linked to continuity of form and process over time (Evans 1982; Kristeller 1983; Santino 1986; Jones 1989; Bronner 1992; Bronner 2000a). In Henry Glassie’s study of Turkish traditional artists, for example, he effectively viewed tradition as ‘the collective resource, essential to all creativity, and in adjective form it can qualify the products of people who keep faith with their dead teachers and their live companions while shaping their actions responsibly’ (Glassie 1993: 9). The linking of creativity and tradition suggests a modern philosophy of the arts that ‘the ability to create is not limited to artists or writers but extends to many more, and perhaps to all, areas of human activity and endeavour’ (Kristeller 1983: 106). This broadening of artistry suggests creativity as a social ideal. This ideal succeeds the Romantic notion of art and architecture as the sole domain of exceptional cultivated minds, existing free of tradition, and as an expression of originality or genius that can create something where nothing existed previously (summarized as ‘creation’). There is not one capitalized Tradition in architecture in a modern philosophy of the arts, but a multiplicity of traditions to explore, for tradition in its multiple, abstract existence does not form a simple contrast with creativity. We may recognize situations and societies in which the pressure to repeat precedent is strong when tradition may be re-introduced or re-established as a creative contribution. In any case, innovation is based on an understanding of precedents, many of which will be perceived as traditional. Creativity and tradition are intertwined, and represent the complex processes of humans expressing themselves to others in ways that carry value and meaning. Tradition, in this view, provides a framework allowing for choice and adaptation. It demands attention to form, fidelity to cultural continuity, while inviting alteration and extension for social needs.

Tradition, choice and expectation

One of the assumptions of the vernacular as part of a modern philosophy of the arts is that in the vernacular, tradition tends to dominate, by which is meant that choices are restricted. By stating that there is a vernacular is to imply that there is a shared social understanding of cultural standards, customs and norms. But choices are nonetheless apparent in the performance of customs and enforcement of norms. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes the process of tradition as one of ‘constraint’ rather than repetition. The question it raises is critical to the reformation of culture: ‘Out of all the things that have been handed down to us and that we now possess, what do we choose, and what are we compelled, to pass on?’ Tuan reflects that ‘perhaps what we must seek to retain are not so much particular artefacts and buildings (though we should try to do so in exceptional instances), but rather the skill to reproduce them’ (Tuan 1989: 33). Amos Rapoport picks up this theme in his effort to define the attributes of tradition in relation to the analysis of the built environment (Rapoport 1989). While Rapoport finds tradition associated with ‘conservatism’ in the sense of accepting the past, continuity and repetition, Tuan offers the less politically loaded (and often negative) sense of ‘waiting’ in tradition. I prefer the idea of ‘expectation’ coupled with reliance, implying social connection and trust, and as I shall discuss with some native descriptions of tradition, a notion of security. ‘Dependence’ would not offer choice, but reliance does, and the sense of reliable connotes the rationality of being time tested. What is significant in the modern concept of tradition is that the past becomes part of the present as a guide to future action. Avoiding the word ‘past’ as well as its sense of a distant time, Rapoport considers the prevailing question to be ‘what is repeated, through what mechanisms it is repeated, and what, if anything, makes it meaningful’ (Rapoport 1989: 82).

Using the linguistic model of vernacular, we may think of tradition as the local saying that gains credit by long and frequent use. Structured as a proverb, the saying offers the wisdom of many expressed by one person, but may not need a long precedent (Taylor 1994). Its wisdom is a result of an important aspect of tradition, social acceptance. As an adage, the saying takes on significance because of being transmitted, and tested, through time, and may be used variously influenced by the performer’s perception of certain situations and surroundings. Adage implies wisdom that one may choose to follow or at least recognize, in contrast to the ‘maxim’ which is more of a rule of conduct. The range in these types of sayings shows the way that tradition covers a range of control and authority, and can become contentious for a community as a result. In the modern concept, it is important to take note of the performance of the tradition, and observe that the tradition of the proverb can be customary, as in a practice followed as a matter of course among a people or community, or by an individual as part of the person’s experience and way of living. In this analogy, builders can use forms and techniques that they recognize from tradition as socially accepted and time tested, and residents alter and apply their experiences in the house. To be sure, the house is not an utterance, and in its persistence as a form and complexity as a process, it stands boldly on the landscape. It frames experience and custom by providing a basic human need for shelter and symbolizing social existence. Sheltering people as well as symbolizing them, elevated above them and enclosing them, the house can be a constant, longstanding reminder of tradition, and often its standing in a culture.

Tradition as process

Viewing tradition as a process, then, an eye toward tradition in the vernacular landscape takes in several significant implications:

1. As consistencies are apparent in any single time among buildings, the question arises as to the force of tradition as a social construction in dictating the similarities. The understanding is that there is a perception of cultural precedent by which forms are generated. In the interrogation of tradition is revealed the process of learning or direction from ‘tradition bearers’ to others or the socially shared events in which tradition is invoked.
2. As inconsistencies are apparent in different periods, the question arises to the forces in tradition that allow builders to change and innovate. The understanding is that the vernacular, being rooted in tradition, is less apt to change, and therefore when significant change occurs, it implies major social structural shifts. Implied in this understanding is that communities perpetuate their traditions from one generation to another in various, and often culturally specific ways – in apprenticeships, in rituals and festive events, in family and community institutions, for instance.
3. As variations are apparent in communities or regions, the question arises to the communication of tradition across space. The understanding is that tradition diffuses in traceable patterns and cultural influences. The implication is that various influences affect diffusion, including geographic, social and economic opportunities and barriers, technology and economic connections, linguistic connections from one group to another, political organization and self-perceptions of insiders (what may be referred to as ‘identity’) and attitudes toward outsiders. 4 As variations are apparent among the dwellings of different builders and residents who have physically adapted the structure for their use, the question arises about the dynamic of creativity and tradition in individual decisions about the appearance of buildings. Implicit in this question is the role of individuality within a culture. As tradition itself suggests an ethnographic focus on the ‘performance’ or enactment of a building, the question of variation often adds the behavioural issues (i.e. based on personal, material enactments of ideas and involving communication systems of symbols) of ‘technical competence’ (culturally developed skills and talents), ‘decoration and style’, ‘use and function’, ‘arrangement’, or ‘aesthetics’ to the more textual methodology associated with the comparison of form (floor plans and elevations) and materials of construction.

In sum, tradition is performative, and in oral tradition can be traced to other performers with attention to the style and variation of singers, speakers and tellers. Indeed, with songs, speech and tales, tradition as a behavioural process is frequently invoked because the performer is more apparent than in architecture. It appears, in fact, that in uttering, rather than building material texts in situational and cultural contexts, the performer is more in control of tradition in the shaping of a performance (Evans 1982; Bauman 1992; Jones 1997). Part of the reason that tradition as an explanatory concept has not been more applied to building is that scholars typically approach the building as text rather than event or process (see Glassie 1972; Upton 1979; Upton 1985; Herman 1985; Jones 1997). It can be argued, in fact, that vernacular rather than ‘traditional’ became appealing as an adjective for architecture because it allowed the viewer license to identify cultures through consistencies in building styles without full knowledge of human mediation and customs involving them (see Bronner 1979; Heath 1988). Vernacular allows for distancing people as agents of their own artefacts.

With tradition as a consideration in material culture, it is not just the skill or procedure of construction that is in question, but the way that knowledge of design and values is inherited, adapted and transmitted. From a textual point of view, variation in architecture is assumed to be across space, thus lending itself to an identification of types and the mapping of regions. The impression is given that an organic progression, apart from the volition of human builders, occurs as one surveys patterns across the landscape (see Noble 1984; Ensminger 1992). But with more inquiry into tradition, the relations of self to community, continuity to change and innovation to conformity come to the fore to explain technological and adaptive choices that lead to variation or social perceptions and contexts influencing change.

An important query involving tradition is the way that it relates to modern pluralistic societies in which, as Tuan claims, individual choices are more abundant and innovation is encouraged. Although it may appear that tradition ‘is lost’, arguably the number of available and emergent traditions greatly multiply. Indeed, a complex issue is the changing nature of tradition within modern industrialized states. Although tradition following Robert Redfield’s paradigm of the ‘little community’ and folk society is associated anthropologically with small homogeneous groups and a limited space, and assumed to be passively received, tradition in modern society is still at work on a mass scale as a cultural reference to a way of doing things or an appeal to the authenticity provided by ‘roots’ (see Redfield 1947; Foster 1953; Redfield 1960; Bauman 1983; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1983; Sider 1986; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; Bronner 2002a). Because of the perceived need to have tradition as a basis for claiming a cultural identity or marketing authenticity (i.e. cultural tourism), frequently traditions are invented, marketed or constructed (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Bendix 1989; Cantwell 1993; Becker 1998; Tuleja 1997). Rapoport notes contrasts in the survival of traditional groups and products in centralized states such as France in comparison to the diversity of the US (Rapoport 1989: 99). This survivalist concern is understandable, considering the cultural historian’s worry about the preservation of vernacular environments in mass culture, but the query that reveals the dynamic nature of transmitted, inherited tradition, as well as modernity, is one about continuity and change. The focus is on the creative choices made as individuals perceive the external authority of tradition.

Representations of the dynamics of tradition in twenty-first-century America

By way of example of the explanatory project incorporating tradition to analyses of vernacular architecture in complex societies, I offer a comparative summary of three representations of the dynamics of tradition in twenty-first-century America: seasonal construction of the Jewish sukkah, Amish community barn-raising and Houston’s ‘recycled’ houses. I order them in their historical reach: the sukkah is an ancient structure codified in a religious text, the barn-raising among the Amish originating in Europe developed in the last two hundred years, and the ‘recycled’ houses, or homemade environments, date to the late twentieth century. With each, the control that individuals exert over their environments in response to mass society, and therefore the meaning of tradition, are frequently at issue.

The sukkah (plural: sukkot), translated roughly as booth or tabernacle, is central to the Jewish thanksgiving holiday of Sukkot or ‘the Festival of Booths’. It drew my attention because it is a holiday revolving around the construction of a primitive dwelling, intentionally meant to be temporary. The building of this structure is an annual remind...