So What?

1. So What?

2. The Final Exam is not the answer Exam is Monday April 27, from noon to 2:30. Come prepared to write. Four parts: • Single sentence answers defining core elements of readings. 2. Reading and writing about Vernacular. 3. What did selected articles tell us about American culture? 4. Tools employed in the study of Vernacular Architecture.

3. Read Critically—Read Actively 1. Question authority, question your impressions. 2. Emotions are our first line of reasoning, but one must move beyond the gut to the head. 3. Even bad reasoning may reach reasonable conclusions. Read for method, hypothesis, evidence, and argument. 4. Bad reasoning comes in many forms. a. Assuming similar motives for actions between past and present. b. What we see today is what there was. c. Racial assumptions of homogeneity. d. The dominance of design over function. e. Using available literature when it doesn't fit. f. Assuming that the simpler the form the earlier the structure g. Environmental determinism 5. Some useful tools of critique a. The distinction between necessary and sufficient b. Hierarchy of trim. c. First effective settlement d. Question connoisseurship, don’t dismiss it e. Expect change f. What are the alternative explanations?

4. Classifying the literature of Vernacular Architecture Vernacular architecture has been a catch-all term for the study of kinds of buildings that are thought to have been neglected by traditional architectural history. Multi-disciplinary activity, but not often synthesis of different disciplinary methods. Articles often focus and draw conclusions at different levels of analysis. Object oriented studies Socially oriented studies Culturally oriented studies Symbolically oriented studies

5. Have we moved beyond the goals of style books of the McAlesters and others? What value is style? Style is used as a prescriptive and descriptive term It isn’t that style doesn’t exist for the owners/occupants, but that stylistic analysis is most often not a revealed product of analysis, but categories of classification. How have terms like style and fashion been used in this class? Form (how was it different for Hirshorn and Groth?) Decorative details. Prescriptive and descriptive literature Prescriptive literature gives accounts of how it ought to be done. Prescriptive literature reacts against current activities Descriptive literature describes how things are or were. Historical approach gives facts as important to community. Archaeological approach gives evidence important to researcher Popular literature focused upon the anxieties and enthusiasms of a market segment.

6. factors in understanding buildings in this course Occupant and owner Strip owners designing to be seen Working class rooming house Golf courses on the strip Builder and subsequent occupants Making a House a Home (Gray Read) House Trailers (Wallis) The concept of modern Outside of time, or the negation of time Fashionable, the profane aspects of churches Save time, white towers, commercial strips, What to do with the time we saved, miniature golf

7. What have the different disciplines contributed? Architects and Architectural Historians. Predisposed to consider architects and design pre-eminent, these scholars have the skills to examine the interface between market-driven design and client or consumer needs. Historians and archaeologists. Added nuance to the colonial corpus of vernacular architecture. The colonial period stretches into the nineteenth century when ethnicity raises issues of survivability and assimilation. How are acculturation and assimilation different? American studies and folklore contributed? Question the corpus. Tend to believe that they push architecture studies to review more mundane and products of lower classes. Cultural Geography. Importance of cultural landscape and looking beyond buildings. Tools of research across large areas. Cultural geographers seek to explain processes of culture—as distinct from the particularizing activity of historians who sought to create a picture of change tied to individual characters and circumstances. Marwyn Samuels catches the essential chasm between logical and imagistic explanations of these forms of cultural landscape explanation in his phrase “necessity knows no persuasion (culture). . . where choice knows no refuge (history).”

8. Defining Vernacular Architecture What are the questions appropriate to Vernacular Architecture? Description of the subtle sequence of modification of old buildings. (The ash and trash of close investigation) Correcting the historical description of colonial life showing it to be meaner, nastier, dirtier than ever before thought possible. Using all available literature, trying to discover the illiterate, alliterate, or unrecorded social fabric, interactions, and contemporary interpretations of life before 1920. Written as true, believed as contingent [subject to time]. Lacking truth, vernacular architecture accepts metaphoric and analogic hypotheses as valid attempts at explanation.