The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture

Abstract

THE STUDY OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE DIFFERS FROM OTHER ASPECTS of material culture studies treated in this bibliographical issue in two ways. First, the name itself is inadequate, since an increasingly large number of apparently disparate kinds of buildings have been included under its rubric. While the term will be novel and puzzling to many readers, it was first used in the nineteenth century by architectural theorists to refer to traditional rural buildings of the preindustrial era, buildings that were apparently the houses of yeoman farmers and that seemed not to have been consciously designed or affected by the intellectual and artistic currents of the Renaissance.' They were thought to be in some sense gothic or medieval buildings, even though many of the examples cited were built long after the Reformation. Buildings of this sort or their functional equivalents in America-the log houses of the southern mountains and other folk buildings, for example-have continued to be the principal interest of many students of vernacular architecture. In recent years, however, the term has been extended to include less pretentious examples of any current style: mass-produced, middle-class housing such as one might find in any nineteenthor twentieth-century speculative development, industrial buildings, the architecture of fast-food and other commercial franchises-virtually