“This Scene Is Itself Living”

Abstract

What do houses do to the people who daily live with them? In what sense are houses themselves living things? If they live and act, how then to conceive of the relationship between built and natural landscapes? This chapter, an episodic intellectual history, considers three distinct but mutually referential moments at which cultural geographers have attempted to answer these questions while steering clear of the simple visions of environmental causation and constraint favored by determinists, who dominated academic geography into the early twentieth century. It begins with the work of Carl Sauer, by 1925 the major American figure refuting environmental determinism at a theoretical level and recommending the study of housing as a transcript of human action. It looks back to the 1870s and the American writings of Friedrich Ratzel, one of several German scholars canonized by Sauer, to illuminate a still more vitalistic ontology of domestic architecture, and an urbanism untapped by Sauer in filing his dissent. It then looks ahead to midcentury studies of vernacular architecture—by those of Sauer’s students friendlier to urban life than he was, and by his friend J.B. Jackson—to assess how this inheritance came to inform critiques of industrial modernity in the postwar United States, as well as how it might articulate with critical currents in geography’s twenty-first century.