Academic literature on the topic 'Domestic Vernacular architecture Vernacular architecture'

The purpose of this thesis is to propose a methodology for documenting historic vernacular houses in Indiana through the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory. The inventory, or survey, is an essential and primary component of historic preservation. With roughly one half of Indiana's counties remaining to be surveyed, there is great opportunity to improve the quality and usefulness of the surveys as scholarship regarding the built environment advances.The thesis examines the definitions of vernacular architecture and sets forth a working definition which is fairly broad in scope. Vernacular house types found in Indiana are enumerated, described, and illustrated.The thesis then examines Indiana's methodology for documenting historic vernacular houses, and it makes recommendations, based on methodologies from other states, for positive charges.This thesis proposes an interdisciplinary approach to conductingsurveys of historic vernacular houses. It draws heavily from related fields such as folklore and material culture studies as well as from several years of experience working CX1 survey projects.The thesis also examines settlement patterns in Indiana and other cultural, building-shaping factors. The thesis is intended to serve as a guide to the vernacular house types in Indiana for use by field surveyors.<br>Department of Architecture

This research is on contemporary attitudes, perceptions, and understandings of vernacular architecture in the context of environmental and cultural sustainability. It uses Kuwait's domestic architecture as a specific case study, in which it employs Kuwait's traditional vernacular architectural elements as a vehicle to further examine socio-cultural, economic, and political issues surrounding the move towards modernity and away from the vernacular and sustainability. The elements are not used to find ways to nostalgically recreate past architecture, instead learn from their principles to inform a more sustainable future. In order to explore this, a mixed method approach has been employed for the study through two stages: the first, qualitatively driven, and the second, a quantitatively driven follow-up. The first stage used two workshops – the first homeowners and second designers, conducted as a platform to simultaneously use questionnaires, cognitive maps, photo elicitation, and group interviews. The second stage continued to use questionnaires and cognitive maps as it examined the findings of the first stage in more detail. More than one method has provided rich descriptive data, which enhanced understandings of Kuwait’s complex social phenomena. The findings highlighted how the effects of modernity changed people’s understandings of their domestic built environments. Specifically how people dealt with and adapted with the collision between traditional concepts and modern practices. For example, how the courtyard has been replaced by the family living room. Moreover, diverse interpretations of the courtyard space revealed how many people perceived the courtyard as spaces in front, back, or around the house, which may suggest how their perceptions of the courtyard is closely linked to the characteristics of the modern villa. There is something about the courtyard that the participants found desirable, which saw it emerging as a consistent theme throughout the methods and stages of the study. Yet the research was unable to narrow down this elusive quality, and perhaps may suggest it is the synthesis of many socio-cultural and environmental factors that makes this element attractive. Other findings continue to reflect people’s adaptation to their environment, only this time in response to government mismanagement of public housing welfare. Scarcity of residential land and high real-estate prices eventually led to Kuwait’s current housing crisis. As a result, people needed more space and added apartments for their children in their houses to secure them future housing. This situation helped to inflame an already sensitive built environment and further reshaped the Kuwaiti house to heterogeneous box like structures. This study captured a moment of Kuwait’s contemporary architectural reality by studying people’s understandings to traditional vernacular elements. In doing so it highlighted an unstable dichotomy between tradition and modernity. It also argues that without a fundamental change in government policy a more sustainable built environment may not be possible.

This thesis examines aspects of the work of American writer and social critic, Lewis Mumford, and the domestic buildings of architect William Wurster. It reveals parallels in their careers, particularly evident in an Arts and Crafts influence and the regional emphasis both men combined with an otherwise overtly Modernist outlook. Several chapters are devoted to the background of, and influences on, Mumford???s regionalism and Wurster???s architecture. Mumford, a spiritual descendent of John Ruskin, admired Wurster???s work for its reflection of his own regionalist ideas, which are traced to Arts and Crafts figures Patrick Geddes, William Morris, William Lethaby and Ruskin. These figures are important to this study, firstly because the influence of their philosophical perspective allowed Mumford, almost uniquely, to position himself as a spokesman for both Romanticism and Modernism with equal validity, and secondly because of their influence upon early Californian architects such as Bernard Maybeck, and subsequently upon Wurster and his colleagues. Throughout the thesis, an important architectural distinction is highlighted between regional Modernism and the International Style. This distinction polarised the American architectural community after Mumford published an article in 1947 suggesting that the ???Bay Region Style??? represented a regionally appropriate alternative to the abstract formulas of International Style architecture and nominated Wurster as its most significant representative. Wurster???s regional Modernism was distinct from the bulk of American Modernism because of its regional influences and its indebtedness to vernacular forms, apparent in buildings such as his Gregory Farmhouse. In 1948, Henry-Russel Hitchcock organised a symposium at New York???s Museum of Modern Art to refute Mumford???s article. Its participants acrimoniously rejected a regionalist alternative to the International Style, and architectural historians have suggested that authentic regional development in the Bay Region largely ceased because of such adverse theoretical and academic scrutiny. After examining the influences on Mumford and Wurster, the thesis concludes that twentieth century regional architectural development in the San Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional and vernacular rather than emulate historical styles or follow theoretical models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the vernacular, regional and historical in modern architecture.