NOTES: Oliver, P. (1998) ‘Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
NOTES:
Oliver, P. (1998) ‘Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
PREFACE:
- Case studies are usually culturally rather than nationally defined
- Entries in second part should be through cultures and not through nationalities
- “my own concern is for the survival of the vernacular in the 21st century. This is not merely an interest in the safeguarding of tradition in the face of technological change though this plays a part
- More significantly, I consider that the sustainability of the wisdom, skills and the satisfaction of human needs embodied in vernacular traditions, is of major importance to future generations. Moreover, there is the identification with tradition and the significance of building heritage in giving material expression to it. Yet i believe that the study and conservation of vrnacular traditions, and the abilities necessary to sustain them is fundamental to the housing of millions in the 21st century. By then, the population of the indian sub-continent alone will be approaching a billion people of whom as many as 95% will be living in vernacular buildings. Mass housing is rarely successful and always wasteful of skills, knowledge and motivation; the solution to the worlds housing demands will only be met, i believe, in the forthcoming century, through the support, enhancement and adequate servicing of verncular architecture.
INTRODUCTION:
- Vernacular architecture is now the term most widely used to denote
o Indigenous
o Tribal
o Folk
o Peasant
o Traditional
Architecture
- Encyclopedia covers
o Traditional self built
o Community built buildings
o Secular and sacrdfocus is on vernacular architecture that has been in use in the 20th century
- Many aspects of social structure
o Beief system
o Behavioral patterns
Strongly influence builting types
Functions
Meanings
Though they differ in their application throughout the world
o Dual nature of vrnacular architecture
- Defining Vernacular Architecture
o Overall definition of vernacular
Term is used to embrace an immense range of building types
Forms
Traditions
Uses
Contexts
o The majority of worlds buildings are systematically omitted
o Neglected heritage
o Referred to as:
Indigenous architecture
Folk architecture
Pasant
Rural
‘traditional a wide variation
• Alternative term
o Vernacular is the indigenous idion:
Latin
• Vernaculus, native
o Corporate image structures
20th century vernacular
Neo-vernacular:
• Architect designed building that have in some manner been influenced by or in the form of a vernacular tradition.
o While the greater proportion of urban buildings were architect designed, or were contractor built popular architecture, a significant number are survivors or vernacular traditions.
o Every building exists in an environmental context
o Conditioned by the capacity of the land to support a given population
Economy of culture affects choice of site
Bearing on the structures that are possible
For each building has to be constructed of materials which, in the vernacular, are most frequently obtained locally from the natural resources of a region.
o Subject to the vagaries of weather, buildings are required to protects their occupants from environmental extremes
o Create micro-climates
o Compatible with human physical effort.
o Vernacular building in one part of the world may display solutions to structural problems that are similar to those in other regions.
- It is particularily characteristic of vernacular architecture that each tradition is intimately related tosocial and ecenomic imperitives
o Developed to meet specific means within each cultural milieu
o The larger bearing of social structure has a bearing on the spacial organization of settlements
o Esoteric knowledge such as geomancy gives guidance to the location/direction of some.
o Building may be learned from successive generations
- May symbolize concepts of the cosmos, or act as an analogue for the abstraction of belief
- Dwelling may reflect both the material and spiritual worlds of its builders and ocupiers
- To seek a singular definition of vernacular architecture is probably ill-advised.
o Reduces richness and diversity
- Vernacular architecture comrises the dwellings and all other buildings of the people
- Related to their environmental contexts and available resources
- Custimarily:
o Owner or community built
o Utilizing traditional technologies
o All forms of vernacular architecture are built to meet specific needs
o Accomodate the values
o Economies
o Ways of life
o And of living
o To the cultures that produce them.
THE STUDY OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE:
- Part of the record of individually motivated explorations
- Informative of ‘pre-contact’ indigenous architectural traditions
- Requirement to understand ‘native’ cultures being regarded as necessary adjunct to effective administration
- Contributed important ethnographies
- Examples of vernacular achitecture were featured in international exposistions
o Expressions of national identity
o Benevolent colonialism
- Established concerns of art and architectural historians
- Classification of aesthetic styles persisted
- Modernist turned to vernacular as means of inspiration
- Endorsment of the functional aesthetic
o Ranging from
Modular co-ordination to
Megastructure design
- 1964: Architecture without Architects
- Studies of the vernacular architecture of entire contries:
o Camaroon (1954)
o Romania (1958)
o Portugal (1961)
- Urgent drive to record vernacular buildings
- The relentles drive towards modernization has attracted millions of people from rural area to the cities of the ‘third world’ resulting in rapid urban growth and the abandonment of their former homes.
- Replica details have become a feature of the vernacularization of popular architecture
o The romantic image replaces the authentic
- Have often become symbols of ethnicity or nationality
o Museum emphasis on excepional
- 1975 europe adds ‘groups or lesser buildings in our old towns and characteristic villages in their natural and man made settings’
A WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VERNACULAT ARCHITECTURE:
- A comprehensive reference work of vernacular architecture studies
- Categorization
o Fundamental prinicple of encyclodedia
Often classified at local or regional scale
Material used in construction
Other means:
• Structural systems
• Resultant forms
• Types of styles (repreresnt)
Vernacular architecture appropriate to there resources, technologies, and phyisical or spiritual needs
Categorization by cultures
• Presents problems
o Traditions vary through regions
o Even if cultural differentiation less ‘easy’ to name or identify
Socil systems and value systems which contribute to the shaping of diverse
• built environments, including
o economy,
o territory,
o settlement pattern,
o inheritance,
o spatial hierarchy
o belief
o symbolism
can be argued:
• research in vernacular architecture stems either from the study of buildings as artefacts
• or of the cultures that produce them.
Materials and construction and the enrichment of their meaning.
• Types and uses
• As well as the specific circumstance of their emergence.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL:
- 1960’s ‘humanness’ of architecture
- An important topic became the quest for potential factors which determine the shape of architectural factors which determine the shape of architectural constructions and which can explain the enormousdiversity of the house forms
COGNITIVE:
- Cognition
o Area of psychological study
Deals with nature and knowledge
What is known
Environmental cognition
Concerned with environmental knowing
While earlier work is concerned with how the envirnoment
• As physical artefact
Was cognized by individuals
• Later effort have brought social and cultural aspects as well.
o Vernacular building dominated by the errenous conception:
The myth of the ‘unselfconsciouss builder’
• Sees vernacular communities as
o Pristine
o Primitive
o Cognitivley egalitarian
o Unspecialized settings
o In which every user is a
“dweller-user-architect-builder-decision maker
o Determining the design,
Use
Construction
o In terms of shared unchanging traditions.
o ‘architecture without architects’ may have some examples
o ‘cognitiv caretakers’ of what is architecturally appropriate exist in most cultures
• The perspective of researchers are often positivley biased towards vernacular architecture while those of many policy makers, especially those in developing countries are strongly influenced by images of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, leading them to denegrate vernacular forms.
‘cognitive map’ spacial array of remembered and evaluated places
The concept, intorduced by psychologist
• Tolman (1948)
• Downs (1973)
• Stea (1977)
o ‘Designative (denoative)
o ‘Apprasive’ (connotative)
Designative:
• Show features of the physical environment that people know or remember.
Appraisive maps define what they feel about features
good or bad
safe or dangerous
beautiful or ugly
- cognitive mapping has become inextricably associated with environmental imigary
o especially of cities
o lynch’s study of urban places
resulting segmentation into landmarks
districts
paths
edges
nodes
later replicated in many cities of the first and third world
establishes a set of place categories that define the urban experience.
o Cognition Settlement and Vernacular Architecture
Represent relations between the physical and social worlds
‘family’
The body of persons who live in one house
• Mobile bedoin tent
o Discourges this ideal
Incorporation of outdoor space into the family unit
o Cognition and ethnophsychology:
Vernacular architctures vary with culture
Recognize ‘indiginous psychologie’
Emphasis the context of cognition
• Ecological
• Cultural
• Political
• Historical
• Internally valid repository of explanations for events.
Such behavior involves decision about, attribution of meaning to, and behaviour in, built environments
• All fundamentally related to cognition
Cognition, then, extends imagined events in space beyond the purely perceptul realm,
And in time beyond the immidiate present,
To a remembered past and an imagined future.
- Etic/Emic Dialect:
o The etic and emic dialect has been caricatured, or oversimplified, as the view from without or the researchers perspective of the peoples studied (emic)
o Etic follows programme of positivist behavioral science
o Formulating universal understanding of phenommena through methods and theories abstracted in advance of field research.
o The emic perspective:
In contrast
As represented in the ethnographic studies of cultural anthropologists
Tries to look inside the culture under study
To find
Indigenous analytic units and synthetic systems.
Oliver, P. (1998) ‘Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
PREFACE:
- Case studies are usually culturally rather than nationally defined
- Entries in second part should be through cultures and not through nationalities
- “my own concern is for the survival of the vernacular in the 21st century. This is not merely an interest in the safeguarding of tradition in the face of technological change though this plays a part
- More significantly, I consider that the sustainability of the wisdom, skills and the satisfaction of human needs embodied in vernacular traditions, is of major importance to future generations. Moreover, there is the identification with tradition and the significance of building heritage in giving material expression to it. Yet i believe that the study and conservation of vrnacular traditions, and the abilities necessary to sustain them is fundamental to the housing of millions in the 21st century. By then, the population of the indian sub-continent alone will be approaching a billion people of whom as many as 95% will be living in vernacular buildings. Mass housing is rarely successful and always wasteful of skills, knowledge and motivation; the solution to the worlds housing demands will only be met, i believe, in the forthcoming century, through the support, enhancement and adequate servicing of verncular architecture.
INTRODUCTION:
- Vernacular architecture is now the term most widely used to denote
o Indigenous
o Tribal
o Folk
o Peasant
o Traditional
Architecture
- Encyclopedia covers
o Traditional self built
o Community built buildings
o Secular and sacrdfocus is on vernacular architecture that has been in use in the 20th century
- Many aspects of social structure
o Beief system
o Behavioral patterns
Strongly influence builting types
Functions
Meanings
Though they differ in their application throughout the world
o Dual nature of vrnacular architecture
- Defining Vernacular Architecture
o Overall definition of vernacular
Term is used to embrace an immense range of building types
Forms
Traditions
Uses
Contexts
o The majority of worlds buildings are systematically omitted
o Neglected heritage
o Referred to as:
Indigenous architecture
Folk architecture
Pasant
Rural
‘traditional a wide variation
• Alternative term
o Vernacular is the indigenous idion:
Latin
• Vernaculus, native
o Corporate image structures
20th century vernacular
Neo-vernacular:
• Architect designed building that have in some manner been influenced by or in the form of a vernacular tradition.
o While the greater proportion of urban buildings were architect designed, or were contractor built popular architecture, a significant number are survivors or vernacular traditions.
o Every building exists in an environmental context
o Conditioned by the capacity of the land to support a given population
Economy of culture affects choice of site
Bearing on the structures that are possible
For each building has to be constructed of materials which, in the vernacular, are most frequently obtained locally from the natural resources of a region.
o Subject to the vagaries of weather, buildings are required to protects their occupants from environmental extremes
o Create micro-climates
o Compatible with human physical effort.
o Vernacular building in one part of the world may display solutions to structural problems that are similar to those in other regions.
- It is particularily characteristic of vernacular architecture that each tradition is intimately related tosocial and ecenomic imperitives
o Developed to meet specific means within each cultural milieu
o The larger bearing of social structure has a bearing on the spacial organization of settlements
o Esoteric knowledge such as geomancy gives guidance to the location/direction of some.
o Building may be learned from successive generations
- May symbolize concepts of the cosmos, or act as an analogue for the abstraction of belief
- Dwelling may reflect both the material and spiritual worlds of its builders and ocupiers
- To seek a singular definition of vernacular architecture is probably ill-advised.
o Reduces richness and diversity
- Vernacular architecture comrises the dwellings and all other buildings of the people
- Related to their environmental contexts and available resources
- Custimarily:
o Owner or community built
o Utilizing traditional technologies
o All forms of vernacular architecture are built to meet specific needs
o Accomodate the values
o Economies
o Ways of life
o And of living
o To the cultures that produce them.
THE STUDY OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE:
- Part of the record of individually motivated explorations
- Informative of ‘pre-contact’ indigenous architectural traditions
- Requirement to understand ‘native’ cultures being regarded as necessary adjunct to effective administration
- Contributed important ethnographies
- Examples of vernacular achitecture were featured in international exposistions
o Expressions of national identity
o Benevolent colonialism
- Established concerns of art and architectural historians
- Classification of aesthetic styles persisted
- Modernist turned to vernacular as means of inspiration
- Endorsment of the functional aesthetic
o Ranging from
Modular co-ordination to
Megastructure design
- 1964: Architecture without Architects
- Studies of the vernacular architecture of entire contries:
o Camaroon (1954)
o Romania (1958)
o Portugal (1961)
- Urgent drive to record vernacular buildings
- The relentles drive towards modernization has attracted millions of people from rural area to the cities of the ‘third world’ resulting in rapid urban growth and the abandonment of their former homes.
- Replica details have become a feature of the vernacularization of popular architecture
o The romantic image replaces the authentic
- Have often become symbols of ethnicity or nationality
o Museum emphasis on excepional
- 1975 europe adds ‘groups or lesser buildings in our old towns and characteristic villages in their natural and man made settings’
A WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VERNACULAT ARCHITECTURE:
- A comprehensive reference work of vernacular architecture studies
- Categorization
o Fundamental prinicple of encyclodedia
Often classified at local or regional scale
Material used in construction
Other means:
• Structural systems
• Resultant forms
• Types of styles (repreresnt)
Vernacular architecture appropriate to there resources, technologies, and phyisical or spiritual needs
Categorization by cultures
• Presents problems
o Traditions vary through regions
o Even if cultural differentiation less ‘easy’ to name or identify
Socil systems and value systems which contribute to the shaping of diverse
• built environments, including
o economy,
o territory,
o settlement pattern,
o inheritance,
o spatial hierarchy
o belief
o symbolism
can be argued:
• research in vernacular architecture stems either from the study of buildings as artefacts
• or of the cultures that produce them.
Materials and construction and the enrichment of their meaning.
• Types and uses
• As well as the specific circumstance of their emergence.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL:
- 1960’s ‘humanness’ of architecture
- An important topic became the quest for potential factors which determine the shape of architectural factors which determine the shape of architectural constructions and which can explain the enormousdiversity of the house forms
COGNITIVE:
- Cognition
o Area of psychological study
Deals with nature and knowledge
What is known
Environmental cognition
Concerned with environmental knowing
While earlier work is concerned with how the envirnoment
• As physical artefact
Was cognized by individuals
• Later effort have brought social and cultural aspects as well.
o Vernacular building dominated by the errenous conception:
The myth of the ‘unselfconsciouss builder’
• Sees vernacular communities as
o Pristine
o Primitive
o Cognitivley egalitarian
o Unspecialized settings
o In which every user is a
“dweller-user-architect-builder-decision maker
o Determining the design,
Use
Construction
o In terms of shared unchanging traditions.
o ‘architecture without architects’ may have some examples
o ‘cognitiv caretakers’ of what is architecturally appropriate exist in most cultures
• The perspective of researchers are often positivley biased towards vernacular architecture while those of many policy makers, especially those in developing countries are strongly influenced by images of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, leading them to denegrate vernacular forms.
‘cognitive map’ spacial array of remembered and evaluated places
The concept, intorduced by psychologist
• Tolman (1948)
• Downs (1973)
• Stea (1977)
o ‘Designative (denoative)
o ‘Apprasive’ (connotative)
Designative:
• Show features of the physical environment that people know or remember.
Appraisive maps define what they feel about features
good or bad
safe or dangerous
beautiful or ugly
- cognitive mapping has become inextricably associated with environmental imigary
o especially of cities
o lynch’s study of urban places
resulting segmentation into landmarks
districts
paths
edges
nodes
later replicated in many cities of the first and third world
establishes a set of place categories that define the urban experience.
o Cognition Settlement and Vernacular Architecture
Represent relations between the physical and social worlds
‘family’
The body of persons who live in one house
• Mobile bedoin tent
o Discourges this ideal
Incorporation of outdoor space into the family unit
o Cognition and ethnophsychology:
Vernacular architctures vary with culture
Recognize ‘indiginous psychologie’
Emphasis the context of cognition
• Ecological
• Cultural
• Political
• Historical
• Internally valid repository of explanations for events.
Such behavior involves decision about, attribution of meaning to, and behaviour in, built environments
• All fundamentally related to cognition
Cognition, then, extends imagined events in space beyond the purely perceptul realm,
And in time beyond the immidiate present,
To a remembered past and an imagined future.
- Etic/Emic Dialect:
o The etic and emic dialect has been caricatured, or oversimplified, as the view from without or the researchers perspective of the peoples studied (emic)
o Etic follows programme of positivist behavioral science
o Formulating universal understanding of phenommena through methods and theories abstracted in advance of field research.
o The emic perspective:
In contrast
As represented in the ethnographic studies of cultural anthropologists
Tries to look inside the culture under study
To find
Indigenous analytic units and synthetic systems.
Notes by: Thomas J. Barker, Arch.Angle.Studios
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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