Indigenous indicator

TRADITIONAL BUILDINGS: A GLOBAL SURVEY OF STRUCTURAL FORMS AND CULTURAL FUNCTIONS

By Allen Noble. London: I. B. Tauris. 2007. [pounds sterling]45

As architectural history grew up with art history as a record of works by 'great' artists, serious study of everyday buildings began very late. Pevsner's glib dismissal of bicycle sheds in favour of cathedrals in the preface to his Outline seems reckless today, when archaeologists revel over the contents of ancient rubbish dumps, but in 1943 it justified the historical process and the necessarily selective nature of projects like Buildings of England. It also went down well with architects still convinced that their duty lay with buildings of a superior kind, there being plenty of local builders to do the nondescript ones. But gradually all buildings had to become architecture, or at least be drawn by specialists in advance, and the Modern Movement removed the role of ornament in defining architecture's special territory. Also, as the effects of modernisation and technological change began to bite, two kinds of indigenous building study started to converge: anthropologists recorded houses in remote places, revealing how richly they reflected the culture of their occupants, while back in Europe old farmhouses and cottages started to disappear from the countryside, prompting a need to study record, and preserve them. Skansen in Stockholm was the first open-air museum in 1891, and there were many studies of 'vernacular' architecture around the turn of the twentieth century, contributing to Arts and Crafts and National Romantic architecture, but interest fell off with Modernism and was not really taken up again until the 1950s. Team Ten made an important contribution, but it was Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects exhibition at MoMA of 1964 that glamorised indigenous architectures from across the world with its seductive photographs. Architects were now persuaded that ordinary houses could be beautiful and inspiring, but the links between buildings and other aspects of culture that came to light were complex and challenging, and anthropologists are still arguing over issues like how a house serves to identify a group of people. There is a wealth of case studies, mainly in the anthropological literature, and there have been several attempts to bring them together into a general account, of which Paul Oliver's great Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture is the most comprehensive. The book under review, written by a distinguished US geographer, pursues the same global aim at a smaller scale. It is a well-written and efficient compilation, assembling examples cross-culturally to reveal parallels and differences, but its sheer breadth prevents it from achieving much depth. The chapters run from 'function and form' through 'plan and elevation' and 'location and orientation' to uses of earthen and wooden materials, doors and windows, and so on. This essentially materialist starting point means that the need to construct and share a cognitive world before building a physical one is somewhat sidelined, turning up mostly in the chapter 'ceremony and decoration' near the end. Architects will not be encouraged by the murkily grey photographs and the paucity of accurate plans, and a general lack of visual appeal rules out competition with Oliver's Dwellings or with Guidoni's earlier Primitive Architecture. Those committed to the subject area will have to buy it, though, for the extensive bibliography.

COPYRIGHT 2007 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning