Vernacular Buildings: A Global Survey 9780755694587, 9781780766249

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1-1 The rural Pennsylvania-German landscape 3 1-2 An Ohio Amish farmstead 4 1-3 An exuberant example of popular architecture 7 1-4 Typical pioneer farmstead, Minas Gerais State, Brazil 10 1-5 A Thai urban landscape 10 2-1 A rainbow-roofed Toda hut high in the Nilgiri Hills, India 13 2-2 Ido period houses of Japan 14 2-3 German-Russian housebarn development in Manitoba 17 2-4 The New England connecting barn, photo and floor plan 18 2-5 Main house types, Chamba District, Himachal Pradesh, India 21 3-1 Longhouse, bastle, and laithe housebarns 24 3-2 Abandoned longhouse, Gola Island, Ireland 26 3-3 Restored late-colonial period hall and parlor house, Yorktown, Virginia 27 3-4 Stages of development of the Howard-Hartsfield house 28 4-1 Hut and granary of the Jal people, Nigeria 34 4-2 Evolution of kitchen locations 35 4-3 Night soil jars sunning in the doorway, Yangtze Valley 37 4-4 An early dwelling-enclosed privy in the village of Quimper, France 38 5-1 Typical house of the Amazonian caboclo, near Belem, Brazil 45 5-2 Interior of a Colorado Indian house, near Guayaquil, Ecuador 45 5-3 A triple-decker house, Utica, New York 52 5-4 A Nile delta farmstead, Egypt 54 6-1 A weaver’s house, Yorkshire, UK 56 6-2 Diagram showing the geographical aspect of weaver’s cottages 57 6-3 Topographic map of Chortitz, Manitoba 59 6-4 Topographic map of farmhouse locations on kames, near Normal, Illinois 61 6-5 Cistern storage of rainwater drawn from roof, on the delta lowland, Louisiana 62 7-1 Farm courtyards preserved in Skansen, Stockholm 65 7-2 Amish homestead with grandfather house, Ohio 66

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7-3 Map of the largest Ukrainian settlement of Alberta, Canada 66 7-4 Road adjustment, General Land Office survey 69 8-1 Masai dwelling, Tanzania 72 8-2 Adobe plaster eroded by roof drain overflow, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico 73 8-3 Puddled adobe dwelling, Punjab village, northern India 74 8-4 Pueblo Indian oven or horno, Taos, New Mexico 75 8-5 Rammed earth wall construction and tamper tool, northern Peru 76 9-1 Hounds-tooth brickwork 79 9-2 Protective wall coverings of brick cladding and adobe 80 9-3 Limestone traditional buildings, Dvori, Croatia 82 9-4 A stone girna, northern Malta 83 9-5 Map of cobblestone building in northeastern North America 84 10-1 Typical rural hut, Ethiopian plateau 87 10-2 Bamboo and thatch dwelling, Tanzania Village Museum 88 10-3 Vertical pole and mud daub construction, near Senkiw, Manitoba 89 10-4 A reconstructed log cabin, northeastern Ohio 90 10-5 Methods of log chinking 92 11-1 Stovewood house wall, Door County peninsula, Wisconsin 96 11-2 Cruck- and box-frame houses, Woebly, Hereford, UK 98 11-3 Example of half-timber construction, Bernkastel, Germany 100 11-4 Mud daub over wattle, Jamestown reconstruction, Virginia 100 11-5 Tenoned planks slotted into posts, near Zakopane, Poland 101 12-1 New England one-and-a-half-story dwelling with small upper-level windows and frets, Stow, Ohio 105 12-2 Roof-positioned eyebrow window 105 12-3 Lithograph of early tree-top structure 106 12-4 Stilt houses above the lagoon at Ganvie, Benin 108 12-5 Food safe in the wall of a Nuristani dwelling 110 13-1 Tentative classification of excavated and related earth structures 112 13-2 Interior of a loess cave 117 13-3 View of an open, sunken courtyard in the Matmata plateau 118 13-4 Irregularly positioned cave openings, Cappadocia 118

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13-5 Limestone cave dwelling, Saumur, France 120 14-1 Thatched dwelling and closeup of thatch, Cloppenburgdorf, Germany 124 14-2 Hebridean thatched hut 125 14-3 Three-foot shakes on a roof in Eagle, Wisconsin 127 14-4 Cow dung drying near Agra 128 15-1 Limestone and tile roofs in Croatia 131 15-2 Cone-on-cube dwelling form of the Bamileke, Cameroon 133 15-3 Bell-cast eaves to deflect rain run-off away from base of walls, Isle d’Orlay, Quebec 134 15-4 Changes in the coyau of Quebec cottage roofs 135 16-1 Heavy snows are typical in northern New York State 140 16-2 Cobblestone wall damaged by rain, snow, and frost in Eagle, Wisconsin 140 16-3 Heavy icicle accumulation in Boonville, New York 142 16-4 Thatched roof weighted with boulders in Scotland 144 16-5 Hurricane damage, Russiaville, Indiana 145 17-1 Abandoned farmhouses 147 17-2 Unsympathetic rehabilitation attempts 148 17-3 Gothic houses in the former British Concession, Shanghai, China 151 17-4 Window frame in new adobe construction, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico 153 17-5 Artillery damage to a building wall in Würzburg, Germany 158 18-1 A United States weather map, showing the extreme low pressure which was a major element in the Great Peshtigo Fire 161 18-2 Fire destruction of dwellings 161 18-3 Lava flow, central Iceland 162 18-4 Community bakeoven in Brittany 166 19-1 A rural Chinese threshold 169 19-2 Round-top door typical of Carpathian village log houses, Poland 170 19-3 Log ladder, Colorado Indian settlement, near Guayaquil, Ecuador 172 19-4 Pacific Northwest Coast Indian totem pole door 175 20-1 Early Dutch windows in the Hudson Valley, New York State 177 20-2 The most common traditional dwelling window types 179 20-3 Thatch-roofed Icelandic dwelling 181 20-4 Rural farmstead and village family chapels 184 21-1 Typical rural Turkish house 187

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21-2 Pueblo roof stack of burned-through cooking pots 189 21-3 Summer kitchen, bakeoven and privy, Arranches, France 192 21-4 A summer kitchen in the Belgian settlement in the Door County peninsula, Wisconsin 193 21-5 Typical traditional dwelling of the Western Caribbean 195 22-1 Cottage with bed outshot, Ulster, Northern Ireland 197 22-2 An exterior chimney, Williamsburg, Virginia 198 22-3 Farmhouse with hay bales along foundation for insulation, Ohio 200 22-4 Cross section of a wind catcher 202 23-1 Cladding removed from log house, near Sharpsburg, Maryland 206 23-2 Two examples of traditional decoration and architecture 206 23-3 A square mandala which represents the Hindu guide for vernacular and other building 209 23-4 Spirit houses in Isaan, Thailand 212 23-5 Dragon and tiger hills according to Feng Shui doctrine 214 24-1 Half-timber gable wall decoration, Cloppenberg, Germany 217 24-2 Gable ridge profiles and decorations in Taiwan 218 24-3 A trullo structure from southeastern Italy 218 24-4 Tunisian welcoming painting of a hand 221 25-1 Cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado 225 25-2 Taos Pueblo, New Mexico 226 25-3 Acoma Pueblo privies, New Mexico 226 25-4 Mortise-and-tenon joints used to connect roof beams and wall posts 228 25-5 Axial pitched-roof longhouses from Enga, New Guinea 230 26-1 Winter and summer shelters of the Kickapoo Indians, Mexico 235 26-2 Map showing the distribution of tipis 237 26-3 Seasonal orientation of Rabaris tents in India 238 26-4 Seasonal movements in the Val d’Anniviers, Switzerland 239 26-5 A miner’s cottage from northern Queensland, Australia 242 27-1 Thatched roofing on a hut in Kenya 245 27-2 Summer-season log dwellings at Skansen Open-air Museum, Stockholm 247 27-3 Visitor guidebooks from open-air museums 247 27-4 The German building grouping at Old World Wisconsin Open-air Museum 248 28-1 Map showing Norwegian immigration into Coon Valley, Wisconsin 252

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28-2 Wisconsin dairy farms and good access provided by paved highway 28-3 Floor-plan evolution in the agricultural plains of Punjab State, India 28-4 Symbolic representation of a Pacific Northwest Coast Indian house

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Acknowledgments The creation of a book is never the product of one person’s efforts. I have benefited from the help of several talented individuals, who have solved many problems for me and taught me how to avoid other difficulties which I might not otherwise have recognized. Several individuals have been especially helpful. Dr. Kevin Butler’s excellent knowledge of computer mysteries saved me time and effort on numerous occasions. He also proved to have a keen eye, as did Dr. Leonard Peaceful. Mrs. Marlene Harmon smoothed the numerous processing hurdles, and often identified the most appropriate pathways to follow to speed completion of tasks. Two graduate assistants, Myriam O’Neill and Michele Davis, tracked down elusive library resources, converted and improved numerous slides, sorted out my sometimes vaguely given directions, and always worked with diligence and perception to complete what must have seemed at times to be an endless task. The book greatly benefits from instantly recognizable sketches, maps and plans, and other illustrations produced by the talented hand of the late M. Margaret Geib. Others who contributed illustrations were Drew Frater, Marylin Mehl, Carmen Silva, and Bret Potts. Lisa Tate solved elusive citation problems, as did Matthew Noble and Douglas Noble with communications difficulties. My thanks to all these talented folks. Because of their most valuable contributions and guidance, these essential services must also be acknowledged. Without the always professional attention of David Stonestreet, Senior Editor, Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, Project Manager, and her colleague, Steve Williamson, this volume would not attain whatever acceptance it will find from scholars and other interested readers. Finally, know that I dedicate this work to Leighann, Amanda, Anthony, Taylor, and Emma Jane, my grandchildren, and to Charlotte Gray, great grandchild extraordinaire. My wife Jane must have been exhausted at times with my frequent insistence that only she could spot errors and fuzzy phrasing. Her efforts are what gives this book its merits.

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~1~ Introduction: Terminology and Disciplines The face of the world is changing. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than with those structures often called traditional buildings, of which dwellings make up the largest part. They disappear, or become so significantly modified as to be almost unrecognizable, for a variety of reasons. Fire, storm, earthquake, volcanic eruption, and other natural events take their toll. Another equally important and long list of cultural causes, including obsolescence, cultural borrowing, changes in fashion, functions, lifestyles, and technology, as well as higher standards of living, and other cultural modifications, also contribute. All of these factors, subtle or not so subtle, work to alter the material culture of our globe. Ava Rodgers (1971, 2), speaking of the United States over forty years ago, wrote: “almost half of the 10,000 buildings considered significant to our nation’s history and culture and recorded in the 1930s by the Historic American Buildings Survey have been destroyed in the last thirty years.” The pace of disappearance since then does not seem to have abated. Further, the entire world has experienced the same situation of loss, most of which involves traditional buildings. Considerable confusion of terminology exists in the discussion of traditional buildings; it seems wise at the outset to establish the limits of terms and definitions in order to make their meaning clearer, and especially to identify where continuing problems may exist. Additionally, traditional building has been the field of study of a range of scholars who come from many different disciplines and academic training orientations. As a result, their perspectives and objects of research, however legitimate, will sometimes vary quite sharply. In some unfortunate instances, expressions of different viewpoints degenerate into attempts to prove an earlier author’s conclusions unsound, even if they were offered tentatively by that author. Pathbreakers may pay penalties, but that does not mean they should not continue to open new doors. The word traditional as used here, refers both to procedures and material objects which have become accepted over a long time as a

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norm in a society, and whose elements are passed on from generation to generation, usually orally, or more rarely by documents that have codified orally transmitted knowledge, instructions, and procedures. This is not to imply that traditional processes and objects do not change over time. They often do, but usually slowly enough that their provenance is clearly seen or easily established, and society is not upset or overturned by these modifications. Though change is a constant in any society, it is the rate at which a society is forced to absorb the new that determines whether it can retain its integrity. In traditional societies: people have to make do with whatever is at hand. The form and arrangement of dwellings, for example, are constrained by the availability of local materials, the nature of the local climate, and the socioeconomic facts – everything in it has a purpose, and because its aesthetic qualities emerge unobtrusively out of the serious business of living. (Tuan 1989, 28)

The premise of traditional dwelling, normally employed to describe a simple structure, often can be quite a complex conception. In warm environments, where so much of daily life is lived in the open, the concept of a house as a structure is not as important as that of the entire compound, i.e. “the idea of a bit of land which is screened for privacy and which contains some enclosed internal space, and some outside space. This whole thing taken together is thought of as the home environment. Each part within is used as seems most appropriate in the circumstances” (Rodger 1974, 105). Such a view is common throughout many traditional societies in areas of warmer temperature, and is especially strong where individuals live in extended family groups, or even clans. The cooler-climate equivalent of this extended concept of the dwelling is the notion of the “farmstead” (Figure 1-1) with all its buildings and facilities as the unit of residence, rather than just the house. These expanded concepts of the traditional dwelling will reappear here throughout subsequent chapters. Some elements may change, but at the same time others do not, thus verifying the traditional nature of the object or procedure. “By its relative immutability the dwelling offers a sustaining sense of security against the uncertainties of a milieu in which change is inevitable, but directions are imperfectly perceived and mechanisms are poorly understood” (Steward 1965, 28). As Szabo and Barfield (1991, 4) have noted with reference to Afghanistan, though it is applicable to most traditional societies:

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Introduction: Terminology and Disciplines 3 Indigenous builders are above all pragmatic. They design for economy in the use of materials and labor with appropriate space for work and domestic life, preservation of warmth in winter, protection from the heat in summer, and household privacy.

Just how structurally and socially complex the construction of a traditional dwelling may be, regardless of how simple it may appear, has been nicely reported by William Newell (1957, 24–5) for the building of a traditional mountain house in remote Chamba State, India. The total vertical height is built along a plumb line and each floor is exactly parallel to the one below it. The care with which the whole house is designed can be deduced from the large number of technical terms used in construction. Beams which are used for different purposes in the house have different names. The foundations are exactly fixed in the ground […] The prospective owner must also acquire a sufficient labour force to cut down the trees in the forest, drag the trees to the house, dig the house foundations, drag up stones from the fields for the walls and cut and carry the slates for the roof [...] If the labour is not sufficient, relatives of the house-builder are invited from other villages, but this is on a personal basis in contrast to village labour, which is compulsory.

1-1. The white-painted tobacco barn to the left, the German-type banked barn with overhanging forebay, and the solidly built limestone dwelling are all features which identify this area as part of the rural German Pennsylvania landscape (photo by author, 1976).

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In discussing traditional buildings one encounters other terms which may appear from a hasty glance to have a somewhat similar meaning. Folk building or folk architecture is usually employed to describe practices or structures which are the products of persons not professionally trained in building arts, but who produce structures or follow techniques which basically have been accepted by a society as the correct or “best” way. In general, members of each group of the “folk” will build using inherited knowledge and with a desire to be accepted by others of the group. This is not to say that modest stylistic and functional devices will not be incorporated by individual builders. Nevertheless, a basic uniformity exists, so that even an outsider, after limited exposure, can recognize certain buildings as belonging to a particular ethnic group (Figure 1-2). The closeness of this symbolic relationship between the dwelling and the family who resides therein, is nicely presented by examining Tibetan structures. “Each house has a name, probably chosen by the lama or astrologer, that becomes the name of the family that occupies it” (Durocher 1990, 52). As Ronald Knapp (2000, 3) noted when speaking of Chinese old buildings, “dwellings are more than buildings sheltering humans from the harshness of natural forces. They are indeed humanized space, structured to express and shape family organization and guide the web of social and ethical norms, beliefs, and values.” His observation can be applied worldwide.

1-2. The German banked barn, the ‘gross-dawdy’ house tucked behind the tree and with its corner just touching the main house, and two pole-top birdhouses are all signatures of the Amish landscape of Holmes County, OH (photo by author, 1977).

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Introduction: Terminology and Disciplines 5

Another striking illustration of ethnic uniformity of design can be found in the German-Russian Mennonite housebarns clustered in twenty-one small villages of southeastern Manitoba. “The uniformity of the buildings in each village extended even to minor details, such as the color used to paint the shutters” (Francis 1954, 57f). Another term, vernacular architecture, is widely used in the United Kingdom, and less so in North America (Ennals and Holdsworth 1998, 241f). The term vernacular architecture is [...] applied to the buildings used by ordinary people, especially in pre-industrial societies [...] Within regions there is marked and voluntary adherence by the majority of society to a single model or ideal pattern of house form. Even though professional builders may be operating, the basic model is not seriously questioned by builder or peasant. The model has no designer but is part of the anonymous folk tradition and tends to be persistent in time [...] Conformity, anonymity, and continuity may be seen as the hallmarks of regional vernacular architecture, reflecting the cultural coherence, simplicity, and conservatism of peasant communities and the deep rooted traditions within the building crafts. (Aalen 1973, 27)

“Type as opposed to style is the object of analysis for the student of vernacular architecture” (Hudson 1988, 37). Geographer Martha Henderson (1992, 15) offers the observation that “vernacular architecture is an historical and geographical record of a culture group’s relationship to physical and social environment.” One of the distinctive characteristics of vernacular architecture study is its interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary focus. “Vernacular architecture has been examined from the perspectives of art and architectural history, social history, folklore, anthropology, historical and cultural geography, archaeology, architectural theory, and sociology to name only those disciplines that come immediately to mind” (Upton 1983, 263). Considerable effort and verbiage has been expended by “scholars” to differentiate between folk architecture and vernacular architecture. The term vernacular architecture (in its regional sense) works well in England and some other countries, where settlement has been more or less homogeneous with differences only perceptive at the regional level. In North America concentrated settlements, derived originally from numerous immigrant peoples, are decidedly more limited geographically and are scattered across the landscape in a checkerboard fashion. Each group introduced structures which were uniquely or primarily its own. Thus, in Wisconsin, for example, there

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is little or no regional or vernacular architecture (in the British sense), but a series of ethnically related structures. The use of a seemingly straightforward term, such as building, also may engender some confusion. Scholars who study traditional buildings tend to view them, as Henry Glassie (1972, 31) suggested, as “internally usable space rather than externally viewed art.” Usage of the term architecture in phrases such as folk architecture and vernacular architecture is looked on askance by some scholars, especially architects. A quotation from John Harvey (1975, 2) illustrates the point quite well: Two separate words do exist side by side: architect and builder, and their products architecture and building. This is fitting, since Architecture is acknowledged as the Mistress Art. Building, with all its component skills such as masonry, carpentry, glazing, is a collective technique taught by the members of one generation to those of the next. It may be greatly modified in course of time by the discovery of new materials or the invention of improved methods, but these changes come from outside. Architecture, however, is not simply the control and supervision of buildings; its primary function is the creation of solutions to fresh problems posed by patrons who wish to have not standardized but specially designed works put up in answer to their requirements.

Architecture is thus viewed as an art form, while building is not. Such an obviously class-derived differentiation is especially attractive to professional architects, who usually make little effort to discuss traditional buildings, or, when they do, often fail to understand or appreciate them. The attitude of many architects to vernacular buildings is nicely characterized by reference to a statement by architects Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin (1987, 73): The tradition of these plain houses without detail somehow survived the eclectic games of the Victorian age, but the formalization of the vernacular proceeded apace as the winds of orthodoxy overcame indigenous form. This formalization was not all internally generalized: there are certain buildings which seem to offer an immediate junction between the vernacular and the “conscious” architecture of the public world.

I must quickly, and in the interest of fairness, add that today not all architects evidence such a narrow view. The monumental work on Portuguese traditional structures (Ordem dos Arquitectos 2004), produced by teams of professional architects, is perhaps the leading exception to such lack of appreciation. Among American architects, Charles E. Peterson must occupy an important place. His sensitivity to vernacular architecture shaped the early direction of the Historic

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American Buildings Survey, ensuring its own place as the largest and most important repository of US vernacular building information among its other collections. As long ago as 1938 Ramsay Traquair recognized the problem facing architects who propose to understand the process and result of “the art of erecting shelters in which we live and conduct our activities.” He observed that “architecture has been particularly the victim of efforts to delocalize it […] But this is all wrong, since architecture, owing to its close contact with our lives, is peculiarly and intimately governed by climate,” which is local. Perhaps he emphasized climate somewhat too strongly and neglected the local considerations of available building materials and social custom, but his point remains persuasively important. The problem for architectural historians and architects investigating vernacular architecture may be that the widely held “elitist idea that architectural styles gradually filter down to the folk, who employ them as an imitation of high style, is erroneous” (Bronner and Poyser 1979, 118). Thus, these structures do not fit conveniently into architectural style classification systems (Figure 1-3). Traditional buildings must be viewed as one element of the regional landscape, and its correct place in that landscape should

1-3. This complex eclectic building apparently, like Topsy, just grew. Enlargements added over time and a well-maintained exterior obviously indicate a well-loved dwelling, Lexington, OH (photo by author, 1978).

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be investigated. It is here that geographers can make their most effective research efforts. The early frame of investigation for American geographers interested in vernacular building was set by the pioneering presidential address of Fred Kniffen (1965) at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting. His novel topic awakened interest in the subject for a generation or more of American geographers. Speaking as a cultural geographer, I feel one of the serious problems of much historical research is the preference for archival research over field observation. Stewart McHenry (1979, 279), another geographer, pointedly observes that historians working on an area in Vermont: have not understood the contributions of Dutch cultural heritage in the development of the southwestern part of Vermont. A reading of the landscape, in contrast to the histories, presents a different impression of the significance of the Dutch legacy to Vermont. The look of the land clearly reveals a Dutch cultural influence. Houses, barns, tombstones, place names and field patterns [are] more reminiscent of the New Netherlands than New England.

Clarence Lebreton (1982, 429) makes a similar statement for FrenchCanadian Acadia. He notes, “The material culture of Acadia is one of the most valuable sources of information about Acadian history. As the people of Acadia were illiterate for much of their history, material remains are the most informative records of their past.” Similarly, folklorist Henry Glassie (1972, 29) has written: “a methodological limitation to print binds the scholar to studying only the handful of people who were literate.” He further states, “the artifact [however] is potentially democratic; artifacts from the past are so abundant that they can be utilized to replace romantic preconceptions with scientifically derived knowledge.” Finally, Gerald Pocius (1983, 12), studying traditional architecture on the southern shore of Newfoundland, provides a strong statement in favor of fieldwork over archival research: While fieldwork produced much new information, the consulting of various kinds of archival sources proved less fruitful. Documentary sources are often rich in data dealing with other aspects of material culture, such as food, clothing, or household furnishings, but little important information was located on the houses themselves […] the only archival sources that proved especially useful were historic photographs.

Other scholars, nevertheless, legitimately complain that geographers, and some other researchers, often fail to adequately explore

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archival sources, relying principally on field observation. Archaeologist Garry Stone (1988, 68) has effectively countered the arguments for fieldwork-based studies by analyzing its fallacies and weaknesses. He makes a plea for a more balanced investigative approach utilizing a wider range of artifacts and documentary materials, and cautions, “All of these sources must be used with discrimination.” Irish geographer F.H.A. Aalen (1965, 41), studying clochans as transhumance dwellings, extends the idea further by observing that the “evidence is derived not only from oral tradition but also field study. Indeed in investigation of this kind it is almost essential that the two are used together.” Anthropologists, folklorists and other similarly oriented scholars hold out for culture-determined building strategies. The true relationship probably lies somewhere among all of these viewpoints. Ronald Knapp (1986, 1) offers a context which provides a solid rationale for the examination of traditional buildings. He says the following in reference to Chinese structures: “Rising out of frugality rather than riches, vernacular forms, despite their nondescript appearance, nonetheless document a tradition in which experience and practical wisdom predominate.” Not surprisingly, cultural and social historians seem to be much more sensitive to traditional structures and their connection to historical development. Finally, notice should be taken of the continuum that exists in the phrase architecture–building. Traditional building is the product of talented, but largely untrained individuals, who build as they do because such knowledge has been more or less informally passed on generation to generation in the society in which they live. Between the poles of folk and academic architecture lies a vast area into which most buildings fall in any classification scheme. Designated as popular or eclectic architecture, these structures combine components of various architectural styles, sometimes together with elements from traditional building. With the shift of world population to cities, the emphasis on traditional building began to decline (Aalen 1973, 48). However, the overwhelming number of scholarly studies of such structures explores those of the countryside or in small villages. As geographer Ronald Knapp (1986, 2) puts it, “rural houses by and large have been built rather than designed, with tradition acting as the regulator. Experience, practicality, and economy have guided housing form just as local conditions have governed building materials” (Figure 1-4). In these areas, patterns usually can be seen more clearly than in the often confusing and mixed urban context (Figure 1-5). Also, the hold of tradition is strongest in the rural areas, where change and innovation generally occur most slowly. This is not to say that traditional

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1-4. Much of interior Brazil was a frontier area well into the 20th century. This typical pioneer farmstead was prospering in the 1960s, in the state of Minas Gerais. Tile roofs and adobe walls make up an expanded barn, a modest dwelling and a privy/wash house (photo by author, 1963).

1-5. The jumble of modest wooden structures along the canal, a crowd of bamboo-hatted, female fruit-and-vegetable vendors, carefully maneuvering along the narrow waterway, and rows of palm trees combine to mark an urban residential landscape of Bangkok, Thailand (photo by author, 1953).

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Introduction: Terminology and Disciplines 11

buildings cannot be found in urban areas, but most scholarly attention has been focused elsewhere. Nevertheless, historic preservationists and historic preservation planners have been in the forefront of those working with traditional structures in urban areas, and actively preserving them. Stable ethnic neighborhoods in cities offer some of the best examples of traditional dwellings. Archaeologists were among the earliest scholars to take widespread interest in traditional dwellings of the common folk. J.G. Hurst (1971, 76) noted, “Until the late 1930’s medieval archaeology was almost entirely concerned with study of the remains of those buildings erected by the wealthier sectors of the population: principally churches, abbeys, castles and manor houses.” Speaking of scholarly investigations in Oxfordshire, John Pilling (1993, 4) wrote: Our knowledge […] is a very partial one. Until recent times most secular buildings were constructed of materials that were expected to survive no more than a generation or two, and only the wealthy could afford to build in more permanent materials. We can only guess at the appearance of the flimsy dwellings of the great majority of the population, although archaeologists have recently added greatly to our understanding.

The need for archaeologists to investigate and understand context has been explained by Robert Barakat (1972, 6). His comments apply equally to scholars of all other disciplines. He says: The task of the historical archaeologist is to reconstruct the whole life of a town, village, farm or house, and not just selected parts, a goal that is indeed awesome in scope but not so impossible. If his work is to mean anything at all to the world at large, it must accomplish this; he cannot escape his responsibilities to the scientific pursuit of knowledge and to himself.

P.V. Addyman (1979, 69) emphasized the advantage which the archaeologist has over others who look only at the above-ground parts of a structure when he noted that the excavator has two advantages: (1) he can take his studies back earlier than the date of a surviving vernacular building, and (2) he can study parts of the structure that other researchers cannot reach. Nevertheless, R.A. Meeson and C.M. Welch (1993, 1) cautioned archaeologists that “contemporary perception of the past should only be seen as a current hypothesis, [and that] occasionally a substantial body of new evidence generates new hypotheses which may in turn be revised or overturned.” This warning applies not just to archaeologists, but also to all scholars who study traditional buildings.

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~2~ Function and Form, I Concepts of function and form are central to the study of traditional buildings. The widely repeated dictum that “form follows function” has fine alliteration and a kernel of truth, but on close examination the idea frequently falls short with reference to traditional building. Recognizing this, French scholars of architecture at the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions in Paris coined the term functional decalage to identify the many discrepancies between form and function (Riviere 1954, 9). Furthermore, and more specifically, in medieval Norway similar, or even identical, “buildings were differentiated by function rather than by form” (Lloyd 1969, 34). Each farmstead consisted of multiple, identically standardized units, each unit being differentiated only by its function. In contrast, Lewcock and Brans (1977, 107–16) and other scholars have demonstrated convincingly that house form derived from other earlier uses can persist and be easily adapted to a new function, if the form is sufficiently strong within the cultural background of the society. The concepts of both form and function on occasion fall victim to fashion. This is nicely illustrated by Breckon and Parker (1991, 22), who noted that Tudor: chimneys rapidly became status symbols, so much so that it is not uncommon to find Tudor houses with more chimneys than there are rooms: this was the owners showing off to the neighbours. Much skill was lavished, too, on the design and decoration of the stacks where they emerged from the roof. Among the most pleasing are those in spiraled and patterned brickwork.

House types were introduced into the American Southwest by early Anglo-immigrant settlers who joined the already established Indian, Spanish and Mexican people there. The first American settlers, isolated from their kind, adopted the forms of those who had preceded them in the land. Later settlers, coming in larger numbers and less completely cut off from cultural ties, employed

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Function and Form, I 13 their accustomed building methods and materials, but modified their [...] building to suit the climate. (Hoover 1935, 237)

Hoover’s early observation of the concepts of both cultural borrowing and cultural baggage has been applied by later scholars to numerous other immigrant groups in many parts of the world. Even though function, i.e. habitation, frequently remains inflexible, the form is quite variable and very often quite restricted. Note, for example, the shelter of the Toda of the Nilgiri Hills of southern India (Figure 2-1), a form which probably occurs nowhere else in the traditional world. Another example, the farmhouses of the Ido period in the three main southern islands of Japan, also illustrates such variety, but are set within an overall basic set of governing characteristics. At least ten regional variations of the basic hiroma form of the Ido period have been identified (Figure 2-2).

2-1. A rainbow-arch form, thatch roofing, and wood-frame adobe walls typify the dwelling of the Toda tribe, who inhabit the higher elevations of the Nilgiri Hills, India. The extremely small door, a security feature carried over from earlier, more precarious times, reaches only up to the top of the thighs of the male standing before it. Note also the amount of excavation carefully made to provide a level platform for the hut (photo by author, 1976).

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2-2. Regional variations of farmhouses of the hiroma floor-plan type, typical of the Ido period in Japan (based upon Inaba and Nakayama, 2000).

Throughout the world, houses may be excavated or erected, or partly both. They may rise to a single story or several. Their floor plans are rectangular, square, round, oval, or combinations. Those dwellings, termed earthfast, are built upwards from the earth’s surface, but anchored by posts embedded into the earth, or foundations at ground level. Roof forms are equally diverse and depend more upon climate and available local materials than on function. Wall treatments may also show almost infinite variations. One must not, therefore, rely on form and function too single-mindedly. “All houses are dwellings;

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Function and Form, I 15

but all dwellings are not houses” (Oliver 1987, 7). The case of Dutch windmills offers an apt illustration. Form is influenced by a number of factors, of which function is just one. Temperature establishes absolute limits: there are no snow houses in the tropics nor palm leaf huts in polar regions. In addition, many other factors besides function, such as the direction of the prevailing winds, the location of possible water sources, recurring rough weather conditions and a wide assortment of cultural and ethnic traditions may affect form. Nevertheless, the influence of the environment cannot be ignored entirely. More often, the environment simply exerts a partial influence upon form, although its effect upon selection of building materials is more profound, as will be seen in following chapters. The influence of environment is even more subtle in some areas. In Appalachia, initial habitation for European-derived pioneers was usually in log houses, which continued to predominate into the 20th century in the uplands. Not all vernacular structures evolve in this way, responding to changes in the desirability of building in new materials, or possibly increases in the owner’s income, or attempts to satisfy community fashion. Many are simply the result of family growth being greater than the periodic increase in family resources, requiring years to accomplish, and thus allowing a casual observer to mistakenly establish a scheme of multiple house types. Take, for example, the process identified in Malaya: The house is most often built in stages over a period of time […] a small temporary structure may be built first to be replaced later on, or the central core of the main structure can be built to which is added a number of spaces over a number of years […] the result [is] a number of buildings in various stages of completion. (Gibbs 1987, 2–3)

“Of all building types, houses are the most reflective of broad cultural change. They are also the feature of the built landscape most likely to be left standing” (Baird 1986, 210). But even they eventually disappear and it is the smallest and most representative dwellings which are the most vulnerable. Often hastily built, with varying degrees of skill, and of perishable materials, they disappear or fall to ruins with the passage of time, often quickly. Estimates are that more than 300,000 Irish one-room cabins disappeared as a result of the Great Famine of the 1840s and the consequent emigration. Housebarns not only shelter humans, but animals as well, and also provide storage for equipment and tools, and often farm products, including fuel and food. An excellent example which persists to the

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present is the cylindrical-plan house of the eastern Galla in Ethiopia. The interior of the dwelling is divided into functional areas just by low earthen partitions. Our use of the word “housebarn” refers to all structures that house both humans and animals, regardless of room and/or wall arrangement. An almost infinite variety of housebarn forms serves these functions. One of the most unusual structures, the koshel, appears in northwestern Russia. Closely related structures occur in Karelia, but­ tressing the argument that Finnish farmstead courtyards gradually shift, as one moves from west to east, from entirely open courtyards to unroofed closed ones, and finally to those with interior roofed spaces. In North America, the only major concentration of housebarns is that of the German-Russian Mennonites in Manitoba, with a smaller one in Saskatchewan. These very earliest German-Russian housebarns in Canada were framed as a single unit, but the separate framing of house and barn, although still joined together, became popular as sawn lumber replaced hewn timber. A firewall separated the residence from the rest of the building. The typical form is an elongated, storyand-a-half structure, oriented with the gable of the house to the road, but with the door on the side of the building. Three stages in the evolution of the Manitoba Mennonite house­ barns could be discerned from surviving structures as late as the early 1990s (Figure 2-3). In the earliest period of settlement, the building was a single unit with an integrated roof. In the second stage or period, the house and barn were independently framed, which made the construction task easier. Rooms became smaller and were given more specific functions, which probably reflected expanded agricultural incomes. Roofs at different elevations made the identification of parts easier from the outside, although they still had a common firewall. The third-period housebarns illustrate the greatest break with tradition. Connecting the house with the barn by means of an enclosed hallway further separated the parts, but allowed the house and barn to retain the traditional connection, preserved the advantage of shelter from exposure to inclement weather – especially in the frigid winter – when moving between the housebarn parts, and introduced a measure of heat-loss protection. Perhaps the greatest attraction of this arrangement was the turning of the house 90 degrees so that the side rather than the gable faced the street, an orientation which helped the inhabitants join the mainstream of Canadian life, since most other non-Mennonite, and indeed most Canadian, houses already enjoyed such orientation (Noble 1992b, 273–83). Thus in the minds of many, the German-Russians became Canadians!

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17

2-3. The three major stages of development of German-Russian housebarns in Manitoba, Canada. The second stage involves separate framing of the still-attached parts and the third stage requires even greater separation and the rotation of the house part by 90 degrees (drawing by M. Margaret Geib).

* * * Quite different in form, and usually not referred to as housebarns, are those structures termed “New England connecting (or connected) barns.” They do, however, meet the most important criterion of a housebarn – both animals and humans sheltered in a unified or single structure. They could be called “put-together” housebarns, because most originally consisted of at least four separated buildings, moved from original sites and connected by interior doors (Figure 2-4). Thomas Hubka (1977a, 152) also reminds us that locally they are often referred to by a clever 19th-century child’s rhyme – “Big house, little house, back house, barn.” Thus, the main house has an addition (which in some instances is the small, original home), and perhaps one or more intermediate structures. The back house may have several rooms, or even originally independent buildings or sheds, which were built for a special purpose – such as a summer kitchen, wash house, stable, or for equipment storage – but which are now incorporated within the structure. The back house also contains the privy and functioned as a wood shed. The final structure is an attached barn, which in the North American practice includes the function of animal shelter (Noble 1984, 2:37).

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Vernacular Buildings 2-4. Photo and floor plan of New England connecting barns. The floor plan provides the rationale for the vernacular terms used to identify the parts. The photo is of a structure near Camden, Maine, but the floor plan is generalized to apply to all such structures (photo by author, 1972; drawing by M. Margaret Geib).

Moving and connecting the individual buildings as part of an expanded structure was, of course, partly a response to long, cold and snowy winters. It also satisfied other practical concerns. It preserved and reused existing structures, and most important of all, it simplified and made more efficient the labor required in farming. I didn’t realize until recently that a house of my great aunt and family in the small town of Glenfield in rural Lewis County, NY, which I had frequented as a child and very young adult, had some characteristics of the New England connected barn dwelling. Although the barn part was separated away, and the little house was missing, the back house was there, attached by an inside door to the big house. The largely unfurnished back house contained another wood-burning stove, neatly stacked piles of firewood for both stoves, a hand pump to draw the well water, space for extra household storage, food supply, and smaller equipment, and wash tubs. On rainy days washing was hung to dry in the one room. I suspect that many other nearby village and rural dwellings had such facilities when the area of the New England structures was so close. * * *

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19

Contrast the form of these housebarns with the four-story, stone-built housebarns of the Italians and Swiss in Piedmont and Engadin. Here in mountainous terrain, the housebarn assumes a vertical form, as it does, for example, among the ethnic Tibetans in the Indus Valley and surrounding Ladakh. Both areas, because of the predominance of sloping land, frequently have housebarns of two or more stories. The lowest level may extend into the slope or bank, with excavated material moved down the slope to create a level platform, compensating for the natural lack of suitably level building sites. Poorly lit and often poorly ventilated, the lowest story is used to shelter cattle and other animals. The arrangement has several advantages: animal heat for the upper floor, inhabited floors in winter, easy access from above in inclement weather, and increased security against cattle raiders at night. All these advantages also are enjoyed by housebarns on more level land, but it is the steep contour of the sloping land that encourages the preeminence of multi-story housebarns in rougher areas. A different form, but with a similar function, is achieved by cliffside dwellings in Nuristan, Afghanistan. The houses are two-storied with the lower level used for storage and animal stabling. The upper inhabited story has two parts: semi-open front rooms used intensively in summer, and one or two semi-excavated rear rooms heated by a small central fire, occupied in winter. Among the coastal Sea Lapps, the relative scarcity of trees “led to the utilization and re-use of all available timber,” even old, wrecked fishing boats covered over by turf cladding. Up until the 17th and 18th centuries, common folk all lived in peat houses and some people still used them as late as the 1920s and 1930s. Turf or peat dwellings had a life-span of no more than half a century or so. None exists today, but surface impressions can still be found after thousands of years. A much later group of Finns, today identified as the Kven, migrated to Finnmark in the 18th and 19th centuries, and settled in and around Varangarfjorden. “A visible example of Kven culture is its own characteristic type of architecture” (Taavetti 1997, 22). Timber-frame house­­barns reminiscent of the story-and-a-half dwellings of Finland are the norm, as well as log or frame saunas. Sherpas occupy housebarns up to 4,400 meters (13,200 feet) in the high Himalaya. Only occupied for up to six months a year, these dwellings serve as winter shelter. Somewhat similar structures can be found in the Indian areas of the Himalayas. These include the one-and-a-half-story stone houses of the poorer peasants on the hill slopes of Dehra Dun, and the more commodious and elaborate two- and three-story timber and stone structures higher up in Jaunsar, Himachal Pradesh. Two structures in the highlands of Himachal Pradesh classify as housebarns, but are of very limited size. Comparable environmental

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characteristics exist, but the house types are appreciably different from each other. The first, termed the Churah house, is: “flat-roofed and mostly single-storyed. The houses appear like rectangular blocks inserted into the mountainside, making terraces. Often the flat roof of one house serves as a courtyard for the one just above it” (Marh 2004, 66). In function it may be grouped as a “mixed” house since cattle are housed in the same main room as humans are. The second house type, termed the Gaddi house, has a vertical form typical of many housebarns elsewhere. The low, gable roof is covered with rough and heavy slate plates. The ground floor functions to pen cattle, and stores fodder and agricultural implements; the next floor above contains two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. “In some houses the kitchen is not a separate room, but an area comprising a raised platform is used for the purpose. [It] is considered sacred and is not approached by all” (Marh 2004, 70). The uppermost floor is for grain storage, and sometimes a temporary shelter for newly married couples. A third house type lies between the areas of the Gaddi and Churah houses. It combines the characteristics of the gabled Gaddi house type and the flat-roofed Churahi, thus demonstrating nicely the cultural borrowing phenomenon (Figure 2-5). Similar, though rectangular, tower housebarns occur in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (Hicks 1966). See Chapter 28 for how tower houses are being replaced by houses of quite different design. Relics of other tower houses, the former abodes of prosperous farmers and wealthy landlords, also are scattered across the border region of Scotland and England, and throughout Ireland (Aalen 1997, 59). Throughout northern Europe, with the Baltic Sea as an eastern center and the North Sea as a western one, two- and three-room rectangular dwellings housed the bulk of the rural population in the Middle Ages. Elsewhere (Noble 1984, 1:122), I have proposed the collective term Baltic three-room house for similar dwellings in North America because immigrant groups who originated around the Baltic Sea continued to erect them in parts of North America. In Finland and Scandinavia these houses have been called “Nordic pair” dwellings, or simply “pair houses”, skalmostuga, “hearth houses” (Paulsson 1959, 85), tommerhus (Perrin 1965, 14) and undoubtedly other terms have been applied. Additionally, they have been documented in Lithuania (Erixon 1937b), although hardly any pioneer settlers came to North America from Lithuania in the pre-urban period and so did not form cohesive rural settlements. The designations used in the UK include “two-room house,” “three-room internal-chimney house” (Smith, J.T. 1963, 403), and, as a derivative, the domus longa or longhouse.

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Function and Form, I 21

2-5. The three main house types found in Chamba District, Himachal Pradesh, India (drawing by B.S. Marh, 2004).

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The questions surrounding the longhouse evolution in the British Isles have engendered considerable controversy about answers and interpretation (see Smith, P. 1963, 416, 430, 436; Smith, J.T. 1963, 389, 397; Peate 1963, 440; Peate 1964, 76; Field 1965, 105; Smith, P. 1967, 775–6; Alcock 1969, 83, 94–5; Smith, J.T. 1970, 126–8; Aalen 1970, 42; Hurst 1971, 77, 99, 112; Aalen 1973, 32, 36, 38; Alcock and Laithwaite 1973, 100; Whyte 1975, 62; Smith, P. 1979, 2, 8; Brown, R.J. 1982, 84, 92, 99; Smith, P. 1989, 95, 100–3, 130; Quiney 1990, 86). It seems likely that the earliest and most common type of dwellings in the British Isles in Saxon times were sunken huts, referred to as either grubenhauser or grubben hutten (Hurst 1971, 90; Aalen 1973, 32). The average size was quite small, about nine feet by six feet. The difficulty of obtaining accurate data from such early structures means that much still remains to be discovered. Little is known of the final transition in Britain from rounded to rectangular forms again but in the British Isles as a whole, the development was probably gradual being initiated by the cultural impact of the Roman occupation. Evidence from deserted villages shows that the transition was completed, at least in England, by the Middle Ages. In Ireland, which did not come under Roman occupation and experienced no major immigrant drafts during the first millennium A.D. there is evidence that circular and oval houses were still being widely used at least in Ulster at the beginning of the 17th century along with rectangular forms which were soon to become almost universal. (Aalen 1973, 30)

A second major early dwelling apparently is a response to the Nordic invasions which affected the northern and western coastal areas of the UK, especially Scotland. The introduced structures have been termed Norse longhouses. Roughly rectangular in plan and given over as shelter to both man and animals, they may represent the ancestor of later longhouses. The final word probably remains to be said on the subject.

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~3~ Function and Form, II In the relatively small area of the United Kingdom considerable variation exists in the form of those housebarns developed after the Middle Ages, although large areas of the country seem to have been dominated by just three basic forms (Figure 3-1): the longhouse, the laithe housebarn, and the bastle house. Accommodation for domestic and farming purposes has traditionally been placed under the same roof according to one of three fashions: longhouse, laithe house and bastle house fashion. In the longhouse the farm house and the cow-house are combined; in the laithe-house the farm house is integral with some sort of stable/barn/cow-house unit; in the bastle house the farm house lies above the cow-house. (Brunskill 1987, 106)

Northwestern Britain, Wales, lowland Scotland, and western Ireland (Aalen 1970) remain the domain of the narrow, rectangular longhouse with a hearth, chimney and cross passage essentially dividing the human domain from that of the byre housing the animals, usually cattle. The term longhouse was coined by Iorwerth C. Peate (1936). It was used in the 1930s by Welsh informants to describe their houses to him (Hurst 1971, 112; Roberts 1984, 38). Written in the form of one or two words, the term longhouse (or long house) is also widely applied to other traditional structures. In North America, it identifies the excavated house of Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, as well as the earthfast dwelling of the Iroquois Indians of Ontario and New York. In South and Southeast Asia, the term is used for extended-length stilt houses, and it likely is used for other types of buildings elsewhere. A group of longhouses in Devon – originally of one-story, but remodeled by the late 16th century or earlier to add a second story – are valuable because of the methods used to significantly rebuild the structures. The ground floor was originally partitioned by a series of low wattle-and-daub screen walls, not built upwards to the roof or any ceiling. Full-height walls and upper floors were added at the time of remodeling. Nathaniel Alcock and Michael Laithwaite (1973)

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3-1. Sketches and floor plans of the UK longhouse, bastle house, and the laithe house. The longhouse occurs in parts of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland; the bastle is limited to the Scottish–English border region; and the laithe in the Pennines. The three types are distinctive and apparently not linked (from Brunskill, 1987).

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Function and Form, II 25

proposed that these early low partitions may mark a phase in the early rebuilding and reconstruction of longhouses not only in Devon, but elsewhere in England where their remains can no longer be found. “By Elizabethan times, it seems, the longhouse was no longer being built in the lowlands” (Harvey 1984, 45). Longhouses also appear widely in Ireland (Figure 3-2), where F.H.A. Aalen (1970, 32) defines a longhouse as: an elongated building intended to house men and animals together, with internal access; usually it contains a dwelling area at one end and accommodation for livestock at the other, and in its original form it appears to have been a single compartment with no major structural division between the human and livestock ends.

Very few longhouses in the British Isles survive in the unmodified, original form, but even when the byre end is converted to human use, the most critical diagnostic feature of the longhouse is the cross passage or its remaining traces, which served both as entrance to the living area for humans and walkway to the byre area for milk cows (Smith, J.T. 1963, 389). The longhouse is also found widely distributed throughout continental Europe (Gies and Gies 1990, 11). Traditional early elongated dwellings in the British Isles, discussed in the preceding chapter, are not limited to the housebarn form: The peasant houses of southern and central England and most of those in eastern Wales normally possessed a three-unit ground plan and appear to have been derived from the so-called hall-houses of the 15th and 16th centuries. Hall-houses were […] typical houses of ordinary peasant folk: they had three rooms with the central unit or hall serving as the main living area […] Animal accommodation was in separate buildings. (Aalen 1973, 37, based on Barley 1967 and Smith, P. 1967)

Later, in the colonial period, settlers from southwestern England introduced elongated two-room houses to coastal Virginia (Forman 1948). Today these houses (Figure 3-3) have received the designation of hall and parlor dwellings (Noble 1984, 1:49–51), and likely are derivatives of this line of development. Even earlier, Scots-Irish pioneer settlers in North America built log structures (double pen, saddle bags and dogtrots) with a derived elongated plan (Jordan 1994, 37) reminiscent of the longhouse cottage which sheltered many of them in Ireland (Evans, E.E. 1939; Aalen 1970). In addition to the British Isles’ housebarns highlighted above, a very wide range of similar structures can be cited across the world. The

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3-2. Drawing, cross section, and floor plan of an abandoned longhouse on Gola Island, Ireland. Note the position of bedrooms, down-slope location of byre, and lack of a hearth (from Aalen, 1970).

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Function and Form, II

27

3-3. A restored, late-colonial period, brick, hall and parlor house, Yorktown, VA (photo by author, 1978).

further in time one goes back to examine human habitation, the more likely one is to encounter structures providing shelter to both humans and domestic animals, even though the structures appear smaller and smaller. The observer of traditional buildings quickly recognizes that the functions of a structure may change over time, just as construction methods change. For most structures, the functional changes will be downwards. On the American frontier, log houses might be replaced by more elaborate and fashionable dwellings as family fortunes increased, or as time permitted, or as alternative materials became more available and less costly. A similar process occurred in rural Ontario (Coffey 1985). Form may change even though function does not. Dorothy Bracken and Maurine Redway (1956, 4, 158) document the often-encountered change from single-cell log cabin to more complex dogtrot house with the passage of time. The home of the early Texas leader Sam Houston offers an even more expanded example. Beginning as a single-cell log cabin, the structure ended up as a six-room, story-and-a-half house. An even greater modification to an original, single-room log

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house has been traced by Ava Rodgers (1971, 4–5), investigating the Howard-Hartsfield house in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, which was expanded from a one-room dwelling to an eight-room, two-story house by periodic additions and alterations (Figure 3-4). In North America early log cabins often ended up as pigsties or chicken coops. On the other hand, the reverse is possible, although not as frequently. A commonly encountered change of structural form is that which accompanies either growth in family size, or increase in household income. Both situations encourage expansion of the dwelling. One Appalachian solution to the problem of adding needed living space to an existing small cabin was the dogtrot, consisting of two small log houses tied together by a central, floored breezeway. John Michael Vlach (1995, 122) reports that doors opening to the breezeway suggest the original residence of a white, free householder, whereas if doors of the rooms were placed on the front of the structure, this indicates separate housing for two slave families.

3-4. Evolution of the Howard-Hartsfield house in Ogelthorpe County, GA, from a one-story, single-room structure, by stages to ultimately an eightroom, two-story house (drawing by Drew Frater, based upon Rodgers, 1971).

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Function and Form, II

29

Eugene Wilson (1974, 65) proposed a somewhat different evolution of the dogtrot form in northern Alabama, in which the first-generation dogtrot houses, built between 1820 and about 1870, usually consisted of: two oblong pens, not always of the same size. Separate outside front doors to each pen were usually retained. Thus, the passage, or dogtrot, was not originally the primary entrance: it resulted from the placement of the two pens.

However, many dogtrot dwellings were in fact erected in whole, not by expansion. Michael O’Brien and Dennis Lewarch (1984, 256) remind us of the “considerable debate on whether dogtrot houses normally were built as single units or grew out of the later addition of a second pen” to an original single-pen structure. Both methods of construction have been employed. Until better documentation of date of construction is available, it probably must be accepted that expansion came first. Perhaps the most unusual example of vertical expansion occurs, very rarely, in Appalachia, where a few dogtrot houses have had a story added, creating a two-story-high breezeway, or an enclosed storage space above the original dogtrot (O’Malley and Rehder 1978, 113; Tate 2002, 51). The dogtrot was not limited to Appalachia, with numerous early examples in Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and widely over the Midwest. Another early single-room plan, two-story dwelling was termed the stack house. Adding stories to other house types is common and unremarkable: a sensible way to add space. Horizontal expansion is also a commonly employed technique everywhere. Horizontal expansion also produced the extended chattel house in Barbados (Fraser 1990, 6–14). Construction is a dynamic activity, which responds to human demands. Thus, building types are not static. The jokester might say “they are not set in stone.” In most traditional societies, the building of a house, although the original responsibility of the owner, may involve the entire local community. Human needs, wants and affluence constantly change, as do fashions, and this is reflected in changes in construction methods, the popularization of new plans, the acceptance of different building styles, the use of new construction materials and adoption of innovations derived from outside sources. Even such seemingly esoteric factors as changes in taxation may affect structural form. The part which taxation has played is often overlooked in studies of the design of traditional buildings. Tax laws made the one-and-a-half-story log house the most common dwelling in Ontario in the first half of the 19th century. Brian

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Coffey (1985, 312), however, is of the opinion that tax had little to do with the form and materials of the building, and availability and cheapness of construction materials were far more important. Window taxes were levied in Britain in the 17th (Cook 1971, 46), 18th and early 19th centuries (Camesasca 1971, 6), in Ireland starting in 1810 (Patterson 1960, 11; Gailey 1984, 34), and were employed in some parts of the New World (Eberlein 1921, 140). Even more widely spread in Europe and elsewhere were hearth or fireplace taxes. Another tax that had an unusual effect on building was the brick tax in force in the UK from 1784 to 1850 (Forrester 1959). Because the tax was enforced on the number of bricks used, builders adopted the strategy of using oversized bricks. Other aspects of legislation or official policy also affect the form of buildings. Governmental restrictions or feudal policies also have served to keep building activity confined in certain directions. In Thailand, for example, before the reign of King Chulalonghorn, “only the upper classes were permitted to build timber houses. The ordinary people had to make do with other materials or woven panels of left-over timber [wattle?]” (Charernsupkul and Temiyabandha 1979, 48). Similarly, in early Korea the monarch set the rules for housing, including permitted size, form and building materials. House decoration was prohibited for most households (Choi et al. 1999, 36, 60). Similarly, in China: prescribed widths governed the dimension of timber and set proportional heights, in the process declaring the occupant’s social status. Decorative details and colors [...] were similarly described in sumptuary regulations and differentiated with a striking diligence. (Knapp 2000, 23)

Throughout the world, the lowest-ranking and poorest people in most feudal and/or highly structured societies found themselves bound by the most restrictive rules and regulations. For example, during the nine hundred year Zhou dynasty [...] the height of a building’s podium was linked to the status of the occupant. Excavated dwelling sites suggest that commoners were restricted to building directly on the compacted ground. Senior officials and above, however, built dwellings on raised platforms, the height of which was regulated by a graded scale related to their position in the social hierarchy. (Knapp 2000, 73)

Furthermore, in China:

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Function and Form, II 31 there is clear evidence that the wealthy and those enjoying higher status were able to indulge their tastes to a greater extent than those of lesser means, often resulting in grander dwellings than their ascribed status would allow. (Knapp 2000, 23)

This situation also was assisted because “enforcing rules was not as crucial as having rules” (Ebrey 1991, 36). “Typologies of buildings are necessary ingredients of any successful project in the study of vernacular architecture” (Barakat 1972, 8). It is thus that the form and functions of structures can be best understood in their widest context. Because the worldwide study of traditional buildings is such a vast undertaking, it has been done only partially and piecemeal hitherto. Hence, many different classification systems have been proposed and adopted. Perhaps the most critical problem now facing students of traditional building is to relate disparate terms and reconcile classification systems. Such an objective cannot be achieved immediately; it requires the agreement of many, many investigators. Furthermore, while scholars may eventually come to agreement, locally used terms will persist, although as vernacular architecture is replaced by more modern building, and the number of traditional craftsmen declines, the use of local terminology also declines, and may ultimately be lost entirely. Perhaps the best answer is the compilation of extensive glossaries, but this effort is time consuming and offers little immediate reward to scholars in terms of academic recognition or compensation.

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~4~ Floor Plans The form of a structure may be viewed from two perspectives – horizontally and vertically. This chapter discusses the horizontal dimension and the next chapter covers elevation or the vertical dimension. From personal experience, F.L.W. Thomas (1867, 154–6) provided useful details of the Outer Hebridean combined barn-byre and longhouse, often not found in later published research. He places the “hearting” walls (outer and inner stone parts with a cavity) at a thickness of five to seven feet, and notes two small holes (for light? to expel some smoke?) low down at the eave-level of the thatch. A small 12 foot 6 inch room, locally called a fosgalan, lies just inside the entrance to the byre. “The horse is accommodated here in severe weather: and as he almost fills the space, it is sometimes difficult to get past him, as I have experienced” (Thomas 1867, 154–6). Cattle housing takes up about two-thirds of the floor plan, separated from the rest of the dwelling by a ridge of rocks, six to eight inches high. The fire in the middle of the floor is never allowed to go out. Grown-up young people commonly sleep in the barn. Another example of continuously burning cooking fires is reported by Lynwood Montell (1993, 32–3), who quotes a respondent from the Upper Cumberland country of Kentucky saying: People used to save fire from breakfast ’til dinner and dinner ’til night in the fireplace in the summertime. They’d put it back in the corner and cover it with ashes to keep it from going out [...] If they run out and they had to create a new fire, they would take and go to their neighbors and borrow fire.

Montell also tells of an old man who was forced to move because of a new large dam whose waters were to inundate his cabin. He stoutly refused to leave his hearth. His fire: hadn’t been out in over a century [...] He wouldn’t leave it. So they [the authorities] took a big truck in there, tore the chimney down part way, put the fire and wood and a man to see to it on the truck. They took his

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Floor Plans 33 fireplace out from there, fire and all, and put it back up for him [at the new location].

The plan reveals the shape and horizontal extent of a structure, as well as the internal arrangement of its space. It also may explain, or at least suggest, the function of rooms. In Tibet, the arrangement of space in traditional dwellings is determined according to principles of geomancy. The threshold of the house faces east, but the foyer in the main room “must be situated to the West, where resides the fire deity, who will keep the flame in the hearth alive. The supplies must be stored to the North, domain of the deity of wealth, who will ensure their endless supply [...] and the butter churn [food preparation by inference] to the North.” The water room and the privy occupy the south, where the god of death resides (Durocher 1990, 53, 57). Elsewhere in the Himalayas, the Lepchas of Sikkim construct dwellings which face north, but have the entrance to the east (Gorer 1967, 63). One of the most unusual floor plan arrangements is found in the circular, dome-shaped, mud huts of the Jal tribe on the Jos plateau, Nigeria (Figure 4-1), where: The granary is conceived as the most important room, and the hut is planned in such a way as to prevent any possibility of its contents being stolen. [Even] the owner has some difficulty in reaching his own storehouse. The circular granary, about five feet across, is placed in the centre of the ground floor room so that its walls give added support to the first floor above. A small opening in the ceiling of the ground floor room enables one to reach the first floor. However, the granary is still inaccessible. The first floor is divided into two rooms, and to get to the second one it is necessary to pass through an opening in the roof and to drop down through another opening. One is then back again in the first floor and the granary is at last accessible through a hole in the floor. To convey the contents back to the ground floor it is necessary to go through the whole procedure in reverse. (Foyle 1953, 1)

Two areas, the kitchen and the toilet, normally require particular attention in a dwelling. The kitchen may be a problem area because the preparation of food involves waste, which attracts vermin. Some food also may need to be cooked, creating a fire hazard and generating heat that must be dissipated in summer in the mid-latitudes, and throughout the year in the tropics. One strategy for solving this problem is to shift food preparation to the periphery of the structure to dissipate heat, and also to utilize the upper levels of the dwelling, since heated air rises. The latter solution is used in Berber houses in Algeria (Aymo 1958, 183–4).

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4-1. The granary in the adobe huts of the Jal people on the Jos plateau, Nigeria is located in the center of the structure, entirely surrounded by other rooms, and is almost inaccessible. The dashed arrow indicates the route required both to load and unload the granary (drawing by Drew Frater, after Foyle, 1953).

Early on the initial hearth achieved the symbolic importance of sanctity. Even today it retains this mystical significance in many societies. As an example of such symbolic importance in traditional communities, Ake Campbell (1937, 233) noted “in the South of Ireland, on All Hallows Eve the fire is not allowed to go out and food is placed on the floor for the dead people who are expected to visit the house.” The protocol in India, in higher-caste and more traditional Hindu dwellings, is somewhat different. The kitchen is off-limits to all nonfamily visitors, even those who might just pass quickly through the space. This protects the ritual purity of the foods from association with lower-caste individuals and mlecha (foreigners considered ritually unclean). In the 18th century French settlers in the mid-Mississippi Valley used detached kitchens in the early stages of settlement when dwellings had thatch roofing. However, in the 19th century, as thatch gave way to more fire-resistant materials, kitchens were moved up under the dwelling’s open galleries so that the cooking was done in the house proper (Franzwa 1990, 34). Such a move also offered better shelter for food preparation in inclement weather, but still kept much of the heat outside (Figure 4-2). An even earlier shift of detached

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4-2. Early migration of the kitchen. This diagram does not portray any single dwelling type, but rather it is an attempt to illustrate in general the early changed locations which hearths and kitchens occupied. The changes were related to a variety of improvements in income, facilities, and perhaps even attitudes. After the times represented in this diagram, the kitchen gradually returned to be housed inside the dwelling (drawing by Myriam O’Neill).

kitchens to the dwelling in Monmouthshire, Wales is documented by Peter Smith (1967, 774). The hilly area of western North Carolina provides a fine grammatical example of the usage of the terms “kitchen” and “house.” The term “big house” widely used in this area refers only to the living room, the one room of the single-pen cabin. “The fact is that big house makes sense to those who use it. Big house expresses the conception of a dwelling or room that has not had its functions split away.” This understanding of the term grows: not from examining structures, but from listening to the people [...] Regretfully, students of folk architecture often fail to train their ears

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as acutely as their eyes. Careful listening rather than careful looking, provides access to the meaning of the big house [...] Although big house is used in reference to what appears to be a very small house, indeed, the term is not used facetiously. No individual who knows and uses the term commented on the humor in it. (Williams, M.A. 1986, 131, 133)

The kitchen is not considered integral to the dwelling form and in many instances it is indeed a later addition. Whether the North Carolina upland kitchen was attached or detached, this plan was referred to as the “big house and kitchen,” a phrase used as commonly as the term “big house” alone. The detached kitchen in Jamaica formerly was connected to the dwelling by a covered walkway, providing both shade from the tropical sun and shelter from the tropical downpours (Green 1984, 44). A quite different example illustrating the removal of the kitchen from the main structure may be found in the Ngadju longhouses in Borneo, where a row of kitchens occupies that part of a structure separated from the living quarters by an elongated, open verandah (Miles 1964, 47; Wallace 1971, 68). As in many other tropical regions, detached kitchens or cooking places were universal in traditional building areas in Haiti (Metraux 1949–51, 12). The location of the toilet also required some thought, although in some societies attention was inadequate. Elimination of human waste originally took place in the bush or in the fields. The use of male “urine bowls” among the Ingalik in Alaska (Osgood 1970, 301, 340), “an overhanging balcony as a latrine for infants, invalids, and the drunk or the lazy” in Sikkim (Gorer 1967, 63), and waste jars for “night soil” collection in China were slight improvements (Figure 4-3). As urban centers in Japan developed rapidly “in the century and a half from the 1580s to the mid-1700s,” the collection of night soil and its application to the fields became a steadily growing economic consideration. In order to maintain agricultural productivity and to expand it as demand increased, peasant farmers had to conserve their own waste, and increasingly to purchase night soil from the growing cities (Hanley 1987, 1, 8–11). A separated latrine or toilet structure was the first major sanitary improvement (Gies and Gies 1990, 34). In many traditional communities the: privy is situated at some convenient distance from the house, but usually away from other buildings. On the Belgian farmsteads [of Wisconsin] the privy usually occupies the ell formed by the bakeoven and the rear

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4-3. Drying and disinfecting night soil jars sunning in the doorway of a village dwelling in the Yangtze Valley. Note the deterioration of the adobe wall from rainwater back splash, and the effort made to keep the gutter water from invading the structure (photo by author, 1977).

gable wall of the summer kitchen. Here it takes maximum advantage of the heat radiated by the oven, as well as the shelter afforded from winter winds [...] Both the privy and the summer kitchen/bakeoven face in opposite directions so that despite proximity, functions are kept quite separate. (Noble 1985, 245)

Only recently have toilets been included within most small or traditional houses. One early solution in North America was evolved by New England farmers who built the elongated structures given the designation New England connecting barns. Here the privy is usually built into or alongside the last room of the connected buildings (Hubka 1986, 164). Elsewhere, the initial shift of the privy to the dwelling was best done wherever the waste could be removed quickly by running water. An excellent example appears beside a small river in the French village of Quimper (Figure 4-4). In many parts of the world, separated latrines still function (Ragette 1974, 32), or, as in South Asia, it may still be the fields that are used, customarily after dark. Françoise Pommaret-Imaeda (1980, 253)

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Vernacular Buildings 4-4. An early enclosure of the privy inside the dwelling, with disposal of waste directly into a flowing stream, Quimper, France (photo by author, 1992).

reports on a Tibetan ethnic community in the Indus Valley in Ladakh that employs a different arrangement: Most houses in Ladakh have latrines situated on the first floor. While the house is being built, a hole is made in the floor of a small room and the floor is covered with a thick layer of sand which is replaced each week. The sand is thrown onto the excrement and this prevents smells and also speeds up the drying process [...] It is an extremely ingenious system for a country where water is in short supply during the summer and frozen in the winter. The excrement falls into a room on the ground floor which can only be opened from the outside. Stones block the entrance and they are removed for emptying out the room at least twice a year, in spring and when summer is over. The manure is spread on the fields.

A somewhat more sophisticated solution appears in many traditional two-story stone dwellings in the Balkans. The privy is an enclosure “attached to the upstairs porch or to a shed in the yard. This

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facility [today] is fitted with a ceramic toilet flushed by pouring a small bucket of water into the bowl” (Langsner and Langsner 1974, 15). For many, the dogtrot has come to epitomize the rural American South. Many of the best interpreters of the culture of the povertystricken, and class-conscious society of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Walker Evans, James Agee, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, utilized the dogtrot house as an easily recognizable symbol of it (Ferris 1986). In rural areas of northern Tunisia, two-story houses may have a second-floor open space (porch/patio/balcony) centered on the front of the dwelling and flanked by two enclosed bedrooms. Such a plan roughly duplicates the liwan house, found in Lebanon, yet seems to have no connection with it. This house type apparently has not been given any research attention, but warrants further study. The floor plan may sometimes tell us a great deal about the general background of dwelling builders. For example, three quite distinct floor plans appear in the early log homes of North America erected by three different ethnic groups: English, Scots-Irish, and German. As settlement proceeded westward in North America, groups tended to intermingle, in large part because of the American land policy which discouraged block grants. Only when a nationality group migrated together and in large numbers could ethnicity be maintained easily. In most traditional societies, the plan of a structure was rigidly fixed and adhered to closely. For example, the interior of the single-room New Zealand Maori house possessed “a clear social organization of space which allocated the left or junior side to the hosts, women, children, and slaves, and on the right or senior side to guests and men, with the most important position nearest the window” (Salmond 1986, 17). Another extreme example occurs with the Mongolian yurt, which, although consisting of a single room, was by consensus divided into four main spaces. Men and women have their traditionally occupied areas; places closest to the door are work spaces; the south side of the structure is where visitors are received and entertained. “The rear of the tent is divided into special areas. On the left is the house Master and his couch, while the right side in front of the family’s precious objects is reserved for honored guests” (Drew 1979, 36). Within the yurt every item had a proper place and the order was religiously enforced. Dwellings such as tents, tipis and yurts all have well-ordered interior arrangements. Those of the Asian yurt (kibitka/ger/gerge), much like those of the North American Great Plains Indians’ tipis, are rationalized by thermal comfort and psychological effect. High winds blowing against them would slip harmlessly around the curved sides,

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whereas a flat-sided tent would be blown in, if not tumbled over. The door faces south or east in order to give protection from cold winds, which blow from the north or west in both northern Asia and the Great Plains. The wall section of the typical Mongolian ger: is constructed of a number of lathes criss-crossing each other to form rows of diamonds; by moving the ends inwards and outwards in the manner of “lazy tongs” the section can be contracted or expanded. This allows the wall to be transported through the simple means of folding it up like the bellows of an accordion. (Dinsmoor 1985, 62)

Held in place and inside the lattice, large pieces of felt are positioned in winter to keep out cold blasts, and panels of reeds in summer provide ventilation. Another peculiarity of the ger was that it served as a kind of sun-dial. Coming through the tono [central smoke hole] and passing along the khans [lattice work wall panels], a sun ray enabled the dwellers to determine the time. (Maidar 1976, 21)

The production of felt is perhaps the most important family industry in Mongolia. Only family labor and the wool of sheep, goats, and camels are necessary. “The art of making felt by rolling, beating, and pressing animal hair or flocks of wool into a compact mass of even consistency is assuredly older than the art of spinning and weaving” (Laufer 1930, 1). The details of the process are carefully and clearly given by Andras Rona-Tas (1963). The ancient Mongolian yurt has persisted up to modern times, although “steel tube, glass or plastic windows have been added” and “the interior has also taken on a new look, thanks to the presence of normal beds or even heated brick beds” (Congzhou et al. 2008, 309). The popularity of metal gers is best documented for the Chinese areas of Inner Mongolia where at least two centers of manufacture have been reported. Because of their weight, these structures are used chiefly in sedentary areas, as either [modern] dwellings or storage rooms [...] Whether these structures will ever become widely used is problematical, however. In addition to their weight, they cost almost twice as much as regular gers. (Dinsmoor 1985, 32–3)

Yurts occur far beyond the Mongolian Plain: as far west as the Central Asian uplands of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and even south to the Tibetan high plateau.

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Floor Plans 41 The Tibetan yurt has a wooden framework which is covered with yak hides and felt rugs. On the bottom is a knee-high earth wall. Inside the yurt there are short, earth partition walls. An altar is set up in the middle of the yurt. When relocating, the Tibetans take away the upper part of the yurt and the main props only. (Congzhou et al. 2008, 307)

Onder Kucukerman (1988, 30, 62, 74, 87) even traces the detailed floor plan of the typical rectangular or square main room in traditional dwellings of Turkey to the earlier gerge or yurt, still found today “in various parts of Anatolia.” A more detailed discussion of the Turkish round tent and the yurt may be found in Cuisenier (1970). The approximate center of yurt distribution lies within the great loop of the Yellow River, which enfolds the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia. The word ordo is Mongolian for camp of a ruler – in this instance, Ghengis Khan. The word also is the source of the English term horde, probably originally referring to the great concentration of Khan’s warriors and camp followers in the Ordos (Lattimore 1941, 51). Looking in an entirely different direction, the circular dwelling of the Salish in the Pacific northwest interior was entirely supplanted by European-designed structures before the beginning of the 20th century. The Salish winter dwelling was excavated two or three feet and covered by a wooden frame of poles anchored to the surrounding earth. This frame was in turn covered by “chinking material made of willow branches and honeysuckle fibre woven together.” Layers of cedar bark and earth completed the roofing. Entrance was through a central smoke hole and down a notched log. A second doorway set into the wall at ground level was used by women. The interior was defined by the notched-log ladder. The space on the side of the ladder without notches was for storage, and on the other for sleeping and working. In many societies a religion-based tradition regulates both space function and location. Among the Merina of central Madagascar, the four cardinal directions measured from each dwelling’s central pillar “organize activities and the placement of objects and people within the traditional house” (Kus and Raharijaona 2000, 99). Thus: cooking and the storage of water and firewood are associated with the southern and western directions. The southwest is the direction children, juniors, and women occupied with household activities seat themselves with respect to senior members of the household. On the other hand, the northeastern corner, joining the sacredness of the east and the nobility of the north, is reserved for the ancestors, family prayers, and important material possessions.

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A similar view of the floor plan is also encountered in the Indonesian island of Savu. The male side of the dwelling is identified as the duru side and the female is the wui side. The women are more restricted than the men. The house is also symbolically and socially divided into right side (front, older, odd (meaning more) and male), while the left side connotes (back, younger, even (meaning less) and female). Even the rafters are divided genetically: depending on their placement in the roof, males are those to the front and females to the back (Kana 1980, 230). The Japanese approach interior space quite differently. They view room functions as transitional. For the Japanese, the garden is a microcosm of nature and of life. Although it does not extend directly into the house, it is an inseparable component of the dwelling. As E.A. Gutkind (1953, 33) remarks, “A Japanese house and its garden are one.” Finally, accessibility and contact with other groups from whom cultural borrowing may take place both have an effect. As an example, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran (1958, 93) suggests that west-coast-dwelling Mexican Indian peoples borrowed the idea of “round-house form” from African slaves brought to the east Mexican coast in the 16th century, although this conclusion is thus far based solely on similarity of form and not documentation. Another case of probable cultural borrowing involves the British and the Dutch, where each looks to the other as the source. This transference refers to sash windows, which in England are considered a Dutch invention of the 16th century, but in Netherlands are believed to be an English import (Stevens, J.R. 2005, 73). The transition between the grasslands and the forest also produced a unique structure, one built by the Bamileke, consisting of a square, mud-walled hut topped by a conical, thatched roof. Julius Gluck (1973, 236) suggests this structure, although originating 400–500 years ago: represents the peak of African building styles [...] It stems not only from the conical-roofed hut and from the gable-roofed hut, but also from the flat-roofed cubicle, since it has a ceiling separating the living area from the roof area.

* * * Floor plans have long been recognized as among the most important diagnostic characteristics aiding the researcher in a study of traditional buildings. Even structures which appear to be the same from the exterior may be placed in different categories by examining

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the floor plan, and vice versa (Noble 1984, 1:21–6). Floor plans generally reveal much more about relationships between house types than do the exterior appearances of those houses. Frequently, the exterior has been significantly modified as fashions and styles change. A well-remembered North American trend from the 1950s is the placement of picture windows in older houses designed for narrow windows. The exterior of a house is liable to be altered because it is visible; the less-often-seen interior tends not to change so much. If more space is needed or desired, usually an entirely new room is added. Thus, the floor plan is apt to grow by accretion rather than through any other modification.

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~5~ Dwelling Sizes, Space Organization and Elevation Although not an infallible guide, floor plans offer many clues about the size of dwellings. Traditional dwellings are normally small (Figure 5-1), sometimes very much so (Chappell and Richter 1997). In a 1973 survey in Bangladesh, 63% of all houses in one typical village were smaller than 400 square feet, and three-quarters of all housing units consisted of a single room (44.97%) or just two rooms (30.16%) (Islam et al. 1981, 6, 14). Early dwellings elsewhere had similarly diminutive dimensions. For example, in Ireland in 1841 more than one-third of all houses consisted of just one room and a further 40% had just 2–4 rooms (Gailey 1984, 8). Furthermore, in the county of Donegal almost half of all dwellings consisted of a single, small room (Gailey 1976, 36). Similarly, in 1858 almost half of all dwellings in New Zealand had only one or two rooms (Salmond 1896, 60). In none of these dwellings did rooms perform just a single household function. Such was true throughout the world (Figure 5-2). In early North America comparable sizes existed. Of 121 houses surveyed in Jackson County, Tennessee in the mid-1920s, 24 had just four rooms, 38 had three, 23 had just two, and two were of singlepen type (Montell 1993, 34–5). A century and a half earlier, in addition to the one- or two-room log cabins built by the Scots-Irish on the westward-advancing frontier, the English settlers along the east coast in southern Maryland were constructing similarly small, timber-frame dwellings. The Direct Tax of 1798 reveals “a third of the area’s total population lived in houses of one room, with an attic above” (Stone 1988, 71). The term “bay” is widely used as a convenient means to describe the distance between adjacent supporting posts, and thus to identify the width or depth of a building. To use a simple example as an illustration, the common phrase “three-bay barn” allows a reader to immediately understand that the sides of such a structure are between about 45 and 48 feet wide. If a supplementary depth or gable width measurement of “two-bays” is included, then that distance would be about 30–2 feet.

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5-1. Typical house of the Amazonian caboclo or peasant, near Belem. Even though situated well back on a levee of a tributary of the Amazon River, the cabin rests on stilts as a further protection from an unpredictable rise of river flood waters. The thatched roof has been extended to provide some additional shelter from the sharp and frequent equatorial rains (photo by author, 1953).

5-2. The interior of a Colorado Indian house, near Guayaquil, Ecuador, with central hearth, pots cooking and steaming, clothes and cloths drying nearby, and the always-present guard dog not guarding. The spaces between the wall poles provide ventilation and allow smoke to be dissipated when necessary (photo by author, 1970).

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The experienced reader also knows much about the structure and interior space of the building, and intuitively knows how many doors or aisles there are and where likely located, since entrances and aisles usually lead to and from eave sides with odd numbered bays rather than even numbered. In North America, a three-bay barn would have one entrance, and a five-bay would have two. In Worcestershire and neighboring counties in the UK, the majority of two- or three-room houses of the later Middle Ages measured 15 by 30 feet and 15 by 45 feet, respectively. Even as the population expanded and larger houses were constructed, the norm of house size remained small. However, agricultural prosperity in England did eventually allow the widespread use of bricks for chimneys and glass for window openings to become common after 1600 (Quiney 1990, 116). This change – coupled with greater diversity in room functions, the desire for greater privacy and the trend to make more rooms useable through increased heating (Brunskill 1988, 43) – led to the employment of double-pile floor plans to replace the singlerow plans. In China, bays called jian: normally are found in odd multiples, such as three, five or seven. Chinese generally believe that odd numbers of units provide balance and symmetry to a building. In general, odd numbers are considered lucky numbers, while even numbers are inauspicious [...] Four bays were avoided, since the word for “four” is a homonym for the word “death.” (Knapp 2000, 22–3)

Two bays were judged “neutral” according to manuals, perhaps as a practical consideration in that “among poorer people houses of two bays are very common. It would be too harsh to condemn their houses as unfavorable” (Ruitenbeek 1986, 168). Accessibility is a function of distance, but within a dwelling it is also strongly controlled by social convention. Thus, the dwelling is divided into areas, rooms or spaces that have limitations of various sorts. The hierarchical nature of the Chinese house is seen quite clearly in courtyard houses of more prosperous and expanding families in Taiwan (Dillingham and Dillingham 1971), and throughout northeastern mainland China (Knapp 2000). Accessibility is always controlled by social conventions, which may be quite rigid. Writing of traditional rural dwellings in Taiwan, Emily Ahern (1979, 155–9) offered a similar but slightly different arrangement of rooms and functions. “In its simplest form, a traditional rural house (dacu, big house) is a rectangular structure, usually with five rooms. There is one major axis, along the long side of the rectangle.” The

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outside entrance is on the side of a file of rooms and feeds directly in to the central, ceremonial and ancestral room. Along the file and increasingly away from this central hall, rooms are steadily lower in roof height and occupied by family members of decreasingly lower family order: One could summarize the general pattern by saying that the central room is oriented toward public display and group entertainment. As such, it houses both the family’s most eminent members (the ancestors) and their resident guests (the gods). It is outfitted as beautifully as the family can manage and is the proper domain of the men in the family, who are usually in evidence on important occasions. As one moves away from this room along the end rooms, in contrast to the central room, women are in evidence, individuals may eat separately, at separate times, baths are taken and toilet facilities used, and animals are raised and slaughtered (Ahern 1979, 156).

As the family expands, perpendicularly placed wings are added, forming an enclosed courtyard when a final cross wall is erected. This last structure now contains the exterior doorway. The creation of multiple interior barriers in front of the main hall is a mark of high status or wealth elsewhere in China, too. The addition of porches or protruding entry structures usually can be found only in the latter stages of traditional-building evolution. Midway between outward and inward dwellings were the outdoor wooden gathering places of some Pacific Northwest Coast peoples. Porch or entry functions include shelter from precipitation, shading from the heat of the sun, as a transitional space from exteriors to interiors, or as a comfortable place to entertain acquaintances or others, as a compromise between exterior public spaces and interior private spaces. They often vary from one another because of the mode of construction or the size of the structure to which they are applied. Dru Haley and Raymond Winslow (1982, 244) present a useful series of diagrams appropriate for English colonial structures in North Carolina. In many communities, traditional dwellings demonstrate an inwardlooking orientation (Diddee 2004, 53). From the Mediterranean Sea, both across its northern shores as well as along the desert expanses to the south, houses normally are arranged around open courtyards. The phenomenon extends, in large but disconnected regions, eastward across desert and tropical environments of Asia, through the Middle East and as far as India and China. Chen Congzhou (2008, 14) offers an insight into just how significant and widespread the courtyard is in Chinese traditional culture. He writes:

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The Chinese term for “family” is composed of two characters – jia for “room” and ting for “courtyard.” Man and wife and their children form a basic unit of production and life. They need both indoor space (room) and outdoor space (courtyard), hence the construction of the word “family.”

Courtyard houses also typify vast areas in Latin America in former Spanish colonial possession. As utilized in Mexican houses, the courtyard possibly comes from two sources. “There is, of course, the Southern European model that was derived from the Greco-Roman atrium house by way of Spain and North Africa. Colonial buildings in New Spain appropriated this type of spatial organization very soon after the conquest” (Messina 2005, 19). Immediately after the capture and destruction of [...] the Aztec capital, many of the conquistadors, including Cortes, began to build houses for themselves [...] the form of the buildings was derived primarily from Spanish models. The patio dwellings of the Spanish regions, Andalucia, Castilla and especially Extremadura, the birthplace of many of the conquistadors, undoubtedly informed their decisions in the type of house that they built. However, one cannot help but wonder just how much influence was provided by the Aztec palaces and even ordinary dwellings that had been seen by the Spanish soldiers, [because] PreHispanic city sites in the central valley of Mexico also contained examples of courtyard type dwellings. (Messina 2005, 19)

The term courtyard has two applications. Usually it refers to the unroofed space discussed above, which is defined by an enclosing building or set of closely positioned structures and/or walls. The use of the term in Africa south of the Sahara, however, indicates an often large, rambling open space inside a compound. Wadas, the typical residential structures of the wealthy aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the princely kingdoms of western India, have an introverted character oriented to as many as 14 interior courtyards (Kanhere 1983, 59). However, across most of the world, just one or two central courtyards provide a focal point for various family activities removed from the commerce of the street, and a common characteristic in Muslim areas is to have two courtyards, one for men and one for women. The former has access to the street and may be used for interaction with males from outside. The women’s courtyard, usually behind the men’s, has no direct access to the outside (Aksoylu 1987, 230). In southern China small, unroofed courtyards or skywells, called tkajing, perform this latter function admirably in the hot, humid summer climate of that area. A further benefit is the construction of

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adjacent single-slope roofs, which empty rainwater into the unroofed courtyard opening where it can be collected (Knapp 2000, 46, 180, 224). In contrast to these tiny openings, G.J. Afolabi Ojo (1967, 15) reports courtyard size for Yoruba dwelling compounds varying from 100 up to 10,000 square feet. One of the most unusual, albeit necessary, functions performed in some Nigerian courtyards was the tending of tall shrubs placed in pots in the central part of the open space. Careful observation of the length of the shadows cast by the shrubs in this equatorial area provided a reliable folk device for telling the time (Ojo 1967, 15). As nicely summarized by Sang-hae Lee (1991, 68), “the courtyard was a room without a roof, a domain set aside for the gainful activity of the entire household that was well adapted to complicated environmental, practical, and socio-cultural situations.” Western scholars have been conditioned to view the courtyard dwelling as the sole habitation of a single extended family which usually will have numerous members. However, Lee Horne (1982, 677) reports that research in a village in northeast Iran reveals that “most households do not live in self-contained dwelling units” and many courtyard houses have multiple, unrelated households. With the passage of time, courtyard houses evolve both through inheritance and through sale or building of additional individual rooms, so that in a single house some rooms may be inhabited by unrelated individuals, and separately located rooms may come under the ownership of persons in other courtyard dwellings. A rather different pattern occurs in the Cauca Valley, Colombia where large numbers of coastal migrants are now “lodgers who may or may not be related to other household members” (Rubbo 1977, 215). These widely separated patterns may indicate that such “mixed-up households,” i.e. those with both related and unrelated members, may be more common in traditional or semi-traditional societies than previously thought. In 1967, a perceptive investigation was initiated by J. Marshall Jenkins, who recognized that floor plans of most Welsh traditional dwellings showed an approximate 7:5 ratio for the length and width dimensions. The relationship involved the squaring of any circle by using diagonals. Later, Arthur Lawton (1973) applied the technique to early German houses in Pennsylvania, noting that the simple layout plan could be achieved without elaborate measuring devices. Still later, Henry Glassie (1976) secured the same result from early British houses in Virginia. Finally, Jay Edwards (1980) confirmed the general European origin of the technique by applying it to traditional houses in Caribbean islands built by indentured laborers and slaves, but controlled by exposure to European overseers.

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Using floor plans in a different way, Caoimhin O’Danachair (1956b) suggests that Irish traditional houses can be grouped into just three types. The first type occurs mainly in the eastern and southeastern sections of Ireland, and is distinguished by a short “jamb wall” which protects the centrally located fire from wind gusts when the single door is opened. A small opening in the wall allows inhabitants to see who is coming in at the door. The second house type, which occurs throughout the west, is characterized by the addition of a rear door into the kitchen, offering the possibility of controlling windblasts into the building. The hearth has shifted to a gable position. The final house, most evident in the northeastern part of the island, adds another hearth on the remaining gable. However, F.H.A. Aalen (1997, 149–52) prefers a simpler and considerably later derived, two-fold classification, dividing traditional Irish houses into a Western type, evolved from the longhouse and consisting of three rooms, one of which is the byre, with hearths and chimneys at or near the gable, and an Eastern type with a central hearth and chimney, lobby entrance, hipped roof, a floor plan of between three and six rooms, and no accommodation for cattle. Elevation is the term used to describe the vertical extent of a structure. Normally the term refers to that part of the building completely above ground. In Sweden, “it was only during the nineteenth century that two-story wood houses began to be built in the countryside” (Sjoberg 2003, 16). The dominance of one- and one-and-a-half-story dwellings is a circumstance of the long history of low income in traditional societies. In parts of Sweden, farmers with the highest incomes in the 19th century built two-story dwellings mainly for show, leaving the upper floor rooms unused. “In fact, it is said that farmers nailed the backs of chairs to windowsills on the upper story to give the impression that the rooms were furnished” (Sjoberg 2003, 142). Traditional societies are rarely democratic, and even those that profess democracy enforce restrictions to ensure the continuance and stability of the society against the likely or possible disruption of innovation and change. The dwelling is a readily visible symbol of social, economic and political status, and is thus liable to be subject to height, size, decorative, and other restrictive rules. In Tibet, for example, the social importance of a structure determines the height it can be permitted to obtain. “The tallest building in a village or region must be the temple(s), followed by the palace(s), the houses of the nobility, and finally, the houses of common people” (Durocher 1990, 50). Maurice Barley (1991, 13) cautions, “the terms loft and garret were not entirely synonymous.” A loft had access via a rough ladder, no window openings; its function was usually that of simply providing storage space, and the term in southwestern England was

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commonly employed in the 17th century. In contrast, a garret probably had dormer and perhaps other windows, an easy entry by means of an enclosed stairway; its function continued to be largely storage although sleeping space was also important, and the term in the 18th century, according to Barley, had largely replaced that of loft in Kent and Sussex. The following analysis of samples [from estate inventories] for Kent and West Sussex shows the change: For Kent in 1640, 6 garrets and 15 lofts; in 1660, 10 garrets and 12 lofts; in 1690, 8 garrets and 1 loft; in 1710, 17 garrets and 2 lofts; in 1740, 21 garrets and 1 loft; For West Sussex for the same dates the figures are; 3 garrets and 35 lofts, 2 garrets and 24 lofts, 6 garrets and 12 lofts, 3 garrets and 1 loft, and finally 5 garrets and 1 loft. A sample from East Sussex for the 1710s contains no house with lofts and sixteen with garrets, a proportion repeated in the 1740s.

Many dwellings, which might legitimately bear the title of traditional structures, but which are more than two or two-and-ahalf stories in height, are usually, but not always, concentrated in urban areas. The tower houses of Yemen come immediately to mind, but tower houses are also lightly sprinkled throughout Europe. In Ireland they are surprisingly numerous. “County Limerick has some 400, and County Cork over 300, County Clare about 200, and County Tipperary nearly 250” (Danaher 1993, 29), with smaller numbers in other counties. The majority of the stone-built Irish tower houses, rising usually up to four stories, were constructed between AD 1450 and 1550. In the border regions of Scotland and England, such houses were fortified residences, whereas in Ireland, although security was a factor, most were in prosperous fertile areas and probably were erected primarily to advertise the wealth and social prominence of the owners (O’Danachair 1977–9, 159). In North America, the best examples of traditional or vernacular tall dwellings, the so-called triple-deckers of southern New England (Gilbert 1989, 160–2), Utica, New York (Figure 5-3), Newark, NJ (Spear 1977, 7), and Montreal, Canada are quite different. Built from 1855 to the end of the 1930s to provide housing mostly for floods of immigrant industrial workers, these tenement structures, built by commercial contractors, accommodated three families, one to a floor (Heath 2005). Their inclusion as traditional structures might stretch the definition of traditional a bit too much, however. Roof type is an important consideration in loft utilization. During the 17th century in southeastern England, gable roofs began to replace the earlier hipped roofs. The gable loft provided more headroom, and

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5-3. Triple-decker houses, housing three separate families, were built in the 19th and very early 20th centuries as industrialization fostered urban growth in the northeastern United States. This house is in Utica, NY (photo by author, 1986).

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hence utility, than the hipped (Barley 1987, 191). Later on, the expanded gambrel roof continued the drive for greater headroom in some lofts. Dutch- and French-derived attics were used principally as storage areas and sometimes for sleeping, especially for children, hired labor, or slaves. Some lofts on the North German Plain were used for the storage and drying of grain. Here grain: is rather slow drying [...] the peasant could not wait to store his corn until it was fully dry, because of the timing of the harvest was determined by the village community. Thus it often happened that peasants had to carry their corn still damp and it would have gone mouldy if it were not stored in the roofspace, passed through by the smoke rising from the open hearth. (Baumgarten 1976, 16)

On the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, stilt-elevated, A-frame houses use the attic today as guest quarters (Just 1984, 34). In modernday America, attics crammed full of cast-off or purposely stored items are frequently cleared, partitioned off and finished to provide an additional bedroom or two for growing families. In addition to economic factors, the environment also plays a role in influencing the elevation of structures everywhere. Social pressures operate in traditional communities in Ireland, with strictures which restrain the peasant builder: In a very conservative and very class-conscious society he must, in his building activities, maintain his position, keep up appearances without over-reaching himself either in ostentation or expenditure. Thus his house and offices must reflect his standing in the community. A strong farmer might not live in a cabin, nor a poor labourer try to build himself a mansion, without earning the scorn, the reproaches, even the active hostility of his neighbours (Danaher 1993, 12).

Traditional houses in Baghdad reflect conditions throughout the desert Muslim world. Dwellings several stories high exist because of land scarcity, and are built around courtyards to assist cooling ventilation. Many of these structures have subterranean basements, which, when not below the local water table, offer cool retreats in the hottest weather. At night, rooftops provide cool sleeping areas, and, at least in parts of Algeria, a safe haven from the scorpions which could attack sleepers in ground-floor rooms (Ackerman 1936, 256). Over large parts of the desert Muslim world, however, inhabitants are crowded closely together on oases, whose locations and restricted extent are governed by availability of water (Figure 5-4).

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5-4. A farmstead on the Nile delta above Cairo gives a sense of the crowded nature of oasis features. The buildings demonstrate both adobe and stone use. The structures around the central doorway make excellent use of cut stone, perhaps salvaged from early ruins (photo by author, 1959).

Plan and elevation together provide a key to help one discover the significance of different components of a structure. One of the most difficult problems in using plan and elevation to understand buildings, or to attempt a typology, is that many structures are “the result of piecemeal building” so that the original plan and elevation cannot always be determined, and certainly not at first glance (Seaborne 1963, 142). “Architecture is not static. Additions are built; rooms are modified. We must not make the mistake of assuming that because a house has a certain floor plan today, that it always had that floor plan” (Cohen 1992, 40). Nevertheless, it is floor plan and elevation which have been the most important features in classifying traditional house types (Sizemore 1994, 49).

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~6~ Site and Location Location may be governed by several factors, and often by just one, though not all structures of a specific type find similar locations. Sometimes it is quality and depth of soils which affect placement. Elsewhere, a number of reasons help to explain the location of farmsteads on hillsides as opposed to the valleys. In the hill country of northern Appalachia, after the initial pioneer settlement period, the better soils of the broader, limestone-floored valleys permitted construction of substantial I-houses and large timber-frame barns, because agricultural incomes were secure there. The thin soil cover of the hill slopes, on the other hand, reduced income from farming and discouraged most building except for log houses, or small frame structures and single-crib log barns. Responding to various combinations of reasons, hill-slope farmstead locations also have been reported for the Hebrides (Hance 1951, 80), in Chitral in northern Pakistan (Ud-Din 1984, 280), in the Green Mountains of Vermont (Mires 1993, 82). They undoubtedly exist elsewhere and, of course, are common and necessary in true mountainous areas. Alan Gailey (1961, 12–13) noted that clay-walled dwellings in eastern Ulster predominated on lower-lying ground, whereas stone houses characterized the higher and more sloping terrain. These complementary distributions reflect to some extent a physical background where the lower ground has been more liberally plastered with a mantle of glacial debris and the higher areas have been left, often, with only a thin covering over solid rock. Potentially, then, the lower areas are more likely to be characterized by the clay-walled houses for not only are the suitable materials likely to be at hand, but the possibility of obtaining suitable building stone close by is more remote.

After the pioneer settlement period passed, and with the beginnings of improved land drainage, cultivation gradually shifted to the better soils of the valley bottoms. These new farmers with higher incomes continued to prefer the lower slopes for building, but for a different reason. Now, two-story barns (bank and basement), could be placed

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on the slopes with direct access to their upper hay and grain storage areas, as well as the lower access for animals. The impact of altitude can be seen in the UK with the location of weaver’s cottages which possess rows of tall windows along the front wall (Figure 6-1). In order to permit maximum sunlight to penetrate the structure, the dwelling was oriented whenever possible towards the south and southeast. Not only does altitude influence location of structures, so also does exposure (Figure 6-2). Over much of the world the warmer temperatures, and consequently unfavorable environmental responses during the low-sun period of the year, have encouraged location of dwellings on southernfacing slopes in the northern hemisphere, and northern-facing in the southern hemisphere. Ronald Knapp (2000, 299) provides an excellent illustration from the high altitudes of Tibet: Strong winds, cold winter temperatures, short warm summers, limited rainfall, thin soils, irregular topography, and sparse vegetation all conspire to make life difficult for those who live on the high and vast Tibetan plateau. Whether for tents or structures, building sites are generally along southern slopes that are open to the warmth of the sun yet buffer the bitter prevailing winds that come from the north.

6-1. A weaver’s house, Almondbury, Yorkshire. The large number of windows documents the 18th-century conversion of the dwelling to enable weavers to work with enhanced natural lighting (photo by author, 1967).

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6-2. The orientation of weaver’s cottages is a reflection of the need for access to maximum sunlight. A south or southeast direction offers the greatest exposure, followed by east and northeast, with westerly directions the most undesirable (drawing by Myriam O’Neill, based upon Barke, 1979).

Among the Lepchas of Sikkim, geomancy restrictions on site location choice rule it to be “bad if there is not a hill between the north and the east because you will get the wind” (Gorer 1967, 71). Most peoples put considerable thought into locational decisions and make prudent and logical choices. Apparently haphazard distributions of houses often will be found upon more careful inspection to be well planned and reasoned (Hoskins 1960, 336), although this evaluation must take into consideration the degree of sophistication of the society when the decision was made. For example: In Bali, the walls around a compound are said to be able to exclude “evil spirits” with the entrance being the only means by which such spirits can get in. Since the spirits are said to be able to turn only with difficulty, the entrance never leads directly to the open courtyard and is tortuously arranged to prevent their admission. (Rowlands 1972, 448)

Ease of defense and control of access have been the governing features of dwelling location in many parts of the world. For example, in Bhutan, “because in the past no settlement was safe from sudden forays by neighboring tribes, all dwellings have some sort of defensive outworks. Usually a stout stone wall girdles the house” (Karan 1967, 54). Even in North America, where popular thought elevates the idea of lonely pioneer cabins and residents who shun closely situated neighbors, close inspection reveals that, at least in mountain settlements, more often than not settlers “came in small units of two or

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three families, not as lone families, and settled at the mouths of gaps and hollows in proximity to one another for mutual assistance and protection” (Wilhelm, G. 1978). In the Bhil country of western Udaipur, India, scattered houses are “built strategically on the top of a small hill, or on a jungle slope so as to command a view over the paths of approach” (Carstairs 1960, 69). Similarly, tribes of the Jos plateau, Nigeria, located well-concealed in huge rocky cairns of granite, were able to avoid the slave raids of the Fulani, and to survive “as a compact group in the face of a hostile world” (Foyle 1953, 1). The placement of the houses of the Mae Enga – in the western highlands of New Guinea on isolated ridge tops or backed against hill slopes – serves two important purposes: better defense against attackers and privacy (Meggitt 1957, 168). An even better example of a defensive location is the well-known pile dwellings discovered in the 19th century at lakes across much of Europe. These structures often required enemies to cross the open water of the lakes, a daunting task in early times (Munro, R. 1890; Joyce 1903). In Alaska early buildings were frequently constructed overlying permafrost, which subsequently thawed unevenly, producing buckled floors, collapsed walls, fallen roofs, and ultimately often complete destruction of the structures. Permafrost did have extreme value for some Alaskan people, however. The Inupiat excavated wells deep into the permafrost to a level where year-round temperatures never exceeded 10°F. Each of these sigluaqs (cold cellars), lined and shored up with huge whale bones, functioned as “a traditional place to preserve food, particularly whale meat” (Sakakibara 2008, 460) for an entire clan. Humans are basically gregarious animals who seek out the company and potential security offered by others, especially of the same ethnic group. Unlike the US, Canadian settlement laws permitted the reservation of blocks of land to be claimed by homogeneous groups of settlers (Figure 6-3). Furthermore, the earliest pioneer settlers frequently convinced their ethnic fellows back in Europe to join them, so that ethnic communities often grew up naturally. Thus, for example, one could easily identify concentrated Ukrainian settlements (around Gimli, Manitoba), Dutch settlements (in Holland, Michigan and Pella, Iowa), Welsh (Gallia and Jackson counties, Ohio), Walloonian Belgians (Door County peninsula, Wisconsin), Danes (around Kimbollton, Iowa), Norwegians (Coon Valley, Wisconsin), Swedes (Lindsborg, Kansas), Icelanders (Washington Island, Wisconsin), and Czechs (around Tabor, South Dakota), to mention just a few. Just how many, and how poorly known and documented the majority of them might be, was suggested by

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6-3. On this topographic map (Altona, Manitoba topo. quad. 62 H/4) of the Mennonite village of Chortiz, Manitoba, the housebarns appear as squares (houses) in front of rectangles (barns). Absence of houses, barns or combined structures is also noticeable in the gaps breaking the regular pattern of settlement, though no new or modern construction has taken place.

William Sherman (1979, 12), whose study of the southwestern quarter of North Dakota found “of the townships in the study area 60 per cent were almost solidly of one ethnic group.” Sherman identified 19 separate groups in his area, but did not fully break down the Anglo-American and German (Reichsdeutsch) groupings. Anglos and Germans came in such numbers in the 19th century as to be found intermixed in almost every part of the expanding United States. At an even more elemental level is the common practice of locating dwellings in close proximity to those of other family members. However, the Kalapalo Indians of central Brazil follow a quite different spatial arrangement. The Kalapalo village, like all those of the Upper Zingu Basin, consists of a circle of thatched roof, oval-shaped houses (looking much like elongated hay stacks) which open onto a cleared plaza [...] Location of houses within the village circle is largely fortuitous; houses are not located near one another according to the relationship of persons who live in them.

With respect to the interior: At each end of the house is a living area where the residents sling their hammocks and store personal possessions [...] Fires are built near each

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cluster of hammocks, where small quantities of food are prepared for an individual’s or nuclear family’s meal [...] These fires also provide warmth at night [...] The house is divided by a large central platform [for storage purposes] [...] The main fire area, always located in the back of the house opposite the rear entrance, is used for preparing major meals [...] During the dry season the main fire is built outdoors to the rear of the house [...] The open space in front of the central platform, from which the plaza can be seen, is used as a communal work area. (Basso 1973, 49)

Even North American Plains Indians who sheltered under a simple and moveable tipi made some elementary decisions. The Blackfoot selected tipi sites for their good drainage, level land and absence of rodent and snake holes (McClintock, W. n.d., 4). Elsewhere, abundance of firewood and ease of its collection has been suggested as the controlling factor for the location of some Navajo hogans (Spencer and Jett 1971, 163). The importance of water as a locational magnet is hard to overestimate (Berry 1928). A dependable water supply marks virtually every dwelling location in the world (Harvey, N. 1984, 13). Even desert nomads move from water source to water source, and must change their location if it becomes undependable. In other environments different water solutions were evolved. Throughout the hill country of southern Indiana, the site of virtually every early log house was governed by the location of springs or small streams leading away from springs. “This means that most early log houses are not located on ridge tops or at the bottoms of valleys, but in the land between, where springs occur. Usually a level spot close to the spring but above it on slightly higher land is chosen for the site of the house” (Roberts 1984, 11). Along the Pacific states of the US, distinctive, tall water-holding towers called tank houses are common additions to rural dwellings in interior areas where agricultural settlement was sustained by irrigation (Pitman 1976). Finally, Paula Stoner (1977, 513) reminds us that early settlers in eastern United States frequently placed their dwellings immediately over fresh water springs, as their need was so great. Water also sometimes may act as a deterrent to permanent settlement. With their potential for level fields and deep fertile soils, valley bottoms are attractive locations but can also be dangerous locations. Devastating floods – occurring several years, or even decades apart – may wipe out entire communities, and the dangers are often not appreciated until too late because of the long period between the floods. With world population growth, climatic change

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and global warming, the concomitant incidence of major floods seems to be occurring more and more often. Still, the attraction of river valleys remains enticing. Japanese farmers seem to have developed the most effective method of dealing with periodic flood dangers. Where flooding is frequent and pronounced: homes built on high man-made earth mounds reinforced with stones are frequently encountered. Such structures, mizutsuka, are usually double storied so that in excessively high water flood periods, the household transfers to the upper level and remains there until the water subsides [...] Where houses are not appreciably raised, and where flooding may occur, tightly fitted rock walls surrounding homes or even fields serve as water holding dikes. (Nishi 1967, 247)

A rather different but important consideration influencing farm­ house location in the Central Lowland of the US, from western Ohio to Iowa, is surface water drainage. In the glaciated areas of these states, moraines, kames and glacial beach ridges provide many sites which are just a few feet above the water-logged surface of the plains (Figure 6-4). Such elevation is not only drier, but also gives a slight settlement advantage by allowing drainage of cold air away from the site in the cool half of the year. Wayne Kiefer (1972, 491) recorded 75% of farmsteads in northern Indiana to be on such slightly elevated sites.

6-4. A small portion of the Normal East quadrangle, USGS topographic map. Farmhouses along the north–south highway are mostly located on kames, which are identified by the roughly circular 800-foot topographic contour. The ten-foot contour interval indicates the slope is sufficient to provide drier conditions for building on the otherwise level and poorly drained prairie around Normal, IL.

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Characteristics of drainage also have a great deal to do with the design of a dwelling. Drainage considerations also apply to the dwelling site. On the delta of the Mississippi River, because ground water is saline, house roofs are used as catchments for rainwater. In the Cajun prairies of southwest Louisiana, a higher water table – and consequently poorer drainage in the southern part of the prairies – necessitated the storage of rainwater, collected on the metal roofs of houses, in above-ground cypress wood cisterns (Figure 6-5). In the northern, better-drained and somewhat higher prairies, the cisterns are tanks placed unobtrusively underground (Post 1962, 24). In some communities, location of a dwelling is governed by quite specific social regulation. An extreme example is provided by the Sakalava people of western Madagascar. A strict order of settlement requires that a village founder or ruling male occupy the northeasternmost location, closest to the burial grounds of the groups’ ancestors. Descendants and subsequent settlers locate houses progressively to the south and west (Feeley-Harnik 1980, 573). The rules which govern site conditions have been incorporated in many cultures into sacred documents, or into sets of regulations and procedures, which, if not actually sacred, came to be regarded by the folk as almost divine. Hence, where traditional society still flourishes, one disobeys or ignores them often at great peril.

6-5. A cistern of cypress wood stores the rainwater caught by the dwelling’s roof. This house and cistern are located on the Mississippi delta lands in Louisiana, where salt-contaminated ground water is not suitable for dwelling use (photo by author, 1956).

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Finally, beliefs about the supernatural – in the form of taboos – condition the site selection of homesteads. Speaking of the Navajo, Stephen Jett (1980, 116) offers the following observation: Traditionally, no structure or field should be located where lightning has struck, for that spot has been claimed by the lightning serpent and lightning will strike there again. If possible, dwellings should not be built in box canyons or caves where there are echoes, for this will result in bad dreams. Nor should one build too near to the bank of a stream for reasons of safety from flood and from the Water Spirit. Locations where antelope and deer pounds were erected are also dangerous, as they are haunted by the ghosts of the slaughtered animals. Prehistoric ruins (and beams from them) are also often ghost infested because of burials there. Peaks and ridges should be avoided, for here the Wind People may bring pain and wanderlust.

The quest initially for a suitable dwelling location and subsequently for the precise site is one of humankind’s most significant life tasks.

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~7~ Orientation The arrangement of buildings involves concepts of both location and orientation. Such arrangement is usually culturally controlled, a product of the relationship with the environment, requirements for security, and ethnic group customs and mores. Nevertheless, even minor variations in topography may operate to influence building site location, orientation, and arrangement. Chie Sakakibara (2008, 460) provides a photo of seashore dwellings of Inupiat in Alaska, whose frame and sod and whalebone houses are aligned in perfect consistency with small beach ridges. In a quite different location, Henry Heimonen (1976, 41, 229) observed the “kind of enclosure, with either a single, or more commonly a double inner yard, is the traditional plan of the South Ostrobothnian farmstead,” but, “in the Lake Superior region, virtually none of the Finnish farmsteads have more than a faint resemblance to this traditional plan.” Arnold Alanen and William Tishler (1980, 76) confirmed Heimonen’s observation. Carolyn Torma (1988, 106), investigating Finnish farms in South Dakota, found only two with a loose courtyard structure. They were in sharp contrast “to the more typical axial arrangement of many South Dakota farms.” In most parts of Norway, farm courtyards were merely open, irregular spaces, around which as many as 30 structures might cluster on each individual property (Holan 1990, 46). In neighboring Sweden, farm courtyards were often quite small and rectangular, and almost closed in by the surrounding buildings of the farmstead, as evidenced by several examples preserved in the Skansen Open-air Museum (Figure 7-1). On a similarly microscopic scale, Amish farmsteads in North America present a unique arrangement characteristic, the presence of the “grossvater” or “granddaddy” house, not found in other ethnic communities (Figure 7-2). The Amish practice ultimogeniture inheritance – sons marry in order of seniority, and when the youngest son marries, he inherits the family homestead and the parents move to a smaller residence. The bond of family is so close that the smaller residence was built earlier on the original farmstead, often so close

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7-1. Four courtyard-centered farmsteads in the Skansen Open-air Museum, Stockholm. Each farm offers a slightly different arrangement, although restricted access to the courtyard is common to all, as well as one-story elevation and gable-roof form. Note the use of roof trees on two of the farms (from a poster circulated by the Skansen Open-air Museum).

that the houses are connected by a common walkway, or if that is inconvenient it is built in such a way that the corners of parts of the old and new structures physically touch (Noble 1986, 39). Long before the old folks come to reside in the smaller dwelling, it usually has served as the residence for older sons and their wives and children, in order of seniority and marriage, until family finances permitted the purchase or rent of a separate farm for each marital unit (Mook and Hostettler 1957, 27).

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7-2. Houses on an Amish farmstead, Holmes County, OH. The house to the right is the “grandfather house.” Note how the lower roof and the wall of the main house have been extended to touch the other structure, thus reminding the world that the family has not been broken. The modification also provides a shelter from inclement weather (photo by author, 1977).

7-3. The Ukrainian settlement area in Alberta is the largest such settlement in Canada. The map provides a generalized ethnic sub-boundary between Bukovynain and Galician groups, each of which had its own distinctive traditional architecture brought from Europe (drawn by John Lehr, 1976b).

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Elsewhere, other groups may have other distinctive locational characteristics by which they can be identified easily. Ukrainian settlements took root in several locations in the Canadian prairie provinces. An area west of Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba was settled by Ukrainians in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although all were Ukrainians, they originated from two quite different parts of the Ukraine, and early dwellings of the two groups were quite different (Figure 7-3). The Bukovynian Ukrainians built larger and more ornate houses than the Galicians. The overhang of the hipped or hippedgable “jerkin-head” roofs: supported by a number of wooden posts formed a verandah. At the corners of the house the exterior walls often flared out towards the top to form eave brackets, which were decoratively carved. The houses were further enhanced by decorative patterns and coloured trim (Ledohowski and Butterfield 1983, 57).

Galician houses, however, appeared less exuberant, and more sober. Rarely did these gable-roofed dwellings have “a prominent overhang, and as a consequence eave brackets were less common, and were always less pronounced.” Little decoration was added to the exterior, and roof windows and exterior trim colors also differed. Orientation always means location with reference to something else. The Hopi in northeastern Arizona built elongated pueblos oriented in a northeast–southwest direction to benefit from solar heating. The original doors of the upper-story rooms always opened in a generally southeast direction. The terraces, where most activity took place, also had a similar orientation to gain the warmth of the winter sun, and for protection from cold winds. Modern doorways to ground-floor rooms retain the same orientation (Fewkes 1906, 89). To a significant extent, orientation – especially of building clusters – reflects cultural traditions, although economic and environmental considerations are important as well. In Japan, for example, the ancient rules of geomancy required that “the house should be protected by a wall or closet towards the northeast, because unpleasant influences are said to come from this direction” (Gutkind 1953, 34). An unusual arrangement involving both proximity to a roadway and traditional orientation to the east occurs among the Bai ethnic group in Xizhou, southwest China. The dwellings face eastward “regardless of the direction in which the street runs.” As a result, the gable or the back wall of the house sometimes faces the street “rather than the front or side” (Congzhou et al. 2008, 202).

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Perhaps the ultimate example of roadway orientation influence has been offered by Jean Sizemore (1994, 135). Writing of the Ozarks, she says: A vivid example of the tenacity of the desire for one’s house to face the road is the Will Ford house of 1905. In 1951, when the road in front of their double pen house was rerouted to the rear, the Fords rearranged the house to make what were formerly the two back doors into the front doors. Mrs. Ford said, “Our living room used to be a bedroom; what used to be the living room is now our kitchen.”

David Brugge (1983, 186) suggested very practical reasons for the hogan entry to face east. Some of his field informants mentioned: the ground does not remain muddy as long in the front of the hogan so orientated, especially if it is on ground sloping slightly to the south or east. The additional advantage of a solar orientation avoiding the prevailing southwesterly winds of Navajo country is denied by all informants as being a consideration, although it is an effective by-product of the tradition.

The tradition of eastward orientation is so deeply embedded in the Navajo that even modern bungalows and other Western houses built by the Navajo today face to the east (Spencer and Jett 1971, 171). Among the Rindi of Sumba, Indonesia (Forth 1981, 55), and many other societies as well, an east-facing orientation has little to do with the compass, but a great deal to do with the rising sun, which variously represents rebirth, fertility, light, renewal, energy, even life itself. In India, among the Gonds, the east-facing door is constructed to be so low that the peasant exiting in the early morning must bow to the rising sun god (Fuchs 1960, 26), a belief widely held by the community. The very real advantages – increased protection from enemies who must stoop to enter, the additional strength of greater structural stability, and the possibility of lower heat loss through a restricted opening resulting from a lower doorway – seem not to be part of the conscious rationale or justification for the feature. The earliest pioneer settlers on the Great Plains of the US also were guided by celestial observation. The walls of their structures were usually aligned “straight north and south, east and west, with the help of the North Star on a clear night” (Welsh 1967, 337). Gradually the General Land Office rectangular land survey (Figure 7-4) began to control land division throughout most of the level or gently rolling land of the Midwest. As a result, houses are oriented to cardinal compass points as determined by the survey. In many parts,

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7-4. Because lines of longitude converge poleward, north–south roads governed by the US General Land Office survey must periodically make an adjustment consisting of two 90-degree bends and a very short east–west connection. This adjustment is shown here in east central Illinois (photo by author, 1956).

orientation control was so strong that even the individually built farm outbuildings rigidly followed the survey orientation. Although a west orientation has a negative connotation in many societies (Mukerji 1962, 32), in many others no such disability pertains. In northern Ghana entrances always face west. “‘Because it is forbidden to build otherwise’ was the usual response to the writer’s queries on this point” (Hunter 1967, 343). In fact a westward orientation provides some protection against the frequent rainstorms that move from east to west there. A west orientation is also common in Madagascar (West 1951, 24; Block 1971, 11). A west or a north orientation in India also has some religious significance, and hence is also generally acceptable, although particular restrictions apply from place to place and in different communities. For example, Nagas avoid the west because this is the direction in which spirits go in death (toward the setting sun?). Nair caste houses must never face north or south; but in Bengal doors face south to avoid the sharp, cold northerly wind in winter and to get the benefit of soft southerly winds in summer (Crooke 1918, 134). Elsewhere in India, a south orientation is avoided since this is the direction of evil (Chandhoke 1990, 176). Southerly orientation is encountered in a few areas of India for very different reasons (Noble 2003). In Tamilnadu cooling southern breezes in summer and cold northern winds in winter override the ancient religious dogma, as do the south-facing warmer winter slopes in the

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Himalayas around Dehra Dun (Subramanyam 1938, 174; Dikshit 1965, 43). India is only one of many countries where an elaborate geomancy has been practiced. Throughout Southeast Asia various forms of it are observed. The principles of such divination probably have been refined to its greatest degree in China under the rubric of Feng Shui. Wind is, of course, also an important factor in habitat orientation. It seems likely that the northwest–southeast orientation of Iroquoian longhouses in southern Ontario is a response to strong winds and very low winter temperatures (Norcliffe and Heidenreich 1974). In southern New England: Families frequently tried to take advantage of building forms to shield outside work from cold north or northwest winds. By the early 1820s, rear or side porches and sheds extending beyond ells helped protect those performing recurrent outdoor activities. This careful orientation of workspace made little difference in January, but in late fall or early spring the strategy was quite effective. (Garrison 1991, 116)

Location and orientation are both aspects that deal with space and position. Although basically non-structural components of house design, they often influence and sometimes determine the other characteristics of a structure. Location is a consideration that usually has economic ramifications, while orientation often speaks to basic symbolic and religious aspects. Both are sensitive to physical and environmental constraints.

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~8~ Building Materials and Construction Methods: Mud, Sod, Turf, Tabby The altitudinal zonation of traditional dwellings in New Mexico was influenced not only by the easy availability of building materials, but also by a number of less-often-recognized factors, including such fundamental economic laws as comparative advantage, primary resource use, diminishing returns, and accessibility. In a vein of usefulness, “houses made of empty tar barrels used in road building” have been reported from Ethiopia (Battle 1973, 8). Occasionally, the building materials have a close and unique connection to the inhabitants. The Kumbhara are a caste of potters in the Indian state of Orissa who construct their dwellings out of terracotta pots. Some of the earliest inhabited structures were either above or below ground. In the main, however, buildings are earthfast, built from ground level upwards. This, of course, discounts the digging of cellars – often less than half the area of the building floors, and also whatever modest excavation was necessary to level the ground – or the raising of a structure a foot or so, to avoid the damp ground in humid areas, and to facilitate air circulation under the structure to enhance cooling and retard deterioration. Furthermore, early mountain herders sometimes built their dry stone dwellings slightly excavated into rocky hillsides. By so doing, they created sturdier structures, reduced drafts, and employed less detailed rock laying (Langsner and Langsner 1974, 12). The materials of construction can be divided into two major, basic groupings – earth materials and vegetative products. In contrast, the use of animal dung for finishing surfaces is surprisingly common. David Murphy (1989, 79) also reminds us that “clay and loam houses are found throughout the Czech states, from western Bohemia through Moravia and the plains of Slovakia,” and that “use of clay in the Ukraine was so widespread that every village had its own clay pit.”

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Vernacular Buildings 8-1. Roundish, low, adobe huts in a Masai settlement in Tanzania, are secured by a wattle door (photo by author, 1970).

Small wonder, then, to find clay dwellings in the early Ukrainian settlements of western North Dakota (Martin, Christopher 1989, 89). In many parts of the world, clay, earth, or mud (Figure 8-1), is referred to as adobe, which is a modification of the Arabic word “al-tob” or mud. The use of an Arabic term is understandable because of the prominence of mud-walled and mud-roofed structures throughout the deserts of the Middle East. Introduced by Arabic speakers to Spain, and subsequently by the Spanish to Latin America, the term also diffused to Europe and much of the rest of the world. The principal advantages of adobe as a building material are its high insulation qualities, extremely low cost because of wide availability, the fact that little skill is required to use it in its simplest forms, and its relative durability. In Sichuan Province, China, even adobe brick and tamped walls may “melt down entirely or wash away overnight” from prolonged rainfall and flooding (Spencer 1947, 261). No entirely satisfactory long-term method of protecting exterior earth walls against weather exists (Alcock 1950, 49). Nevertheless, Mehar Gill (1991, 1), speaking of mud construction in Punjabi villages, notes, “In order to protect these walls against eroding effect of rains as well as from burglary, the

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8-2. Any place subject to water overflow is vulnerable to erosion, even in the desert. Here excess water from a roof drain is eroding the plaster of the adobe wall, which eventually will collapse if repair is not made to this structure on the Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico (photo by author 1996).

houses were erected usually with common walls with one another on two or even three side.” Even in the building process excessive water can be a problem (Figure 8-2). If the mud is “too wet it may be difficult to compact, because pressure at one point will cause the soil [to] rise at another” (Fenton. F.C. 1941, 18). Despite the need to remain constantly vigilant, adobe structures proved to be more desirable than sod ones. In the dry margins of the Great Plains of the US, for example, westward-moving settlers in the 19th and early 20th centuries shifted from sod houses to adobe and other types of mud buildings (Adams 1910). Clay or mud dwellings of various types are reported from Illinois (Sculle 1989, 36), Nebraska (Murphy 1989, 81), South Dakota (Koop and Ludwig 1984, 3–5; Rau 1992, 290–7), North Dakota (Martin 1989, 89), Nevada (Owen 1989, 245), and even far to the east in New York State (Pieper 1989, 237). In all areas, walls may be constructed by building layer upon layer of mud in a method widely used in desert environments and sometimes referred to as puddled adobe (Figure 8-3). In the puddled state the soil grains are brought close together, resulting in a mechanical interlocking of the angular soil particles, with the clay in the soil acting as a cementing agent for the particle surfaces in contact. The material often becomes much harder and stronger, than would normally be anticipated. (Neubauer 1950, 27)

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8-3. Puddled adobe huts of a village in Punjab, North India. In the left background, note the courses of stones and rocks to give more stability to another finished wall (photo by author, 1973).

In the latter area, juniper wood rods were used early on to provide additional reinforcement to the adobe (Hoover 1935, 242). “In the nineteenth century both the Pima and Papago [in south central Arizona] built forms of the ki, a brush and mud covered structure,” of oval plan, slightly excavated, banked with earth, and surrounded by a domed adobe-plastered roof (Nabokov and Easton 1989, 340). However, the Pima or Papago traditional house which commonly survives today is a one- or two-family, earth-roofed hut built of adobe. “It differs from the common Mexican type of adobe house in that the roof extends over the walls instead of the walls extending above the roof.” Cottonwood beams support the roof. “Arrow-weed and cottonwood grow only on river flats, so the Papagos of the desert use ocatilla stems or sahuaro ribs” instead (Hoover 1935, 243–4). Under pressure from the US Indian Bureau in the 1880s, Pima and Papago tribesmen began to construct a dwelling called a sandwich house. Native adobe methods were gradually supplemented by the borrowing of Anglo techniques and materials. The result was a rectangular-plan structure whose walls were constructed of thin adobe

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8-4. The Pueblo Indians of southwestern United States borrowed the idea of this type of oven from the early Spanish Mexicans. Made of adobe, in this beehive shape it is called a horno (photo by author, 1967).

bands separated by one-by-four milled lumber lath boards inside and out, looking for all the world like a gigantic layered sandwich (Fontana 1978, 86). Indians here and elsewhere in the southwest also adopted bee-hive ovens, called hornos (Figure 8-4), and corner fireplaces, from the Spanish-Mexicans. One of the most unusual applications of mud building is practiced by the Musgum (Mousgoum), who reside astride the boundary between Cameroon and Chad. Their roughly conical houses can be as high as 30 feet. The basic structure is formed by strong reeds lashed together, over which the mud is laid. The pisé mode of construction (Figure 8-5) was widely employed in parts of the UK and France at least as early as the 18th century (Merrill 1947, 7–9), and in late 18th and early 19th century by innovative plantation owners in Virginia (Hallock 2004, 40–53). One of the traits, which makes the construction by the Mormons of Utah interesting, is the rapidity and success with which they adapted

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8-5. A wooden tamper used to compact mud in pisé construction in northern Peru. The wooden form holds the mud mixture until solidified. Much the same procedure is followed in the rest of the world’s non-industrial areas (photo by author, 1985).

to different building materials as they migrated westward. Coming from a humid, forested environment, where frame houses were the norm, they built log cabins in Illinois, sod dugouts in Nebraska, and poured adobe and adobe brick houses in Utah, all within the period of a decade. Another major, and the most technically sophisticated, method of using mud is in the form of “adobe building blocks.” Again, two basic techniques are in use. The simplest, called clay lump or toubes, is one in which the clay is formed by hand into a roughly rectangular block. Clay lump occurs widely in Africa (Denyer 1978, 93). A more sophisticated technique produces adobe bricks. It requires packing the wet mud into a rectangular wooden form. Even with thorough drying, adobe bricks are susceptible to water erosion. Sod houses in North America suffered from the same social stigma that log houses experienced – although in both instances they were the mark of the pioneer, carving out settlements in what appeared to them to be a forbidding and dangerous wilderness. The sod house floor plan was usually a simple, one-room rectangle because these structures were normally thought of as temporary dwellings.

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Although sod was ubiquitous on the Great Plains and provided excellent insulation, sod structures were not without problems. Interiors had poor light and ventilation because of few openings; dirt sifted down from the ceiling in dry periods; on rainy days and for several days thereafter, the roof often leaked and dirt floors got muddy (Dick 1937, 114); insects, birds, mice, and snakes found shelter in the sod (Dutcher 1949, 361); and the heavy weight of sod roofs needed substantial support (Welsch 1968, 49). Despite these difficulties, “soddies” provided shelter for thousands. In many parts of Europe, especially in western Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Iceland, turf houses were constructed using methods similar to those of the North American pioneers. Turf houses, in all regions, were steadily replaced by more comfortable and desirable structures as incomes elevated and technological methods and standards of construction improved. In coastal southeastern United States, a burned-lime and crushedseashell aggregate, mixed with some sand and water, is called tabby (Manucy 1952). Its use in the New World derived from African slaves assigned as construction laborers, who knew its properties from their earlier residence in the Guinea Coast of West Africa (Jones, S.L. 1985, 199). The height of tabby’s popularity coincided with years of southern prosperity in the first third of the 19th century (Sheehan and Sickels-Taves 2002, 21–2). Cotton cultivation from the late 18th to the late 19th century was extremely labor intensive. Consequently, the demand for slave labor increased accordingly. The existence of a large slave labor force, primarily utilized in agricultural pursuits, also provided the manpower needed to manufacture tabby structures in a cost-efficient manner. Combined with the activities of Thomas Spaulding [a local Georgia builder], who popularized the use of tabby for house construction, the development of large plantations in the southeast probably accounts for the extraordinary leap in popularity of tabby in the early years of the 19th century [...] The affordability of tabby construction was [...] directly proportional to the cost of labor. (Sheehan and Sickels-Taves 2002, 25)

When tabby dries and cures, it forms a rock-hard mass much like cement, so impenetrable that fortresses, as well as simple dwellings, were sometimes built of the material (Manucy 1952, 33). “Across several centuries, tabby showed itself to be a practical building material [...] Even when new products such as Portland cement were introduced, tabby remained popular.”

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~9~ Building Materials and Construction Methods: Brick, Stone, Snow The ultimate rock-hard earth building materials are brick and stone. If clay, rather than just being used after natural drying, is subjected to baking and fusing temperatures in a closed kiln or oven, fired brick is the result, a much superior building material to mud or adobe. Usually, bricks are laid in horizontal courses, but in England, the Low Countries, and the early Dutch-settled regions of northeastern United States, in the space on a gable wall just below the roof line, the bricks were laid in a herring-bone fashion to create regular small triangles (Figure 9-1). “The bricks were laid diagonally for the very practical reason of keeping the vertical joints tight by gravitation” (Oliver, B. 1929, 34). This, of course, helped render the gable parapet waterproof, “in as much as it minimized the exposure of mortar joints along the top surface of the wall” (Wheeler 2004, 2). The bricks were “worked into more or less equal-sized triangles extending down the length of the gable, and produced a pleasing decorative effect” (Stevens, J.R. 2005, 50). The tumbled triangles, extending in eastern England from Yorkshire to Kent, appear to have been the result of importation of the technique from the Low Countries (Sheppard 1966, 31), but the technique was not continued much in English-settled North America. One large area over which brick became the construction material of choice for dwellings is the North European plain from the Netherlands to Poland. The Romans introduced brick making into England, but with their departure brick making ceased. However, in the 12th century, brick production began again, concentrated initially in eastern England. Its establishment there was encouraged by three factors: (1) proximity to continental Europe where brick making survived from Roman times, (2) the presence of soft, easily worked and suitable clays, and (3) the lack of building stone in eastern England.

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9-1. The hounds-tooth brick construction appears just below the roof line in an early Dutch fort, now a private residence in the Mohawk River Valley of New York (photo by author).

Greater status usually attaches to building in brick rather than in mud or wood. In the case of wood, this is probably because of the brick’s greater durability and fire resistance. In the case of mud, a brick structure’s elevated status is perhaps because of its greater cost, more finished appearance, and the need for more skill in its construction. Masons in central and southern Utah in the second half of the 19th century undertook to disguise adobe walls, which were considered inferior. They plastered exteriors with a rendering of faux fired brick “intended to be visually pleasing and socially acceptable” (Carter 1981, 69). Brick-veneered or brick-cased log houses (Figure 9-2) are reported from Wisconsin (Noble 1985, 245), Virginia (Reed 1977, 8), and Pennsylvania (Van Dolsen 1989, 99–107). Karen Koegler (1995, 196) suggests a similar distribution for early stone houses in Pennsylvania: In a landscape dominated by log dwelling houses, stone houses apparently represented little more than 5 percent of the finer homes. The proportion of stone houses was probably even smaller because the vast majority of dwelling houses in southwestern Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century were appraised by local assessors as being worth less than a hundred dollars, and building materials for these “lesser” houses were not specified.

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A

B 9-2. Examples of cladding used to cover log structures. A – Brick veneer applied to a log house in the Belgian settlement on the Door County peninsula, WI (photo by author, 1980). B – Adobe and bits of plaster held together by small, straight branches on an early Ukrainian dwelling, near Winnipeg, Manitoba (photo by author, 1986).

Studies investigating the disappearance rate of traditional buildings are quite rare. Part of the problem is that many structures, especially of wood or mud, may leave virtually no trace after a short period of decay. A study, attempting to explain why scholars working in what was defined in the article as vernacular architecture studies, offered the following observation: We often spend a great deal of time examining quite extraordinary structures, too [...] Often this involvement with the architecture of the elite stems from the simple fact that the largest and most substantial buildings are the ones that survive. The truly ordinary structures have vanished. (Carter and Herman 1991, 1–2)

Perhaps the authors might find some value in a discourse with archaeologists! Many writers have commented on “English bricks” presumably brought over to America in the early settlement period as ship ballast, if not actual cargo. Before we reject entirely the idea of bricks imported to the New World as ship ballast, we need to consider the evidence

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presented by David Cohen (1992, 45–7), who quotes 17th-century documents that indicate that the Dutch in New Amsterdam did, in fact, contract with ship captains for some bricks. The most durable earth building material is stone. It is also among the earliest material used for dwellings. In many parts of the world, especially where adequate forest cover was not easily available, it provided simple, dome–shaped or beehive shelters, little more than hollow piles of rough stones or boulders. The flatter the rock fragments, the better for use as building material in the pre-historic world. Much later, as construction techniques improved, stone building became more refined. Most of the discussion about stone in this chapter refers to this long, later period of history. Nevertheless, archaeologists continue to expand our knowledge of pre-historic (and more recent) circular stone dwellings, including numerous examples in Scotland, western Ireland (Joyce 1903; Henry 1956–7), the Balkans (Langsner and Langsner 1974), and in Galicia, Spain (Evans, E.E. 1974, 54). Because of its weight and bulk, and hence the difficulty and cost of moving it very far, stone is used for traditional dwellings within a short distance of its origin (Figure 9-3). Thus, a geological map showing building stone formations such as limestone, sandstone, and slate is a useful guide to finding traditional stone structures. As Charles McRaven (1980, 11) notes, “stone is expensive if you count your time, cheap if you don’t.” By those who could afford its use stone and mortar were held to be the best of all building materials, and the stone-mason was an important and respected rural craftsman. A substitute for lime-mortar was found in tempered clay by those who were too far removed from a source of supply of lime or whose pockets did not reach to the use of the more expensive material. (O’Danachair 1972, 83 for Ireland)

Stone structures, because of their labor and skill requirements, almost always are the second or later generation of buildings erected by immigrants. As an example, Norwegian settlers in Bosque County, Texas in the 19th century constructed log cabins or dugouts in which to live as soon as they arrived. Later, they shifted to stone houses as time permitted (Breisch and Moore 1986). As societies have matured, stone has come to be widely viewed as the most prestigious construction material, because of the recognized durability of carved stone used in public buildings and monumental structures, and probably because the wealthiest and most powerful sought out stone for their dwellings, even though humble early building often may have employed such material. Stone dwellings

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9-3. Limestone was widely used in traditional dwellings along the Adriatic coasts, near Dvori, Croatia. The small rectangular holes in the building to the right are entrances for pigeons, a dovecote (photo by author, 2008).

provided such status and prestige in the northern United States that even timber-frame structures often added wooden quoins: blocky carvings at the corner of a building that look like rectangular stones stacked alternately long side, then short end out [...] Reproduced in wood, they vaguely recall the corner of a large masonry structure, but since it’s obvious that no clapboard house could support stones laid in its surface this way, the quoins have become a forthright declaration of falsehood for the sake of chic. (Bruce and Grossman 1975, 57)

The great advantage of drywall construction is that if water penetrates, the effect on the wall is much less than in mortared walls (Denyer 1991, 154). In Gaelic western Ireland, dry walling may be used initially, but then: the walls are pointed with rough mortar [...] This technique has the advantage that in the inside of the wall, where the mortar does not reach, a system of open spaces is left, and hence the dampness which may come in, cannot pass through, but is conducted downwards to the foundation and from that into the ground. (Muhlhausen 1934, 41)

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Because of its weight and the time and skill required for its use, cut or finished stone building reflects regional prosperity and the development of crafts of stone masons. The corbelled stone huts in Malta have been occupied or used continuously up to the present time. Stone structures vary in floor plans from circular to oval, rectangular and square, and in overall form from standard roof covered, to beehive, to barrel vault, to pyramid roofed, to corbelled roof covered by small stones, and even finer gravel (Figure 9-4). Because corbelled stone huts occur most often in limestone areas, they are frequently associated with, or are in proximity to, extensive cave dwellings. This is true in southern Spain, the Greek islands, and in the heel of southern Italy. Building with cobblestones is an outgrowth and refinement of fieldstone construction. The middle of the 19th century was the period of maximum development of cobblestone architecture, which centered on upstate New York (Schmidt 1966, 2). The time and location of cobblestone buildings supports the thesis that surplus: stone masons, thrown out of work by the completion of the Erie Canal, found employment in building cobblestone structures [...] Furthermore, the distribution of these structures reflects those areas in which the final

9-4. An early stone, oval-plan hut called a girna in northern Malta. Abandoned now, it provides emergency shelter to shepherds caught in heavy downpours. Giren occur all over the rural parts of the island, but are most numerous in the lesser populated west and north (photo by author, 1992).

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phases of canal construction took place in New York State. (Noble and Coffey 1986, 45)

From a heartland in central New York (Figure 9-5), cobblestone building advanced westward into Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even before the Civil War brought a cessation of cobblestone building, the popularity of such construction had begun to wane. Perhaps this was a result of a depletion in the availability of suitable stones, or a lack of young masons to replace the dwindling numbers of the original canal workers, both of which conditions would have resulted in increased costs of construction. The final chapter on cobblestone architecture research has not yet been written. In a few instances, stone in the form of slabs of slate has been used for walling of timber-frame houses. In the area around Boppard along the Rhine in Germany, slate – often cut into flat diamond shapes – became a particularly common wall and roof material (Stevenson 1880, 190).

9-5. Map of cobblestone building in North America. Cobblestone building in the 19th century was influenced by continental glaciation and by erosional smoothing of stones by lake and river water action. The large area of cobblestone construction in New York State is also related to the number of masons attracted to the area by the building of the Erie and other canals. The Laurentian Shield, an area of old, hard rock, furnished the source area for the cobbles carried south by the glacier (from Noble and Coffey, 1986).

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Nearby, in the Siegen industrial region, a 1790 law “intended to save wood for iron production by preventing its excessive use for house building” forced the use of substitute materials. Slate as a walling material also occurs in Brittany and Belgium, and in England in Cornwall, Devon, and especially the Lake District. Slate has also found a variety of other constructional uses, although these are not as commonly applied as roofing and cladding. The use of slate slabs as free-standing fencing and property walls occurs in England, Spain, and undoubtedly elsewhere. In the small Mosel Valley town of Bernkastel, flat slates a foot or more in diameter are embedded in the middle of the town’s sloping cobblestone streets, offering better walking surfaces than the somewhat uneven and irregular cobbles. Also in Mosel River towns, slate is widely used for roofs and the upper gables of half-timber houses. Slate also served as sidewalks (footpaths) in prosperous 19th-century small towns in northeastern parts of the United States. One quite unusual combination of stone materials is encountered in the English Lake District where wooden lintels are covered by a course of thin slates projecting from the face of the wall, and then by a course of cobblestones holding the slate in place (Denyer 1991, 151). The slate course acts as a deflector of rainwater. Slate also forms a unique structural element in some buildings in this region by forming crow steps, stepped slate projections lined up along the roof gable edge (Denyer 1991, 155). A special kind of earth material used for a seasonal or temporary dwelling is snow and ice (Schwatka 1883). The word igloo is the general Eskimo word for a dwelling, employed as we might use the word “house.” The igloo was limited in most polar areas for use only as a temporary expedient, and in central North America as a seasonal habitation. Most Arctic peoples used partly excavated rough-stone houses, often with whalebone frames, in the winter, and animal skin tents in summer (Cranstone 1980, 488–9). Because of its unique use of materials and its attractive and efficient form, the snow and ice igloo is more widely appreciated than its numbers and limited use warrants. Everywhere, earth materials used in traditional building tend to be employed either in a natural state (such as mud, sod, or snow) or after minimal processing (such as brick (both adobe and fired), cut stone, or slate). In societies of lower technological levels, earth materials provide dimensional strength, and because of their lighter weight often dominate a structure’s upper areas and roof covering. Because of their more or less ubiquitous nature, and low cost, earth materials have been widely employed in all parts of the world.

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~ 10 ~ Building Materials and Construction Methods: Vegetative Materials, I After earth materials, vegetation is the main source of building resources, and wood in various forms and modes is the most important component. Logs, which in their simplest form are nothing more than tree trunks stripped of branches, cut or split into convenient lengths and usually corner-notched, are widely used in colder, more humid climates throughout the world, where appropriate forest resources occur. Log houses are, in a way, the “Cinderella” of architectural history: unhelped by fairy godmother or Prince Charming, they have not inspired much serious interest or study from either architect or historian, probably because they were unpretentiously functional and were usually built with the intention of eventually being abandoned (Rempel 1980, 34). In tropical and near-tropical areas, because of the abundance of light forest products, and because temperatures are uniformly warm, negating the need for tightly fitted buildings, these lighter materials suffice. Even at higher elevations and cooler temperatures in tropical latitudes, lighter building materials are often encountered (Figure 10-1). Constantly warm temperatures mean buildings do not have to shield against cold, but constant rainfall means humidity is always high, so wood deteriorates quickly and termites, beetles, and woodworm present a constant menace to buildings. Houses, therefore, are utilitarian and functional, often not decorative, and not meant to last very long. When the roof begins to leak, for example, such structures are abandoned if quick repairs cannot be performed. Traditional Hawaiian dwellings (Hiroa 1957; Forsythe 1997), derived largely from Polynesian methods of building, had evolved into four types of thatched houses by the time of missionary arrival in the islands.

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10-1. Here on the Ethiopian plateau, vegetational growth is slow at high elevations, and dwellings have the look of tropical structures. The roof is thatched; walls of light vertically placed poles are rudimentary; the windbreak utilizes leafy plants, but temperatures remain cool all year around (photo by author, 1975).

The easily built house without walls was essentially a roof frame built directly on the ground with either straight or curved rafters [...] The house with stone walls was fundamentally a house without walls, only in this form the gable or hipped roof rested on four low stone walls rather than on the ground. Gable-roofed houses with thatched wood frame walls were the most common form of shelter at the time of western contact; hipped-roof thatched houses seem to have gained popularity after contact. (Hiroa 1957, 78)

As in most under-developed societies, traditional Hawaiian dwellings were quite small, averaging about nine feet long, five feet wide, and six feet high for small houses (Hiroa 1957, 78). Floors were grass-covered dirt and “one low opening for a door frame was typical of enclosed structures [...] Window openings were probably not much used before western contact” (Forsythe 1997, 162). Bamboo is the most widely used structural material of the tropics, while palm fronds and leaves are the most common surface coverings (Figure 10-2). As late as the 1980s, housing censuses in the costal

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10-2. A thatched roof and bamboo dwelling preserved in the Tanzania Village Museum, Dar-es-Salaam. The upper decorative wall screen, composed of short lengths of bamboo, aids ventilation and structural integrity (photo by author, 1975).

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10-3. Logs form the walls of this Ukrainian structure near Senkiw, Manitoba. Light willow sticks are attached to the logs to act as an anchor for the mud daub, much of which has already eroded (photo by author, 1983).

lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador showed between a quarter and three-quarters of all rural homes to be of bamboo construction (Parsons 1991, 150). However, tropical bamboo construction has some important disadvantages: left in contact with soil, it rots rapidly; bamboo shoots have a high silica content which rapidly dulls cutting tools; and bamboo roofs exposed to tropical rain last an average of only two to three years. Bamboo also is susceptible to both fungal and insect damage. Not all tropical construction utilized bamboo. In the Niger River delta, for example, the common material of traditional building is the raffia palm, whose use illustrates nicely the ingenuity of builders and the care taken not to waste any part of the plant. Other species of palm are also used for building in the tropical world. Of these, coconut, nipa, and sago are most widely employed – coconut for its timber, and sago and nipa for thatch. As with bamboo, coconut palm wood is full of silica, and consequently, blunts tools very quickly (Dawson and Gillow 1994, 22). Nevertheless, its wide availability, especially on marine shores, and its ease of splitting, encourages

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its use. For example, the Maori in New Zealand constructed singleroom houses of a light framework of poles of totara wood and wattle walling of light wood sticks and bundles of raupo bulrushes. The roof consisted of reeds, totara bark, raupo, and grass (Wakefield 1845, 330). These simple structures could be erected in a day or two. A different and distinctive form of wattle-and-daub construction, although not referred to by that term or even by a native substitution name, is utilized by the Masai. It results in a “loaf shaped, mud barracks, plastered with cow dung over a brushwood frame” (Huckaby 1973, 8). Wattle-and-daub construction also is used widely in the Latin American tropics, and light vegetable materials are also used for building in the desert and near-desert area of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. The almost universally employed material is the tough stalks of the ocotillo shrub. One of the world’s most unusual building materials is the baled hay used in the Sandhills of Nebraska. A very modest resurgence of the popularity of baled hay as a cheap building material occurred elsewhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s in what were called “hippie” communities. The idea did not catch on and it is rare to find one of these later structures today. In humid areas of the mid-latitudes, because of the abundance of timber, log building became a standard mode of construction (Figure 10-4). One reason given for the long popularity of log building, in addition to the abundance of timber, is the lack of need for costly and scarce nails (Cooper 1994, 275).

10-4. A restored log cabin from the Schoenbrun Open-air Museum in northeastern Ohio. Its mud-and-stick chimney is authentic as well as the chinking, although both are somewhat neater than it originally would have been (photo by author, 1974).

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Beginning in 1811, log houses built of round logs were the only dwellings not taxed in Upper Canada, a condition which lasted well over a quarter of a century, despite their accounting for the majority of houses. There is no doubt that this method of assessment had some effect on the types of houses favoured in Upper Canada. It encouraged the use of round logs (usually dressed on the inside) for permanent dwellings in spite of some disadvantages of this type of construction and a widely held prejudice against it (Blake and Greenhill 1969, 24–5).

At least three major methods of preparing logs have been identified in Midland American construction (Jordan 1983, 61–3). They may be left round, with or without bark still attached. They may be hewn flat on two sides, to secure smooth exterior and interior surfaces to reduce the amount of chinking required to fill the spaces between logs for weather proofing, and to permit additional covering both inside and out. Finally, the logs may be “split lengthwise and inserted in the wall with the rounded side facing outward.” A fourth major method of log construction, termed the New England-Canadian tradition (McLennan 2006, 2), involves the sawing or hewing of the logs on all four sides. Probably because of the technique’s employment in early military structures in New England, houses utilizing this construction were referred to as “blockhouses” (Roberts 1984, 39, as elaborated upon by McLennan 2006, 4), thereby strengthening the erroneous idea that virtually all log construction in New England was military. In Europe an even greater variety of treatments exists. Another aspect of log construction involves the amount of chinking required and the material used (Figure 10-5). Alpine-Alemannic and Scandinavian construction, original or derived, used little or no chinking, while the Germanic and Scots-Irish methods employed in the United States used considerable material. Even left in their natural round shape, logs can be used for building by laying them horizontally, one atop the other and securing the corners. Because of the round shape, the logs protrude into the interior and considerable additional material must be added to create flush walls and to fill the “chinks” between logs. This can be small stones, mortar, bark, and narrow pieces of wood, earth, or sphagnum moss. When round logs are used, the amount of chinking is therefore significantly increased (Lehr 1976a, 67). In North America, many early dwellings were quickly and almost carelessly erected, for they were intended for habitation for a short time only. But careless and hasty building was not always the norm.

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A

B

10-5. Two examples of log chinking. A – A log cabin near the Antietam Civil War battlefield shows an attempt to chink with almost anything available, including stones and small sticks. B – The later log cabin from Skagway, Alaska shows more careful workmanship using uniform size saplings. These two examples may demonstrate the stress facing the Maryland pioneer settler as winter approached, and the more relaxed builder in Alaska, perhaps because of more affluence, and possibly with alternative temporary accommodation (photos by author: A in 1978 and B in 2001).

Dena Lynn Sanford (1991, 83) observes that in a Finnish settlement in Montana: The crudest log structures are attributed to the early American homesteaders [...] The appearance of their homestead cabins, with chinked walls and loosely-fitted notches, conforms to the popular conception of log buildings as hastily-constructed, temporary shelters. The Finns, on the other hand, with their tradition of log construction, built whole log complexes intended for long-term use.

V-notches require more careful work. “If the log remains in the round, the visible end of the log is pear-shaped. If the log is squared, the end resembles the gabled end of a house, and the process is often called ‘roof topping.’” Squared logs have greater aesthetic appeal even in rough, remote areas, but of course require more labor.

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As early as the end of the 17th century, differentiation between the designations of “log cabin” and “log house,” based in large part upon aesthetic appeal, were being made, as recorded by an observer in 1805: The temporary buildings of the first settlers in the wilds are called Cabins. They are built with unhewn logs, the interstices between which are stopped with rails, calked moss or straw, and daubed with mud. The roof is covered with a sort of thin staves split out of oak or ash, about four feet long and five inches wide, fastened on by heavy poles being laid upon them. If the logs be hewed; if the interstices be stopped with stone and neatly plastered; and the roof composed of shingles nicely laid on, it is called a log house (Harris, T.M. 1805, as reported by Lounsbury 1983, 435; and also by Rempel, 1980, 33).

Carl Lounsbury also noted that this terminology would apply in western North Carolina, and Charles Martin (1984, 19) reports the same designations in Kentucky. Dovetail notches are even more complicated and in North America, for ease and speed of construction, were often cut by sawing. The half dovetail has a flat bottom, and the full dovetail a sloping one. Among lesser known notches are the diamond notch, square and half notches and double notches. Various tooth notches characterize Fenno-Scandinavia. An alternative method of securing log corners is the use of corner posts with the horizontal logs tenoned to fit into vertical slots. Rarely encountered in North America, such a technique is fairly common in European Germanic areas, where it is known as Blockstaenderbau. Terry Jordan (1980a, 162) felt this method was “a transitional type between notched log construction and half-timbering.” Michael Ann Williams (1984, 36) notes that the late 19th-century log or timber houses in Cherokee County, North Carolina are smaller than pre-Civil War ones. The explanation is that “as sawn lumber became cheaper and more available, the family desiring a larger house would have preferred frame construction” rather than log or timber. One of the major reasons for the popularity in Texas of the dogtrot cabin was that it permitted use of shorter lengths of timber in the construction of its two separately enclosed parts, and the drier climate of Texas supported mostly trees of only modest growth (Collier 1979, 30). In other instances with shorter lengths of log available, an alternative method of construction is preferred (Lebreton 1982, 435–6). Used most widely in French-speaking areas, it also occurs in the Ukraine, Poland, New Zealand, where the method is referred to as “drop log” (Salmond 1986, 52), and the northern United States

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around the upper Great Lakes. In Canada, this mode of building spread from French-speaking areas in the east, ultimately all the way to the Pacific coast. In order to utilize shorter length timbers, which were easier and lighter to handle than long ones, and which were also of a more uniform diameter because of their shorter length, the Canadian immigrants began to use building techniques employed previously in France and elsewhere in Europe. This involved laying the logs horizontally and cutting pointed tenons to be dropped into vertical posts, into which an open, pie-shaped cross section had been cut. Alternatively, the tenons could be squared and dropped into a square slot in the post. A variant of this system was used by French Canadian settlers in New Hampshire. It involved four vertical poles at corners to secure untenoned logs (Hale 1957–60, 121–2). The close relationship of the French approach using short logs and that of the Germans employing longer and heavier logs can be easily seen. The best remaining grouping of 18th-century houses constructed by these methods is in the small town of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri (Franzwa 1990).

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~ 11 ~ Building Materials and Construction Methods: Vegetative Materials, II In its simplest form, log construction utilizes long, heavy components. Wood, however, because of its relative ease of hewing, splitting, cutting, and other ways reducing of mass, can be employed in a variety of other uses or modes of construction. One strategy to overcome the problem of weight is to cut logs into more convenient lengths. An unusual mode of log-and-mortar wall building involves the stacking of stove-length or cordwood lengths of wood – usually white cedar – in a bed of mortar. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, elderly residents familiar with this construction method refer to it as “depression building,” recalling the hard economic times of the 1930s when the technique was apparently more widely used. (Tishler 1982, 128)

Examples of stovewood buildings occur across northern United States (Minesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York), and in southern Canada from Ontario to New Brunswick. Also, William Tishler (1982, 126, 132–3) has identified examples from Norway and Sweden. The concentration of such buildings in Wisconsin, where over 70 stovewood structures existed in the 1980s, has been particularly well studied (Perrin 1963). The method of stovewood building differs entirely from that of other types of horizontal log construction (Figure 11-1). Stovewood construction permits the use of short lengths of wood, which would otherwise be useful only as fuel. The walls are made from logs cut into short uniform sections and stacked perpendicular to the length of each wall [...] In many instances the logs were split lengthwise into smaller sections. These pieces were then laid in a bed of wet lime mortar that enclosed each chunk of wood but left the cut ends exposed. The resulting wall resembled a pile of neatly stacked firewood. (Tishler 1979, 28)

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11-1. Interior view of part of a stovewood wall in a house on the Door County peninsula, WI. The two-foot lengths of wood have been split and placed in a bed of mortar. The timber frame carries numerous axe marks made when hewing occurred (photo by author, 1980).

Another common use of logs is in the manufacture of railroad ties, in great demand up to the beginning of the 20th century. As railroads expanded and were rebuilt on the Great Plains and extended westward into the driest parts of North America, surplus ties became available as building material. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the Nebraska railroads, some of which had been laid in great haste in the 1860s and 1870s, were relaid with an improvement of the roadbeds and replacement of the ties [...] Whenever lines were destroyed or rebuilt, the used ties were made available first to railroad workers for free or for a few cents per tie, and then to the general public for an equally minor charge (Welsch 1976, 150).

Laid horizontally, the ties were placed so that all courses extended just to the corner face, producing an effect which resembled quoined corners, but which is usually called a “butt corner” in

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log construction. This mode of building was used in Elko County, Nevada, where the surplus ties were produced as a result of the extension and upgrading of the Central Pacific railroad. According to Andrea Graham (1989, 242): People in railroad towns built with railroad ties, while those in mining towns, the other main type of town in Nevada, did not [...] People in the mining towns apparently had the money to bring in lumber and there is indication that the miners considered themselves sophisticated and urbane – not likely to build with such humble materials as railroad ties.

Timber-frame structures in the British Isles followed one of two methods of framing – cruck or box (Figure 11-2). An enormous amount of research has been done on cruck framing, which survives today mostly in Great Britain. More than 3,000 cruck buildings can be identified in England and Wales (Alcock 1981, 6). “Often trees intended for use as crucks had stone weights attached to one side, causing their trunks to grow in a curve” (Hill and Birch 1994, 84). In Scotland a pair of crucks cut from the same tree and used to oppose one another is referred to as a “couple.” At least two cruck pairs are needed to complete a building, and frequently more than that were used. In the latter Middle Ages, as population grew in England, and the consequent demand for timber increased, the supply of large trees diminished, raising their cost. The cruck truss and the box frame are two quite different systems of construction, although both employ hewn timbers secured by mortise-and-tenon joining. The tenon is a projecting tongue of wood fashioned on the end of a beam. The mortise normally is an oblong hole cut through the structural timber to which the tenoned piece is to be joined. The mortise and tenon are firmly secured by a wooden peg called a treenail (pronounced “trunnel”). The peg is driven into a hole drilled through both timbers (Reed 1977). The cruck truss transfers the weight of the entire structure directly to the ground by means of the crucks. The box frame transfers the weight of the walls, including beams, to the ground by means of its posts. The weight of the roof structure, on the other hand, is transferred to the ground by means of a system of rafters, collar beams, girts, king posts, or other upper supports, and then finally to the house posts. Double rows of holes, marking the positions of both posts and buttresses, are a feature of many sites in northern Europe. One major difference between the cruck truss and the box frame was the roof structure. The cruck truss depended only upon a ridge pole for stability. The box frame and rafters, in place of the upper part of

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11-2. The village of Woebly in Hereford, contains both cruck-frame and box-frame houses in a decorative style called “black and white,” in which the timbers are painted black and the panels white (photo by author, 1995).

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the cruck, eliminated the ridge pole and used purlins or horizontally placed roof boards for stability (Carson 1974, 192). Box framing required hewing of timbers, which was time consuming and produced irregular surfaces. To solve these problems saw pits were introduced, measuring about five feet deep. One sawyer stood below the log in the pit and pulled the saw downwards. The other, astride and above the log, pulled the saw upwards. The latter, the more skilled of the two, was responsible for guiding the saw, and for starting the saw in a notch axed into the end. He was known as the “top-notcher.” The term “top-notch” has passed into the English language as an idiom to denote the best or most skillful of anything, not just carpentry. The inventor of the circular saw and the date of its origin are surrounded by considerable speculation and uncertainty (Bell 1984), but it has proven to be the most efficient method of sawing. The life of the pit saw, however, was long indeed! Pit saws were used in the Virginia Mountains even after the turn of the 20th century (Bealer 1978, 34). Pit sawing also provided two words which ultimately became common English family names – Pitman and Sawyer. The practice of vernacular building provided a number of other family names in England – Thatcher, Reeder, Slater, Tyler, Carpenter, Joyner, Bricker, Mason, Pargeter, and Dauber. The situation is similar in other languages. Half timbering (Figure 11-3) is the term widely used, initially in Europe and later in North America, to describe a timber-frame structure in which bricks or other earth materials fill the wall space between the heavy wooden framing members. This nogging most often was brick whenever it could be afforded, or mud when brick was too expensive. The walls were then covered on the inside by thin wall planks. In cold climates an exterior wooden cladding would also be used for additional insulation (Figure 11-4). Not only did early New England immigrants employ clapboards as wall cladding on their own dwellings, they shipped them back as one of their first exports to England. The origin of the Pilgrim colonists was southeastern England and it was to this area, the only part of England that utilized such wall cladding, that the shipments were made (Eaton 1949, 8–10). Plank framing, a variation of post and beam timber framing, became more popular in North America than elsewhere because of the abundant forest resources, the diffusion of saw mills to cut logs into more easily handled planks, and the greater availability of low-cost nails to replace pegs and mortise-and-tenon joining (Cummings 1979). The earliest form of plank-frame construction in the United States was employed in colonial New England.

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Vernacular Buildings 11-3. A feast for the eye, the exuberant display of medieval half-timber structures in Bernkastel, in the Mosel Valley. Also note the slate roofs (photo by author, 2007).

11-4. Mud daub over wattle. Note also the thatch roof and rough timber frame, Jamestown, VA (photo by author, 1981).

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In some parts of Vermont, as many as 30–40% of all traditional dwellings were of plank-wall construction. A study of traditional dwellings in Independence County, Arkansas revealed that over half of the houses surveyed there were also plank wall (Tebbetts 1978). Similarly, Charles Martin’s study (1984) of Hollybush, Kentucky demonstrated widespread use of this construction method in that part of Appalachia. Working in western North Carolina, Michael Ann Williams (1990) found much the same situation, and as a result has suggested that, although not usually recognized as such, plank-wall construction is one of the dominant modes of traditional building throughout the entire Upland South of the United States. Horizontal-plank construction is much more rarely encountered than vertical (except in New Hampshire), probably because vertical planking eliminates the need for studs and hence is more economical than horizontal. Unlike in the rest of New England, New Hampshire tended to favor the plank-on-plank method found in Ontario and as far west as the Great Lakes (Simmons 1982, 69). This method requires the greatest amount of lumber, but provides the thickest wall and hence the greatest degree of protection and insulation. In some parts of both North America and Europe tenons were milled on the ends of both logs or sawn planks, which were then inserted into corner posts (Figure 11-5).

11-5. Tenoned planks are being slotted into posts in this log plank house, near Zakopane, Poland. A couple of posts with slots await in the background (photo by author, 1985).

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In a volume necessarily limited in size, the enormous amount and complexity of detail involved in timber construction, whether of cruck, braced frame, or plank building, cannot be adequately discussed. Readers will recognize that many of the sources listed in the references to this volume will be more specific and can remedy the omission here. Throughout Australia and especially in Queensland, dwellings widely built in the 19th century have been referred to as light-stud-frame houses. The origin of this dimensional-lumber type of construction is still debated, but Peter Bell (1984) offers a convincing argument for the borrowing of it from southeastern England. Several structural characteristics identify the building: The houses are highly standardized – the majority reducing essentially to one of two basic floor plans – and are almost invariably built in timber and iron. They are usually elevated above ground, sometimes to a height of 2 metres, boarded internally but left exposed on the outer face of the building. Almost every house has a veranda on one or more walls. Decorative detail is subdued, typically confined to a few conventional embellishments in sheet metal and fret-sawn timber.

Steel nails came into widespread use after 1885 (Edwards and Wells 1993, 2), even though government tests in the late 1880s found cut nails to have holding characteristics superior to steel-wire nails. More important to builders, however, was the steel nail’s cheapness, the variety of sizes and specialty designs available, and their ease of handling. Consequently, they gradually but steadily replaced cut nails (Nelson 1968). Identification by examination of nail types is only one method used to fix the construction dates of vernacular structures. Modern methods include the examination of paint samples, carbon-14 dating “based upon the radioactive decomposition of carbon, a constituent of all organic material,” use of thermo-luminesence “which measures light output and the corresponding gamma-ray production from heated ceramic materials,” and the employment of dendrochronology (Edwards 1982, 21–3). Application of successful techniques depends upon a variety of factors and usually yields a range rather than a specific year date. “Until the 1970s, tree-ring dating could be applied only to moisture-sensitive trees, especially those grown in relatively arid areas” (Edwards 1982, 23). Those strictures no longer apply. An excellent review of the use of dendrochronology in both southwestern United States and in New England is given by Greg Huber (2006). Cheaply produced nails could be used to fasten light lumber pieces firmly together when needed for greater support. The labor and skill

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involved in nailing a lumber frame was considerably less than that required to cut mortise-and-tenon joints and the fastening which treenails provided. These innovations, together with the perfection of balloon and platform framing announced the ultimate end of timber framing. Lumber slowly but steadily replaced timber as the wooden building material. The process of substitution continues with the greater range of modern construction materials steadily replacing the traditional. One of the most unfortunate aspects of this process is the gradual diminishing of skill levels of craftsmen. Eventually, a rich component of each group’s culture will stand in danger of being lost, and an anchor to the past will be destroyed in the society’s consciousness.

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~ 12 ~ Above-ground Structures “Man builds a home to protect (and implicitly separate) himself from nature around him.” Despite this currently unfashionable gender framework of expression, David O. Aradeon (1971, 56) recognized a basic truth about dwelling construction. Building at ground level is normally more difficult and requires more skill, although not always more labor, than excavation or elevation, and habitation there is infinitely more dangerous generally than in either alternative. Researchers frequently employ locally common terminology, which usually is not applied or understood outside the immediate area of its use. For example, in Ireland terms for thatch and thatching tools often differ from county to county, and on occasion from district to district within a county (O’Danachair 1945, 214). Peter Bell (1984), working on New Zealand, is one of a very few scholars who makes the effort to explain locally used terms. The widely used term eyebrow window is often employed to refer to half-size openings low down in the upper level of a cottage (Figure 12-1). However, the term is also used over a wider area to identify small, half-circular windows let into gable roofs (Figure 12-2). Just how muddled the terminology can become is reported by Jack McClintock (1982): “The conch house [...] is called an eyebrow house because of the way the roof – the ‘eyebrow’ – overhangs the secondstory windows above the front porch.” Even the term “conch house,” commonly used in Key West, Florida, is itself a muddle, as admitted by McClintock, who says, “The conch house follows no particular style. It is a vernacular patchwork of many elements,” and he later writes, “Nobody has yet contrived a satisfactory definition of the conch house,” other than the fact that early houses in Key West used a conch shell as a doorstop. Gunawan Tjahjono (2003, 164) suggests that many longhouses in Kalimantan were probably higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia in order “to counter strikes from below by attackers using spears.” He identifies one longhouse “which sits on a series of eight-metre-high posts.” However:

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12-1.  The small windows that provide illumination to the upper floor of this New England one-and-a-half-story cottage are protected by metal frets. The house dates from the end of the first quarter of the 19th century and has the Greek Revival exterior decoration of that period. Most such dwellings of this type do not (photo by author, 1974).

12-2. The term “eyebrow window” has been applied to several quite different types of windows. The term fits best for windows let into the roof surface, as illustrated by this example from Silesia (photo by author, 1985).

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because fire is the greatest danger to a long house, the defense argument can be seriously challenged. An enemy could easily set fire to the house and then slay the inhabitants as they fled from the burning building. Such tactics are not uncommon in Southeast Asia. (Wallace 1971, 69)

Elevating dwellings solved a range of other housing problems. The Ifugao of northern Luzon, Philippines, build houses: on support posts about two yards above the ground. These posts, around which rat fenders are attached, keep the living quarters free from the dampness of the ground as well as from snakes and rats. All houses are of the same basic pattern and structure. Lower construction timber is hardwood, which resists ant destruction. Upper construction boards are of softer woods as the smoke from the fireplace protected them from insects. The roofing is of grass stacked in a steep, pyramidal shape. (Wallace 1971, 96–9)

12-3. A 19th-century lithograph of a tree-top structure. Illustrations of this type helped to perpetuate the idea of the inferiority of primitive peoples bound to such simple structures.

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Living well above the ground has several advantages beyond that of security, both from animals and enemies (Figure 12-3). The sheltered ground area of the dwelling built over land may be used for rice processing, for animal shelter (Just 1984, 36; Kucukerman 1988, 87), as a work area, and storage for implements and firewood (Long 2003, 196–7). Built over water, the pile dwellings possess “very easy access by boat, and if the water is flowing or tidal it facilitates the hygienic disposal of refuse (Cranstone 1980, 497). Over drier ground, dwellings on piles 40 feet high raised structures in Borneo enough “to avoid the stinking rubbish accumulating below” (Dawson and Gillow 1994, 143). Also, if the elevation was high enough, or at some distance from the shore, inhabitants were outside the range of most malariacarrying mosquitoes (Dawson and Gillow 1994, 10; Cranstone 1980, 497). The Urali tribal peoples of south India add still a further reason for utilization of stilt houses: “keeping their women in seclusion at adolescence, menstruation and even at child-birth” (Ghosh 1953, 22). Another problem in coastal and riverine locations is the nature of the site. Dwellings on mud flats must be lightweight to prevent their sinking into the mud, often unevenly. Along the Rio Babahoyo in Ecuador, this problem is addressed by building bamboo huts on floating rafts connected to the shore by adjustable ramps, which rise and fall with the river (Parsons 1991, 143–4). A second problem of some coastal and riverine sites is the necessity to construct huts on piles or stilts several feet high, enough to avoid the twice-daily surge of the tide and stormy seas at other times (Figure 12-4). In the seasonally inundated Gran Chaco (Nordenskiold 1912) and the basins of the Orinoco, Amazon (Nash 1923, 329), and other rivers in South America, avoidance of periodic flooding ranks with protection from insects as major advantages of stilt buildings. In drier locations, the space thus developed beneath the elevated floor platform provides a valuable area for work, and a place to pen animals that might otherwise stray (Sternberg 1984; Westmaas 1970, 133). In the upper tributaries of the Amazon, communal houses used by the Yagua tribes consist of little more than a thatched roof and a lower platform, and are entirely without walls or partitions. Privacy is attained for individuals simply by their turning to face the outside jungle, in which attitude they will not be disturbed by others. This “cultural convention directly corresponds to the more familiar material convention of a partition to give privacy” (Duly 1979, 69). A closely related trait is practiced in small single-room houses on the other side of the world. In the Philippine island of Cebu, the idea

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12-4. Thatch-roofed stilt houses are well above normal high tide in the coastal lagoon at Ganvie, Benin (photo by author, 1975).

of privacy is also related to eye contact. “One ‘disappears’ or becomes ‘no longer present’ by simply looking away” (Villalon 2003, 208). Throughout the vast monsoon-influenced lands of Southeast Asia, from Assam and the Brahmaputra Valley and throughout northeastern India, to interior southern China, south to the Indonesian islands, and east to the Philippines and New Guinea, the house is the stilt house. This does not mean, however, that all houses within this area are supported on stilts (Long 2003, 196–7). Many are earthfast, with wattle-and-daub or wooden or bamboo walls, although some are more substantial. Specific and detailed information on the stilt houses of Thailand is somewhat difficult to locate, but one excellent source is a volume by Chaliew Piyachon (1989). Unfortunately for most Western scholars, the entire text, including bibliographical information, is printed in the Thai language. It remains an excellent resource, however, because of its numerous excellent photos of stilt houses, often including constructional detail inserts, floor plans, and isometric diagrams. As one moves northward within Southeast Asia, the houses become more sturdy, utilizing heavier timbers and more planks. This shift probably results from two conditions: the greater need for a somewhat

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more closed structure because of lower temperatures in the low-sun period of the year, and fewer light building materials in these regions away from the equator, where growth of vegetation is slower. In China, stilt houses occur in six provinces. Entry is via a stairway under and toward the center of the dwelling. Some of the most distinctive are those of bamboo built by the Dai minority people who live along the Burmese border. In northern Thailand stilt houses resemble those of southern China in their use of heavier construction materials but are more elaborate in internal division and often use multiple roofs to cover different rooms and spaces, all often at different levels. The entry is a flight of wooden stairs at the front, leading to a partially open platform where visitors are received and other social functions are performed (Charernsupkul and Temiyabandha 1979, 49). The multiple, independently framed roofs, rear kitchen, reception platform, and a space where water is kept in cooling jars for visitors and family, are all features normally shared with stilt houses found further south (Hilton 1956). Physical form and the use of both interior and exterior spaces of the stilt houses vary somewhat as one would expect over such great distances, but a basic unity persists (Hilton 1956). Jee Yuan Lim (1987), also looking at traditional houses in Malaysia, emphasizes the flexibility of the interiors due to moveable partitions, minimal furniture, and a natural willingness to use floors for sitting. Three main types of Nuristani dwellings are identifiable, but all have many common characteristic features. The typical dwelling rises two stories, the lower one of which is partially excavated back into the valley slope. The upper floor has a single, large room locally called an ama with a central hearth, from which smoke exits through a centrally located smoke hole. A semi-open verandah may occupy the downslope side of the house, and contains the only entrance to the interior. The wall corners are constructed in such a fashion as to provide flexibility when the frequent earthquakes occur. A small, built-in wooden food safe (Figure 12-5) usually projects from the outside of the wall, and provides a unique and decorative touch. These Nuristani dwellings take full advantage of the hillside: The houses cling to the mountain sides with one man’s roof serving as another man’s access. Many villagers must walk across the neighbor’s roofs to reach their own house. Roofs and twisting paths take one along horizontally and an elaborate system of steep ladders leads one up vertically. In the more heavily trafficked areas, these ladders are carved of a single log with a handrail added to facilitate climbing. But in the relatively unused areas, ladders are thin twisted logs haphazardly

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Vernacular Buildings 12-5. Sketch of a food safe in the wall of a Nuristani dwelling (sketch by Brent Potts).

notched here and there with steps long worn with age and use. These log ladders can be tricky since one must start the climb with the correct foot forward. (Hallet and Samizay 1975, 68)

The Garo of Meghalaya Province, India, who build stilt-supported longhouses up to 80 feet in length and up to only about 15 feet in width, also prefer sloping sites: When possible they are oriented in such a way that several of them converge on an open yard which covers the top of a small hill. The front entrance of the house is at one end, close to ground level, while the back end is often high off the ground over the slope of the hill. (Burling 1963, 21, with an excellent map on p. 26)

The history of the verandah in Australia took a somewhat different direction. It traces its introduction about 1793 from South or Southeast Asia initially to “the southern counties of England where it had been taken by Army men returning from the outposts of the empire” and then ultimately down under. Used at first as no more than a covered external passage-way between rooms in one-room thick passage-less houses, it spread, one-storey high, along the face, then around the ends and across the back of the houses widening from three feet to ten on the way to form a cool, shaded and

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Above-ground Structures 111 breezy area for sitting in the heat of the day or in the evenings. The verandah became increasingly a living area. A small box of rooms was surrounded by ever-broader verandahs. (Cox and Freeland 1969, 63)

The movement of people and more and more household activity to the verandah required modifications for better accommodation of both inhabitants and their various activities, and to escape the stifling heat indoors. Both elevated and excavated dwellings offered enhanced possibilities for habitation. Better security, defense against extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, safety from either rain or flooding and other environmental challenges were some of the advantages to be secured. These came at the price of more difficult accessibility, cramped and often uncomfortable quarters, and potentially dangerous structures subject to earthquakes, rock and soil collapses, wind and rain damage, and uneven subsidence of unstable and water-logged seashore and riverine soils. As time went by, questions of security receded and technological levels improved, with the result that elevated dwellings became less attractive and were largely abandoned because of their recognized disadvantages.

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~ 13 ~ Excavated Structures Earth materials, and the earth itself, always have been an important source for traditional building. On at least five continents and hundreds of islands, humans have made use of the earth by excavating into the surface. Such structures are classified in this chapter under six broad headings: (1) natural hard-rock cavities subsequently broadened and deepened by human efforts, i.e. caves, (2) wholly underground excavations in relatively soft rock or earth materials, including loess soil and volcanic tufa, (3) semi-subterranean pit houses on level ground, (4) structures wholly or partially excavated in loosely compacted clay or loam soil on gently to moderate-sloping land (dugouts), (5) sod or turf houses and so-called “sod dugouts”; and (6) artificially created mounded dwellings. Figure 13-1 sorts out these six groupings together with some explanatory features and comments. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some peoples – German-Russians, for example – who settled the American Great Plains, constructed pit houses (by the above definition), but referred to them as

13-1. Chart providing a tentative classification of excavated and related earth structures.

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“dugouts.” Barbara Oringderff (1976, 46) indicated such structures in Kansas were sometimes termed “half sods,” denoting a partially erected structure. In the other direction, the process of excavation of a dugout is the same basic one involved in creating a loess cave, for example. Peter Donat (1970) takes a wider view of these excavated eastern European dwellings. He labels them slawischen grubenhauser (Slavic sunken huts) and offers a distribution stretching from the Elbe River to the Dnieper. Many multi-room bordeis extending to 60 feet in length, although most were considerably smaller, are reported in the Wallachian Plain east of the Iron Gate as late as the mid-20th century (Megas 1951, 76). The grubenhaus, or sunken hut, also is reported as a dominant house type vying with the longhouse in England (Hurst 1971, 90–100) and northwestern Europe during the Middle Ages (Gies and Gies 1990, 11, 34). They were “dug into the soil to the depth of half a yard to a yard, and used alternatively for people, animals, storage or workshop.” Later on, the use of crucks provided “enough elevation to save the need for a sunken floor and to put an end to the long, murky history of the sunken hut.” Jean Chapelot and Robert Fossier (1985, 119) broaden the distribution of such structures even further: In a geographical area extending from the Rhine to the Dnieper and from the North Sea to the Danube, a study of more than 100 rural sites from this period shows very clearly that sunken huts were used exclusively as dwellings.

Are these excavated structures pit houses, dugouts, or mound dwellings, or should some other designation be used? Using the classification system proposed in this chapter (Figure 13-1), they really do not fit well into any single class. A further difficulty not addressed adequately by the classification system here proposed is that some structures may be pit dwellings in some instances and erected structures in others. A case in point is the Navajo hogan normally erected above the ground level or very slightly incised into the surface – but when building timber is scarce, may consist of a pit four to five feet deep (Kluckhohn, Hill and Kluckhohn 1971, 150). Another problem is the classification of dwellings inside artificially created mounds of earth. Such structures, often partially excavated, were especially utilized by Arctic dwellers, and some in various other parts of the world continue to be occupied to this day. These may not belong in the same class with naturally dug dwellings. Finally, as has been noted above, many dwellings widely scattered across the surface of the world are excavated only a few inches into the earth.

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Amerindian earth lodges of central and western North America represent a house type especially difficult to classify. Excavated only one to four feet below ground level, these conspicuous, domeshaped structures rose up to ten feet or so above ground. The excavated earth, together with sod, became an outer covering over wooden pole frames and bark slabs or other insulating material. Floor plans were usually circular or oval, and could extend up to 100 feet (Douglas 1931). Considerable variation in structure details, type of insulating material, size, and season of habitation existed from tribe to tribe. Mandan earth lodges utilized a strong timber frame with a covering of willow branches or mats and prairie grass, and were then completely encased in earth and sod, whereas the Omaha employed bark slabs. Earth lodges occupied by the Omaha, Iowa, Sauk, Winnebago, Osage, and Ponka were used only in summer as a refuge against the high temperatures on the Great Plains (Dorsey 1896). Entrance to some earth lodges was via a long, partly underground, tunnel-like ramp. Somewhat similar to the plains earth lodge in its external form and tunneled entrance was the Thule Eskimo winter house: Because building material was extremely scarce across the Arctic, Thule builders framed their winter houses with whatever they could find – rocks, driftwood, chunks of sod, and the ribs, jawbones, skull, and vertebrae of the bowhead whale. The jawbone sometimes served as an arch over the entrance, curved ribs were side posts, bone chunks became wall filling. (Nabokov and Easton 1989, 191)

The Unangan people, found at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula and on the Aleutian Islands, similarly used whale-bone or driftwood frames for their oblong pit dwellings. The structures (barabara) were excavated four to six feet, with the frame covered by cut grass and sod. Typical dimensions ranged from 35–40 feet long by 20–30 feet wide. A concentration of unusual underground dwellings occurs in the upper Parun Valley in Nuristan. Here, surrounded by partially supported stilt houses on the valley slopes, the dwellings located on the valley bottoms have been built (excavated) into large mounds composed of earth and assorted debris. Scholars have long surmised that an early circumpolar distribution of semi-subterranean houses existed as the forerunner of later occurrences. Pit houses show a strong orientation to the northern hemisphere, roughly between latitudes 30 degrees and 60 degrees north. The lesser southern hemisphere distribution of pit houses is likely explained by the much smaller amount of land in that hemisphere. However, pit-

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house occurrences in South America, and some which exist in Africa, cannot be explained merely on a circumpolar origin basis. The only semi-subterranean dwelling reported from East Africa is the tembe from Tanzania, designed to house extended families or even entire clans. “Typically the tembe hut is two meters high and not more than three meters wide; but its length can be as much as twenty to one hundred meters” (Gluck 1973, 241). Both semi-subterranean and completely sunken versions existed, with some of the latter containing entire, more traditional circular huts concealed within them. This, of course, was a response to the prolonged troubled times endemic to the area before the coming of European powers. Elsewhere, semi-subterranean structures were utilized because alternative building materials were not immediately available when a group migrated into an area, or because there was insufficient time to construct an above-ground dwelling before the onset of the first winter. German-Russian Mennonite settlers entering the largely treeless prairie provinces of Canada in the mid-19th century resorted initially to the old dwelling forms called semeljanken or semlin, and the serai which they had known in Russia. Ukrainian settlers moving into Alberta utilized for their first shelter a quite similar pit house, called a zemlyanka, or staya in Ukrainian. Another North American area of early pit houses was on the Colorado plateau. The earliest of the Navajo hogans nearby are reported as semi-subterranean, but were excavated only a foot or so into the ground. None of these now exists. Originally, the Thompson Valley Indians of British Columbia occupied two types of seasonal dwellings. Summer shelter was provided by a framework of poles covered by mats. A semi-excavated earth lodge was occupied for only about three months in the coldest part of the year. By the 1890s, however, the winter house was abandoned for log and wood-frame houses introduced by Anglican missionaries and other white settlers. Excellent diagrams of the earlier earth lodge appear in Laforet and York (1981, 117–18). Where winters were cold, many early pit-house entrances were through the central smoke hole. In the Thompson earth lodge, it was protected in stormy weather by a cover of woven fiber and willow withes, covered by bark. Four poles, of which two were shorter, maintained a slanting position for the cover. It was possible to revise the direction of the slant, and thus divert wind, snow, and rain. In calmer weather people placed an open-work mat of woven sticks over the smoke hole. This gave some protection but allowed for ventilation (Laforet and York 1981, 119).

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In the westward migration of settlers in North America in the 19th century, many groups espoused the use of dugouts. Other westwardmoving groups in North America in the middle of the 19th century also used dugouts as they traversed the Great Plains. Dugouts had several advantages for the westward-moving pioneer settlers in search of land to own. They could be built quickly – in a few weeks after arrival, and occupied during the three to five years required to secure title to the property. For many settlers, however, the dugout was a very temporary habitation until an erected dwelling could be made. This was especially true for those who arrived early in the spring and had the help of neighbors. Those who arrived late in the year were forced to spend the winter in the dugout, even if outside help was available. The dugout seems to have been the most common type of shelter built by new arrivals, and even some of the wealthiest settlers lived for a time in these wretched hovels. The dugouts were built by digging a hole in the earth, “cellar fashion,” to a depth of six or seven feet, or sometimes by digging into the side of a hill. The breadth of the hole was determined by the needs of the builder’s family, and after the digging was completed the excavation was covered over and lined with the trunks of small trees. Cracks were sealed with canvas and mounds of dirt, clay, and turf; but unless a sloped roof was built over the shelter there was little protection from heavy rain. The walls inside the dugout were often covered with bark, and sometimes the floor and ceiling were planked. Caves carved out of soft rock or loose earth material are another form of excavated housing. Such structures can be extensive and are especially notable in three very separate areas – in the Shaanxi loess plateau of China, the Matmata upland of Tunisia, and the Cappadocia region of central Turkey. Each of these areas offers a different rock/soil material. Almost all of the Chinese troglodytes inhabit loess caves in provinces just to the north of the Qinling Mountains. Here, the sites for most of the caves are the almost-vertical valley slopes and, less often, along incised roadways cut down deeply into the loess itself. The most desirable orientation is southeast, south, or southwest (Yoon 1990, 97), probably because such position provides maximum heating in winter, as well as beneficial drying of the loess, thus helping to prevent soil collapse. Because damp soil often proves unsuitable, resulting in collapse, “an earth cave seldom lasts more than two or three generations” (Myrdal 1965, 13). Loess is a loosely cemented but stable soil material which, because it has vertical cleavage, can be cut in free-standing vertical planes. Some roadways have been cut and worn down, with near-vertical sides as

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deep as 60 feet. Extensive root systems of the surface steppe grasses keep the soil in place. The cave excavation is done horizontally, with the walls defined by the vertical root channels. Life takes place in the concealed valleys and along the narrow worn-down roadways. On the plateau surface, the only signs of the dense habitation may be the smoking chimneys that protrude slightly above ground surface. Cave dwelling in China has a history going back several centuries (Figure 13-2). Reasons for the steadily growing concentration of cave houses include the growing rural population and the consequent depletion of forest resources making alternative building materials unavailable (Golany 1992, 7). Other reasons include: (1) the heat regulation of caves making them cooler than their surroundings in summer and warmer in winter, (2) the saving of precious agricultural land, allowing the use of otherwise unused land such as cliff sides, (3) their ease of construction, and (4) construction costs significantly lower than those of above-ground dwellings (Golany 1989, 17; Golany 1992, 78; Congzhou et al. 2008, 297). The caves of the Matmata region in southern Tunisia (Figure 13-3) and in the neighboring Garian region of western Libya are different in several respects from the loess dwellings of China.

13-2. The interior of a loess cave. The adobe or stone bed (kang) occupies much of the space. The ceiling is vaulted and plastered. This cave even has electricity, as shown by light bulbs and radio (photo by author, 1977).

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13-3. A view into the open, sunken courtyard of a cave dwelling in the Matmata plateau. The openings to several cave excavations can be seen appearing obliquely in the courtyard (photo by author, 2008).

13-4. In Cappadocia, many caves have entrances at different levels and the fronts are often recessed to reduce weathering (photo by author, 1998).

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Whereas some caves still are situated on steeply sloping land, most occur in clusters around a deeply dug, open-to-the-sky courtyard, which may be square or rectangular. The considerable amount of earth material excavated to construct the open courtyard pits usually produces an irregular, mounded, and undulating surface between the courtyards. These cave complexes have several advantages in the desert environment of Tunisia. They are, of course, cool in summer and warm in winter, but also are energy efficient since they do not need to be heated, offer protection from dust storms, do not require any water during construction, require very little in the way of maintenance after construction, and, perhaps most important of all, are cheaper than above-ground construction (Hallett 1975, 24; Golany 1988, 51–2). The Matmata caves, now partially vacated, have become a center for limited tourist development, with potential for future expansion. The third great area of excavated structures carved out of soft material occurs on the Anatolian plateau of central Turkey. This area, known generally as Cappadocia, consists of several separate areas, all of which are covered by severely eroded volcanic tufa. The cones of soft rock are easily excavated (Figure 13-4). Because the volcanic rock is several dozen feet in thickness, many of the caves have easily defended entrances high up the side of a cone, and inside may extend to several levels up and down. A network of stairways and winding tunnels connects the various rooms, in some instances on 10 to 12 levels. More picturesque and better known than the Tunisian cave area, Cappadocia has become a tourist center of international renown. Another, but much smaller, area of man-made excavations in volcanic tufa occurs on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. The heel of the Italian boot also possesses a number of cave dwellings. The rocks here are also volcanic tufa, which is easily excavated. Although some cave dwellings are more complex, most consist of a single, fan-shaped room with a flat ceiling. Four locations in the southwestern United States have considerable numbers of early caves originally given the designation of cavate lodges by Cosmos Mindeleff (1896, 217), who observed: they differ from the cliff houses and cave dwellings principally in the fact that the rooms are hollowed out of cliffs and hills by human agency, being cut out of soft rock, while the former are simple, ordinary structures built for various reasons within a cove or on a bench in the cliffs or within a cave.

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Permanently inhabited caves derived from natural rock cavities are another type of excavated dwelling. Perhaps the most unusual of natural cave environments in which humans have sought habitation are several of the larger lava tubes in Hawaii (Hiroa 1957, 76). French limestone cave dwellings, where David Kempe (1988, 7) in the 1980s estimated 25,000 inhabitants had lived, occur in three areas: (1) the valley of the Seine River and to its north in Picardy and Champaign, (2) the southeast, back from the Mediterranean coast and east of the Rhône Valley, and (3) the great area of west central France from the encircling Loire Valley to the Dordogne River (Figure 13-5). In part of the latter area, the caves range from simple two- to three-room residence-cum-wine cellars to extensive communal dwelling networks dating from the Middle Ages (Fraysse and Fraysse 1963–4). These caves have a history as dwellings that dates back much further, however – to prehistoric times. CroMagnon man, discovered in 1868 in one of them, and the paintings of Lascaux, another cave, are world famous.

13-5. Limestone cave dwelling near Saumur, France. The cave part has been supplemented by a sturdy limestone block addition (photo by author, 1992).

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In Spain, two major concentrations of cave dwellings exist. In Navarra province in the foothills of the Pyrenees, between a quarter and a third of the populations of various districts lived in caves up to World War II (Ling 1936, 851). The other Spanish area is in the southern province of Andalucia, where standards of living have been higher than in the north. The largest concentration is around Gaudix (Carver 1981, 103). Many of these caves are still occupied, but numbers are steadily declining. To primitive man, excavated habitats were attractive. With virtually no effort shelter could be found in caves and other sanctuaries. Digging further and elsewhere gave even greater security and warmth. Some excavated structures have persisted as shelter right up to the present. Little by little, though, as standards of living have improved and humans have sought greater comfort, the attraction of excavated sites as domiciles has declined.

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~ 14 ~ Roof Coverings and Dung Floors The most critical feature of a traditional building is its roof, or whatever else covers the structure. “The roof not only shelters inhabitants and their possessions against sun and rain, and wind and dust, it also makes the space underneath livable in summer heat and winter frost. It protects the walls and holds them together. Few structures can long survive a break in the overhead cover” (Waite 1976, 135). Usually, the roof represents the largest single component of the cost of any small building, often as high as 40 percent of the total cost; at the same time, it represents the most complex array of technical problems for solution; and as it tends to dominate the external appearance of the building, its symbolic significance for the owner is commonly of great importance. (Spence and Cook 1983, 263)

In some extreme examples, the walls may be entirely done away with so that the roof eaves rest upon the ground (Carson et al. 1981, 154). Sliding, lightweight, paper panel walls are a confirmation that “walls are but a by-product of Japanese buildings, while in other civilizations they are the primary elements of architecture” (Gutkind 1953, 31). Finally, in New Zealand, pioneer homes of the English settlers in the 19th and even early 20th centuries used metal roof surfaces and storage tanks in the yard to collect and store water (Salmond 1986, 123, 143). In 2007, I observed many still in use in the South Island. A similar technique also exists on many smaller dwellings in Tasmania. Peter Bell (1984, 72, 76, 80) also provides photos from northern Queensland of dwellings with tanks. The roof is so significant that it even has provided the names by which dwellings are popularly known. Hence, we find the hippedroof house, the pyramid-roof house, the cat-slide roof and the dogtrot house, the Mansard house, and even the “House of Seven Gables”! An important element in roof classification is the pitch or degree of inclination. Edwin Doran, Jr. (1962, 98) proposed a simple and

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potentially useful system of pitch categories involving four types: gentle (15–25 degrees), moderate (25–35), steep (35–50), and very steep (50–60). Publication in a not widely circulated journal may account for its lack of use in later studies. A wide variety of locally available items often function as roof coverings. Among those most commonly used, the vernacular range extends from grasses, leaves, straw, and heather, through rugs, other woven textiles and felt mats, bamboo, tree bark, branches, hewn timber and logs, as well as sawn wooden boards, shingles, shakes, and tiles, to turf or sod, mud, and stone – though the best known is still the thatch roof. Turf or sod has been used widely because of easy availability, low cost, and excellent insulating qualities. At the same time, such roofs suffer from several deficiencies. They do not hold moisture well; high winds encourage dirt to sift downward; they are exceptionally heavy; they harbor small animals and insects; and they are not fire resistant when dry. Felt mats are used extensively in Central Asia from Turkestan to Inner Mongolia in China as roof covering for yurts. The art of making felt by rolling, beating, and pressing animal hair or flocks of wool into a compact mass of even consistency is assuredly older than the art of spinning and weaving [...] The making of felt naturally presupposes the existence of wool-furnishing domestic animals like sheep, goat, and camel. While it is true that felt can be made and has been made from the hair of wild animals, the supply of such hair is not plentiful enough to establish the industry on a large scale. It is therefore clear that solely peoples who possess a large stock of herds of woolbearing sheep and camels could call into life a flourishing felt industry. (Laufer 1930, 1)

Other unusual or locally available materials also have been called into use in some more restricted areas. A layered-roof composition is also found in Lebanon. It consists of log beams supporting the roof weight, succeeded by a layer of twigs, branches, or reed matting laid crosswise to the logs, a third layer of thorny brush pressed down into moist mud, and finally a layer of finely crushed stone, with sometimes a lime-chaff coating on top. The upper layer is rolled periodically by a heavy stone roller to ensure the continued sealing of the material (Ragette 1974, 22–5; El-Khoury 1975, 4). A similar type of roof occurs in the western Himalayas, but without the refinement of gravel and lime-chaff. “Successive layers of wooden rafters, twigs, birch bark and soil make a thick flat-roof” (Marh 2004, 69).

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* * * The word thatch is an Anglo-Saxon version of the German word Dach, meaning roof (Figure 14-1). A reliable estimate of the number of active, full-time thatchers in England and Wales in the 1960s placed the number at over 800 (The Thatcher’s Craft). Subsequently, numbers have steadily declined. It might seem at first glance that a thatch roof is a simple feature, and its construction basic, but nothing could be further from the truth! Furthermore, in Ireland and often elsewhere, a classification of sub-types, including roped, scallop, pegged, thrust, and stapple thatch, can be identified on the basis of the method employed to affix the thatch to the roof timbers (Mogey 1940; O’Danachair 1945; Buchanan 1957). One area where thatch roofing was renewed annually is in the Hebrides Islands of Scotland. Here, the thatch is blackened inside from the soot of open fires in houses which have no smoke holes (hence the name “black houses”) (Figure 14-2). In most of the middle latitudes, the lifetime of a thatched roof is considerably longer than in the tropics. In a similar vein, a well-laid reed roof will last 60–70 years if it is “cleaned down and knocked up” every seven years. John Betjeman, writing in the Foreword to The Thatcher’s Craft (1961), notes:

A

B 14-1. German thatched roofs. A – The use of thatch bundles at the gable to retard precipitation run-off as much as possible. B – Closeup of the thatch on another building preserved in the Cloppenburgdorf. Note the thickness of this thatch layer required to defend successfully against water penetration (photos by author, 1986).

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14-2. A thatched hut typical of early Hebridean dwellings. Entirely without windows and with only two small smoke vents in the thatch, fresh air and a bit of light enter through a doorway break in the massive rock wall; such houses have been given the designations of black houses (photo by author, 2003).

There are known instances of a Norfolk reed thatched roof lasting over a hundred years; a combed wheat reed thatched roof lasting fifty years; a long straw roof lasting thirty-five years. Though these figures should not be applied generally, at least they indicate that where thatch exists it is better renewed than changed for some other material.

Although parapets are widely considered a device to retard fire, James Walton (1948, 142) suggests that in southern Africa they are used primarily to prevent the thatch on gable roofs from lifting in strong wind. William Addison (1986, 28) noted that thatchers in England soaked their material in order to make it more pliable and thus easier to work with. At the same time, a solution of alum was added “to reduce the risk of fire.” Thatch is still the most commonly used roof covering in the world. In England alone, 50,000 thatched buildings were estimated to still survive as of 1982 (Brown, R.J. 1982, 252). In India, Nick Hall (1981, 7) reported some 40 million houses thatched; and “in Kerala State over 50% of roofs are made from coconut or palm leaves.” The rationale for the widespread and persistent use of thatch for roofing in middle latitude regions is not just because of its cheapness, but due also to its superior temperature and sound-insulating character.

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* * * Wood, in various forms including bark, has served as roof covering in a multitude of locations. “In South China and along the Tibetan border, bark roofs are occasionally seen, the slabs placed alternatively concave and convex” (Spencer 1947, 261). Immigrating settlers in both Australia (Cox and Freeland 1969, 27, 43, 44) and North America (Hudson 1975, 7) used bark for their first roofs whenever it was available. Timber in the form of split or sawn boards and planks was an even better roof covering than bark for most pioneers in North America. From early times, split boards had been used by the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, who covered their substantial communal houses with long cedar planks. These “were often adzed into a shallow ‘U’ shape so as to carry water off the house with minimum leakage” (Newman 1974, 23). Elsewhere, for both Native Americans and incoming white pioneers, boards and planks did not always form the only roof covering. A second consideration was the necessity to use green wood, which twisted and deformed as it dried. Also, wood grains, more often than not, were not straight or parallel, so boards were uneven and rough. Many grains produced twisted or bent planks, whose irregularities became even more pronounced as they became periodically wet from rain and snow. The best solution was to cover the boards or planks with some other material. Nevertheless, sawn planks were widely employed by Dutch settlers, who found “the harsher climate and limited materials in New Netherlands did not encourage the continued use of thatch. Furthermore, thatched roofs were recognized as fire hazards, especially in cities” (Dunn 1990, 3). As a final refinement, wood can be split into shingles or shakes. Both terms are widely and interchangeably used. Although widely distributed across Europe, shakes/shingles (however they were termed) rarely were the dominant roof covering, even in pre-industrial times. More important were sod and birch bark in the north of Europe, thatch in the east and west, sod in the southeast, tile in central and southern regions, and slate in areas close to slate deposits, such as in parts of Wales and Northern Ireland, and on the continent in the Rhine and Mosel valleys. Perhaps it was the labor and skill required to make the shingles which prevented their widespread adoption. In Alpine central Europe, these roofs occur most often in well-wooded hilly and mountainous terrain such as the Carpathian Mountains. They were also reasonably common in Ulster up to the 17th century (Robinson, P. 1985, 22), but Caoimhin O’Danachair (1972, 78, 79) notes:

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This craft perished in the timber famine [...] Ireland, once possessing wide forests which provided an abundance of good timber, especially oak, was in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries so utterly denuded of woodland that even fencing poles and boards for coffins were unobtainable without considerable trouble and expense.

Another area where shake roofs have been studied is the highlands of Mexico where John Winberry (1975) suggests that shake roofs were introduced by Basques from northern Spain. The folk production of shakes, called tejamanil, is now largely prohibited in Mexico as a result of government forestry-conservation policies. The use of shingles/shakes is more common in North America than in England, probably because of the greater abundance of wood. Originally, shingles of three-foot length or greater, were employed by the Pennsylvania Germans (Bucher 1968). Warren Roberts (1976, 442) also encountered them in southern Indiana, and other references place them in early New England and Long Island (Figure 14-3). The long shingle, which probably has European antecedents, was replaced by the short shingle, when shingle mills began operating around 1800 (Bucher 1968, 54). The key to the long shingle is the lapping

14-3. Three-foot-long shakes cover the sauna of a Finnish building group, Old World Wisconsin, Eagle, WI. The opening at the roof peak is to allow steam, smoke, and heat to escape (photo by author, 1979).

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both sideways and lengthways to provide watertight cover. “A New Zealand variation on the shingle was the use of palings – long boards laid in overlapping rows” (Salmond 1986, 55). Cow dung is a widely used material in both Africa (Faculty of Architecture 1978, 451) and Asia to finish earthen floors, where it forms a hard, durable surface, which when dry is easily cleaned of dirt and debris. A similar process and result using sheep dung is reported for early Scotland (Beaton 1997, 19). John Lehr (1973, 11) reports the use among Ukrainian settlers in Alberta, of a solution of cow dung and water to smooth and seal clay house floors. Furthermore, a mixture of clay, some chopped straw, a little water, and horse or cow dung was used to plaster walls, both inside and out. In Punjab, India, traditional dwelling floors have a “thick layer of mud mixed with wheat chaff [...] Once this mud layer dried up, a thin coating of mud and cow dung paste was applied to give the finishing touch” (Singh, M. 2004, 77). One also ought not to forget how valuable cow dung is as a fuel in India and other areas of Asia and Africa (Figure 14-4). Earth, finished to provide a hardened and durable surface easy to clean, undoubtedly forms the floor material of the greatest share of the

14-4. Cow dung is widely collected and hand processed (note the finger grooves), confirming its value as a building material and heat source, near Agra (photo by author, 1972).

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world’s traditional dwellings, both past and present. Obviously, not all floor surfaces are cured with animal dung, however. Many of bare earth are simply pounded and pounded. Flooring of stone or wood, or coverings of other light vegetative materials can be found in dwellings in some areas. In other places, materials such as laterite, which hardens on exposure to air, are used. In the Hebrides, because of dampness and especially cold temperatures, a light sprinkling of sea sand made treading on hard earth easier and warmer. It also helped in sweeping it (Campbell, A. 1937, 224; Sinclair 1953, 22).

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~ 15 ~ Roof Coverings of Stone, Tile and Brick Even stone is used as roof covering, although because of its weight, its use is usually restricted to material having relatively thin bedding planes. Of these, slate, which can be used effectively in thicknesses of less than one-quarter inch, is most widely employed. One principal difference between slates and most other stones is the better natural cleavage of the former, which permits it to be more easily split in one direction (National Slate Association 1926, 6). In England, “blue slate” was especially prized in the southern areas because it could be split thinly enough that its weight was one-third to one-quarter that of slates supplied from sandstone- or limestone-associated sources (Jope and Dunning 1954, 209). Nevertheless, roof frames had to be sturdy to support its mass, especially since the roof slope must be only about 35 degrees in order to guard against detachment and falling of individual slates when subjected to strong winds. The other natural hazard for slate is hail. Otherwise, it is a desirable roofing material which can last hundreds of years with minimal maintenance. Until the development of railroads, slate was limited, because of its weight and relatively brittle nature, to use in domestic structures in areas close to the quarries, along canals, or near ports where foreign slates were landed (Robinson, P. 1985). This relationship is well shown in Northern Ireland, where two concentrations of slate quarries exist – one along the Donegal–Londonderry border, and the other in eastern County Down. The plantation surveys of 1611–22 identify an early cluster of slate-roofed dwellings in northern Ulster, and the later Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1830 reveal a concentration of slateroofed houses in County Down. Quarries and slate-roofed houses clearly coincide spatially. Elsewhere in Ulster, thatch roofing prevailed (Robinson, P. 1985, 26–8). E.W. Holden (1989, 74) also demonstrated a correlation between slate roofs and coastal and inland waterway locations in medieval Sussex. These sites were especially concentrated in the chalk downland. Holden also provided an excellent and detailed discussion of Sussex and wider slate use as a roofing material.

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Everywhere, the introduction of railroads made slate economically available over a much wider area. Nevertheless, the cost of shipping a heavy material, subject to a significant amount of breakage, produced certain ultimate limitations. In the United States, for example, although roofing slate was widely used on structures east of the Mississippi River, the demand west of the Mississippi because of high freight rates was quite limited since the most productive quarries were in the northeastern United States. Other sedimentary stones have been used for roofing, but in a much more limited scope, both functionally and geographically. One of the most important is limestone, but its use is limited not only by its weight, but also because uniformly thin pieces are difficult to produce. A limited number of rough stone roofs survive in the UK, where their weight is supported by stone walls. In the Dalmatian part of Croatia, most such roofs, also originally supported by stone walls, have been replaced by tile (Figure 15-1). Another earth material in widespread use as roofing is tile, used in a variety of forms, although the material is basically the same in all cases, i.e. baked clay. The pantile is a doubly-curved clay tile half an inch thick, 14 or 15 inches long and 10 inches wide, in which the narrow, sharp downward roll at the right side securely covers the upturned edge of its neighbor.

15-1. The rough slabs of the limestone roof in the foreground contrast with the tile roof in the background, Dvori, Croatia (photo by author, 2008).

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The depth of the curve is one and one half inches but contrives to look more and gives the roof a rich texture in the sunlight. The top right and bottom left corners are cut off at 45 degrees to give a tight fit. The tile is hung by its half-inch long nib on a wood batten spanning between the rafters. (Gibbs 1987, 21)

Rounding off the bottom edge of the tile reduces weight and channels run-off to the center of the next lower tile. Rounded butt tiles are sometimes referred to as “fish scales.” Metal roofs, although they exist, are not commonly used on traditional structures, except as modern replacements. The drumming of tropical rain on metal roofs, without ceilings to baffle the noise, not only disturbs sleep, but also makes it impossible to understand normal speech. Nevertheless, Phillip Gibbs (1987, 21), comparing metal with the traditional thatch (atap) roof in Malaya, offers reasons for the expanding use of the former: Galvanized iron has some advantages over atap. It is now cheaper to buy than atap and lasts longer. It requires no maintenance and does not flake like atap. Moreover, the dust falling from the atap necessitates constant cleaning of the house, which the Malays insist must be spotless at all times. Insects and small reptiles often live in the atap roof, and there is always the danger of fire. Once the atap catches fire, the house is burnt down as the fire cannot be contained.

A retaining board along the eaves prevents slippage of the sod, which is laid with the grass side down, with grass seed then sown on top. The mass of roots and grass blades combined to form a solid covering. In most parts of Ireland and in the highlands of Britain, a layer of sod formed the base upon which thatch was laid. The three most common roof types employed in traditional buildings are the circular cone, gable, and hipped, though other types are not unknown. In areas of low rainfall, the flat roof is almost universal, but low population densities reduce the numbers of these roofs in many areas. An unusual roof type appeared in the last quarter of the 19th century for a brief time on the northern US Great Plains. It was arched in form, and Barbara Oringderff (1976, 33) estimates that about 17% of all Kansas sod houses had “car or rounded roofs,” making it the second most popular roof for sod houses, although far behind the gable roof (76%). Somewhat similar in form, but quite different in construction techniques and roofing materials, is the esthetically pleasing, curved roof of the peasant huts of Bengal, India. In these structures, it is the

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exaggerated crescent line of the eaves sloping downward at the house corners that provides its unique appearance. Evidence of the cone-shaped roof occurs throughout the world, likely because both round excavations and dwelling walls were the earliest and easiest to build with primitive implements and techniques. The circular thatched roof is widely encountered in all tropical and semitropical areas. Perhaps the most unusual cone-shaped roof is that employed by the Bamileke in Cameroon, where the cone sits atop square walls (Figure 15-2). The hipped roof has a short ridge line from which it slopes in all four directions on a rectangular-plan structure. Although skill is required in its construction, it has considerable advantages over the gable roof. The triangle of the upper gable wall is not required, eliminating one of the weakest wall sections of a gable roof covering. The gable roof probably covers more traditional dwellings than any other form of roof. It is known by a variety of names, such as straight gable, two-slope, pitched, saddle, or eagle roof (Megas 1951, 4), or as salt-box or cat-slide roof in its mis-proportioned variations. Other terms can undoubtedly be found. Its popularity derives from simplicity of construction. The simple gable-roof form can also include several conspicuous, dramatic, or visually satisfying components. In some islands of Indonesia, the end of the ridge line, for example, may project forward and upward, thus creating a frame for a prominent outwardtilting gable wall, which is colorfully decorated. Throughout insular Southeast Asia it is this outward-tilting gable wall and an accompanying upswept ridge line which identifies traditional dwellings of many coastal communities and even some interior ones.

15-2. The stages of construction required in the building of the unique ‘cone-on- cube’ house of the Bamileke in Cameroon (from Denyer, 1978).

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A strong case has been presented by researchers for the variations in design of such structures throughout insular Southeast Asia to represent a direct and strong symbolic connection to the overseas origin of the various peoples there. In central Europe, where the roofline is more restrained and is contained by verge boards parallel to the gable wall, dramatic and intricate gable, half-timber decoration is frequently encountered. The second and more widely used method with wooden shingles is to affix a topmost row of longer shingles on the side facing the prevailing winds, so that they extend a few inches above the ridge line. This forces wind-driven rain up and over the ridge. The extension of shingles or shakes above the ridge line is referred to as combing. Another area of the ridged roof combines artistic form with practical functions. French, German, and other European houses often employ a device, called bell casting in English or coyau in French, which is a change of pitch of the roof at the eaves, to throw the water as far as possible away from the wall (Figure 15-3). In profile the gable roof now resembles a cross section of a bell with a flared rim. John Stevens (2005, 58) has noted similar devices on early

15-3.  Excellent coyau, the French term for bell casting of roof edges which casts away rainwater run-off to prevent back splash from damaging lower walls. This dwelling is on the Isle d’Orleans in the Saint Lawrence Valley near Quebec City (photo by author, 1976).

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Dutch houses in the Hudson River Valley, and on early, non-Dutch dwellings in Connecticut. Although a diminutive feature in France, its place of origin, the coyau ultimately expanded up to four feet in length in French Canada. François Varin (1986) suggests that these modifications resulted from efforts in the New World to throw water, derived from the increased rainfall and melted snowfall, ever further away from the structure in order to secure wall integrity. While this benefit is true, another impetus may be as important. With the victory of the British in the French and Indian War (one part of the Seven Years War), the defeated French Canadians desperately wanted to hang on to their French culture. The coyau and the resulting easily recognized bell-cast silhouette served the need as a symbol. Over time, as French culture and identity strengthened and regained its place, the coyau symbol steadily became more exaggerated, thus helping to establish the “French-ness” of Quebec (Figure 15-4). Not just in Europe or European-derived cultural areas were changes in roof pitch employed to cast rainfall run-off away. In Indonesia: roofs are always steeply pitched to ensure that the rain runs quickly off the thatch, although in many Indonesian houses the angle of the roof declines as it reaches the eaves, so that the water is guided away from the foundations of the house. (Dawson and Gillow 1994, 24)

15-4. Changes in the roof overhang (coyau) of Quebec cottage roofs (taken from Noble, 1984).

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Another strategy to deflect water from the lower parts of a gableroofed wall and to protect exterior plaster was use of the pent roof. On single-story structures, the pent roof was carried across the taller gable walls about halfway up (Lehr 1976a, 68). On two-story structures, the pent often appeared on all four sides. On the Hebrides Islands in the west of Scotland, longhouses were constructed in such a way that the roof fit almost inside the walls. These Hebridean houses employed a hipped, thatch roof secured to a wide stone-and-earth wall by ropes. The wall consisted of outer and inner stone parts with a cavity (hearting) filled with earth between. The Highlands of Scotland contained, in addition to the longhouse of the Hebrides with its cavity-filled hearting wall, three other thatch roof types. In the eastern and central Highlands, the thatch was supported by timber couples: planted in the foundations of drystone walls. This form of construction is very ingenious because the main weight of the very heavy roof is carried by the couples, firmly planted in the foundations and not by the drystone walls. (Grant 1995, 149)

A third roof, given the name “Dalriadic” because its distribution largely coincides with the old Gaelic kingdom of southwest Scotland, “rested upon the tapering walls of the gable ends.” Finally, the fourth roof type, confined to the island of Mull, combined some elements of the other roofs. Its thatch was anchored by ropes and boulders, it overhung the stone walls, and it possessed one gable wall and one rounded end (Grant 1995, 151). The roof of the Bernese Middle-land housebarn is an excellent example of the hooded roof type. In these Swiss structures, the walls do not directly support the roof, as is usually the case with the fitted roof. The hooded roof is particularly appropriate in regions of high rainfall, and especially in high snowfall locations because moisture is kept well away from the walls and the base of the structure. Most traditional buildings, however, possess roofs that are inter­ mediate between hooded and fitted. They are supported by the walls, but they overhang both eaves and gable. The eave overhang serves two purposes. First, it directs the flow of rainwater from the roof away from the side walls – especially important when the walls are made of daub or a similarly vulnerable material. The larger the overhang, the further away from the wall will be the water when it strikes the ground and splashes back toward the lower part of the wall. A second function

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of an eave overhang is to cast a shadow upon the side windows and walls, thereby reducing interior temperatures in the hot season. The function is most effectively performed in those areas where strong seasonal contrasts exist in the elevation of the sun (Davis 1982). The roof is so critical that people will often do away with almost every other constructional element – walls, doors, and so on. Some early dwellings in both New Zealand and Manitoba even dispensed with roof supports and rested the roof snugly on the ground. Today the modern A-frame design follows the same concept. For traditional structures, roofing materials extend over a wide range, from light vegetative items to those of heavy earth. Regardless of composition, the main function of the roof is to protect the structure from the weather and climate. The major climatic elements, which the roof battles against, are rain, snow, and wind. Once any roof of a traditional building is breached, deterioration of the entire building begins.

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~ 16 ~ The Effects of Climate and Seasonal Change One of the enduring strengths of traditional structures is their intimate relationship with their environment. As James Ayres (1981, 17) notes, “Before houses were ‘designed’ they evolved, with a sensitivity towards their environment that may be seen as truly organic. It is such values that we have lost today and thus it is, that we so cherish them.” Barry Dawson and John Gillow (1994, 19) hold the influence of the environment to be even more critical, stating, “traditional architecture is a product of its environment; each regional variant develops in response to the conditions and materials determined by the local climate and vegetation.” Therefore, at first glance it may seem surprising that structures similar in appearance occur in widely separated locations, although little or no early human connection existed. To a considerable extent, traditional buildings, because they provide shelter, reflect to a degree the climate in which they are built. As an illustration of the significant effect of climate, consider Labelle Prussin’s observation (1974, 185–6) that in equatorial West Africa the small temperature change between day and night, or even between wet and dry seasons, calls for a shelter with a raised floor, open-weave bamboo screen walls, and a floor plan providing for cross ventilation. In contrast, the interior savannah climate has both pronounced rainy and dry seasons, with daily temperature changes in the latter as high as 30 to 35 °F. Here, the earthen roundhouse with its insulating walls can accumulate and store the heat of the day for evening comfort. The circular form, in contrast to the rectangular, helps to concentrate thermal radiation in a central, enclosed interior space. Rather than strive for maximum ventilation, the savannah builder will shun window openings and limit the single door opening to the smallest possible dimension so that the thermal properties offered by the thick earthen walls will be maximized.

It must be remembered that external appearances and similarities are not always an infallible determinant of relationship. Despite relating

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variations in rural Japanese traditional dwellings to the climate, “economic reasons, social conditions, local customs, superstitions, the cumulative local house building skills, aesthetic values, foreign influences, and long historical background” also contribute to dwelling variations in addition to climate. Casual observers beware! Building has a seasonal rhythm governed by weather changes. For example, pioneer settlers in Colorado were enjoined not to attempt construction of adobe buildings in winter, to build in spring and fall only if necessary, but in summer if at all possible. In western Canada, those who intended to erect log cabins, or even just claim-shanties, were advised to peel the bark from cut-down trees during the month of June, when the recent run of the sap made removal an easy task, but before the tree had dried up, when the bark would often adhere tightly. Generally, in tropical and subtropical agricultural communities house building is an activity of the downtime: i.e., the dry period between rainy seasons close to the equator, the period after harvest (also the dry season) in the balance of the tropics, or the winter time, such as in the lower Himalaya (Bhatt 1986, 24). In Quebec and other higher-latitude locations, the governing climatic feature was temperature: The building of a stone house in Eastern Canada was a race against the winter [...] The usual requirement was that the builder begin work just as soon as the weather permitted and, at the latest, by May 15th. The masonry walls and gables were to be ready to receive the woodwork by late June or early July and the house was to be roofed and complete by late September or, at least, in November. The winter weather would have done havoc to unprotected stonework. November 1st, All Saints’ Day, was a popular terminal date, for it was then that indentured masonry workers were usually laid off. The choice of religious feastdays to mark off the completion of different stages of the project was a well-used practice. (Moogk 1977, 62)

Winters in Canada and the northern United States can be extreme (Figure 16-1). Log structures, a common traditional building in these areas, required yearly maintenance to counteract the stresses of frost action. Shoring and leveling were required each spring and lost chinking had to be replaced (Brandt and Braatz 1972, 31). Frost and rainwater together are particularly difficult for masonry construction because: lime mortar cures slowly and, in a frost, it will be broken up by the expanding water crystals. At Quebec the mean temperature is above the freezing point from the end of March to mid-November. Rain is another

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16–1. Heavy snow is a winter phenomenon in northern New York State because of its windward location to the east of Lake Ontario (photo by author, 1974).

16-2. The combination of rain, snow, and frost action has damaged the cobblestone wall of this traditional dwelling, near Eagle, WI (photo by author, 1986).

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The Effects of Climate and Seasonal Change 141 factor, for it will wash away fresh mortar, not to speak of the discomfort for the mason. Masonry work is, therefore, further confined by the need for dry and warm days. Precipitation in the Quebec region drops off sharply after April and it resumes at a high level in November. (Moogk 1977, 61–2)

Particularly susceptible to the joint action of rainwater and freezing weather are the traditional buildings constructed of cobblestone (Figure 16-2). Traditionally, suitable limestone was quarried in the autumn and then left exposed to weather over the winter. “The force of even a single sudden thaw following a hard frost could achieve in a few hours what would take the hand of man many weeks” (Clifton-Taylor 1972, 101). Daily watering was necessary, possibly throughout the winter, to ensure sufficient splitting along bedding planes. In a more indirect way, climate affects nomadic herders by controlling the growth of grasses, which determines the timing of the seasonal migration to new pastures. Where considerable snow accumulates in winter, extra care must be taken to prevent the buildup of ice along the eave line of timber-frame dwellings. If enough ice collects, it acts as a dam to the snow melted by the heat from the interior. The snow gradually then finds its way to the eave, where it refreezes (Figure 16-3). Traditional builders solved the problem by keeping the loft or attic unheated through the winter. Heavy snowfall also provides one rationale for the pronounced extension of the front gable in Rocky Mountain cabins. A gable overhang is not normally employed to moderate temperatures or to reduce light because fewer windows occur in gable walls. Furthermore, the gable wall is much higher than the side, and hence the overhang is not as effective in providing shade. In areas of considerable winter snow accumulation, and where the entrance door is located on the gable, the overhang does have the function of keeping the door free of snow, although a pent roof is perhaps more effective. The reason the roof is so critical is that not only does it provide shelter, it also ensures the integrity of the building itself. Once a roof is breached, admitting rainwater or snow, deterioration begins immediately if a building consists of wood or other vegetative materials. If not quickly corrected, destruction of the structure will follow. The same consequences occur with mud or adobe constructions if precipitation penetrates. Throughout Mexico and the Hispanic southwestern US, “flat” roofs are rarely completely flat. Most have a slight incline (from 1 to 5 degrees)

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Vernacular Buildings 16-3. Icicles and ice buildup along the gutter of this house in Boonville, NY work to provide a dam behind which melt water is encouraged to penetrate the building (photo by author, 1974).

for drainage. In New Mexico the flat roof has a slight tilt to the east, west, or south to facilitate water drainage; north was avoided to prevent water freezing on the roof in winter due to consequent northerly exposure. Even though rainfall is very low in desert areas, when it does occur, it often is in short, heavy downpours. Such rains, regardless of temperature, may easily dissolve adobe mud, the most common traditional structures in desert and near desert areas. However: adobe roofs baked under the blazing sun normally provide adequate protection from the widely spaced desert rains. The capillary action that weakens walls also permits adobe roofs to absorb considerable rainwater. During heavy rains, the excess water must be removed from the flat roof by wooden or stone drains projecting through the parapets. Several types of roof drains, or canales, [are] used in Indian pueblos. The areas surrounding these drains represent potential trouble spots. Water spilling over or penetrating under the canales can rapidly destroy a large wall section if it is not kept under repair (Noble 1984, 1:83).

Moisture at the junction of roof and walls is also a problem in more humid areas. The search for effective materials to block penetration of rainwater has been extensive and exhaustive. The nearly flat mud roof of houses used by the Masai tribe in Tanzania is not always effective in

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repelling rains, and hides must often be thrown over the structure as added protection during the rainy season (McKim 1985, 66). On the American Great Plains after the Civil War and towards the end of the sod-house phase of building, tarpaper began to be used as roofing. It was laid down first and sods were placed over it, providing an efficient roof. Subsequently, tarpaper roofing without a sod covering spread widely in North America as a cheap, if not particularly long-lasting, roof material. Such a roofing system, using tarpaper painted with petroleum tar on both sides, had been developed during the American Civil War to cover ammunition dumps (Kear 1971). Christian Kleinert (1976, 200), working in the Himalayas, has offered a general observation that relates house building to variation in both rainfall and temperature. As one moves from east to west, rainfall steadily decreases. The roof pitch, which is quite high in the humid east in order to shed rain from thatch covering, also decreases, until in the western Himalayas only flat mud roofs are encountered. A similar, but much less significant decline in precipitation occurs from south to north. In this direction because altitude increases, it is temperature – especially during winter – which affects buildings the most. The light wood materials of housing give way first to heavier timber and finally to stone at the higher elevations. The form of the house also changes from structures surrounding a courtyard to houses more closed, showing thick walls and a few openings only. In tropical areas, the constantly warm temperature and high humidity of the tropical environment during the day made the significant drop in temperature with the setting sun not only uncomfortable, but unhealthy because of the lingering high humidity. The problem was solved in Samoa by building houses in which the solid walls only rose up about halfway. Above this, the remaining space was left open, but could be closed at night by woven screens (Ferree 1890, 149). The stormy combination of precipitation, high wind, and cold temperatures was most troublesome in the abruptly shifting weather of the mid-latitudes. Traditional builders appreciated the need to take precautions against recurring weather problems. In the St. Lawrence Valley, most early French buildings were built of adobe or stone. Generally, only one wall was covered by clapboards in this area of prevailing northeasterly gale winds. The clapboarding protected the mortar against moisture driven into joints by the strong winds (Cameron, C. 1982, 19). To the south, in Rhode Island, English colonists were forced by the greater severity of New England winters (as opposed to those of Britain) to abandon half-timber construction and to substitute clapboard or shingles for better insulation.

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Wind can be most damaging and dangerous, especially in short, intense bursts. Thatch easily blows away, a situation that calls for various methods to tie or weigh down the thatch. The difficulty is most worrisome in Scotland (Figure 16-4). In much of Scandinavia, wind protection is provided by the upside-down-V-shaped application of roof trees, “short pieces of wood pegged together and set along the ridge to hold down the top of the thatch” (Donnelly 1992, 215). To an extent, the tile roof is a response to climate. This is especially true in Europe where the drier and warmer southern countries favored tile roofs, whereas the northern, more humid, and cooler countries favored thatch and wood. In France the traditional boundary between the types is the Loire Valley (Meirion-Jones 1982, 45). In the central part of North America, tornados are a recurring danger. Even metal roofs can be rolled up and destroyed by the force of these storms (Figure 16-5). In the Midwest and mid-South of the United States, a high proportion of rural dwellings have an adjacent excavated structure called a cyclone cellar, “cyclone” being a vernacular term for tornado. Climate is, of course, only one element of the physical environment, but one which cannot be ignored if a dwelling is to have an extended life and utility. Generally, if rain or flood water invades a structure, deterioration will soon follow, ending eventually in partial or total

16-4. The thatch of this black house is kept in place by a series of boulders attached to a network of strong wire. The hump visible on the ridge is a small smoke hole opening, Kingussie, Scotland (photo by author, 2001).

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16-5. The metal roof of the small timber-frame house has been torn back by a severe tornado whose force can be deduced by the window frame that has been blown onto the roof. In the right background are also trees bereft of branches, Russiaville, IN (photo by author, 1966).

collapse. Another significant component of climate is temperature. Cold temperatures are a greater problem to defend against than warm temperatures. Finally, wind, as its force increases, heightens all the negative impacts of other destructive forces. These other environmental hazards are dealt with in the next chapter.

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~ 17 ~ Threats: Man-made Winds and rains, heavy snowfall and dust storms, the timber rot of humid areas, the frost cracks of winter freezes, and all the other potentially damaging effects of climate and weather are only part of the hazards affecting traditional buildings. One must remember that abandonment of individual dwellings, and even entire settlements, may result from social and natural causes, which could include spread of disease, attack and warfare, soil exhaustion from over-cultivation, ethnic and class disputes, man-made fires, and even disappearance of local springs and other water sources. However, easily overlooked is the impact which wealthy and powerful landowners have had on the traditional structures. As archaeologist J.G. Hurst (1972, 539) reminds us for medieval England: There are many cases of manor houses being built over earlier peasant houses showing that seigneurs cleared away parts of the village so they could have the best site, in the same way that town houses were removed to make way for castles.

Similar observations applying to other parts of the world undoubtedly can be found. Also largely overlooked as a continuing man-made hazard is the pressure of steadily growing population. One simple and almost forgotten example of this impact on traditional building is provided by South Africa, where increasing population numbers in the 19th century caused a critical shortage of grasses suitable for traditional building. The result was the introduction of less suitable and inferior wattle-and-daub walling to replace grass thatch (Frescura 1981, 13), thus entirely changing the character of the settlements. In many societies, as population pressure increases, dwellings are converted to lower-order agricultural uses or simply allowed to deteriorate (Figure 17-1). Among the Toba of Indonesia, a different solution is found. Because of the critical importance of rice, elevated storage barns called sopo are constructed with a high level of craftsmanship and of a design similar to that of their dwellings. During the daytime the open lower spaces are gathering places for

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A

B

17-1. Abandoned farm houses. A – This once beautiful and sturdy structure is now structurally unsound. The gables, supported by the stone chimneys, are more stable, Tug Hill plateau, NY (photo by author, 1970). B – Windows are boarded up, the portico has been removed, and only a scar in the roof remains as a witness to its original presence, Munfortville, KY (photo by author, 1981).

the community, and at night sleeping quarters for single men who provide building security. It also happens that a sopo often will subsequently be turned into a residence by enclosing the sides. Such “conversions take place to accommodate population expansion” (Cameron, E. 1985, 81). One of the world’s most distinctive areas of vernacular stone buildings is the Cotswold Hills of England (Hill and Birch 1994). Here outcrops of limestone, which weathers to a golden hue, due mainly to the presence of limonite, an iron oxide, supply the principal building materials, used at least since the 14th century. Original cottages now have been extensively altered to provide today’s wide variety of house types. As happens elsewhere, the original structures are under the

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threat of unsympathetic restoration as transportation systems improve, permitting affluent urbanites to escape the confines of the city to relocate to this idyllic setting (Figure 17-2). Closely connected to population growth pressures elsewhere is the more subtle – and sometimes not-so-subtle – action of colonial administrations to improve the lot of “natives.” Some administrators in Africa were so zealous that they actually undertook campaigns to burn down traditional dwellings to drive out hill peoples (Denyer 1978, 189). The destruction of traditional dwellings by occupants themselves also occurs for a variety of

A

17-2. Excellent examples of unsympathetic rehabilitation. A – The huge buttresses applied in the 19th century to this Cotswold cottage destroy much of the original character of the structure (drawn by Iraida Galdon Soler). B – The out-of-scale office building additions to colonial Bacon’s Castle, a 17th-century residence in Tidewater, VA is unforgiveable in a publically owned facility (photo by author, 1981)

B

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reasons. In some Amerindian communities, dwellings in which a death has occurred are abandoned and subsequently burned. For a quite different reason, the Sons of Freedom, a sub-sect of the Doukhobors in western Canada, periodically burn down their own houses to purge themselves of materialism as an extreme demonstration of faith (Mealing 1984, 74, 85). The other objective of many colonial administrators was to replace native religions with Christianity. The greatest pressure on the people came from missionaries, but if and when disputes arose between the native peoples and the missionaries, colonial administrators invariably sided with their own kind, the missionaries. As Alison Hoagland (1997, 180) reminds us: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the missionaries in Alaska, as well as throughout the American West, linked Christianity to assimilation: a Native could not become a good Christian unless he or she had relinquished traditional customs [...] The missionaries looked at the tribal houses and saw not a unit of government, but a large plank house accommodating a number of families in unsanitary and immoral conditions [...] Mixing several families together without separate rooms threatened the “purity” of young girls, in the missionaries’ view. The missionaries campaigned to replace the traditional multifamily plank houses with single-family, American-style residences, believing that a different house type would change traditional patterns of living [...] The missionaries were equally dismissive of totem poles and potlatches [...] Not until the plank houses and totem poles were threatened with extinction would it become socially acceptable to missionaries and government officials to save them – and then only as isolated works of art, not as evocations of a way of life.

Not all missionary activity had a negative effect on indigenous populations. A few sympathetic missionaries helped preserve native culture, usually indirectly by authoring first-hand accounts and observations. Father Berard Haile, working among the Navajo Indians, may be taken as an exemplar. More often than not, however, the missionary attitude and activity were to eradicate as much of native culture as possible because so much of it was religion-based. Only then would Christianity prevail! The impact was especially prevalent in the Pacific northwest where, for example, all native house types were destroyed. Only gradually has Native American culture begun to reassert itself, and structures of traditional design to be built again in small numbers. In the southwestern United States, similar pressures existed, with only the largest groups, such as the Navajo, able to resist successfully –

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at least up to a point. “Before the mid-1920s, U.S. Indian administration was committed to transforming Indian communities into variants of the dominant American culture as quickly as possible” (Dozier 1970, 15). The pressures were extreme and the result often devastating to the Native American tribes. The Crow Indians were among the most successful groups to adjust to government pressures. They modified as little as possible, yet always peacefully, and successfully camouflaged their actions so as to retain parts of their native tradition and lifestyle. In the single-room, government-reservation-financed log houses: the stove was located in the center, much like the fire pit in the tipi, with the stovepipe coming up through the center of the roof [...] like the tipi, the front invariably faced east in anticipation of the rising sun [...] the tendency [was] to make the cabin more tipilike by cutting only a single opening [...] a curtain or liner was hung around the interior wall. The liners or curtains served both practical and social functions. On a practical level, they formed an air space that helped to insulate the lodge in both winter and summer. Socially the liners were decorated to publicize a man’s war record, thus declaring his status in the tribe. This practice lasted into the early reservation period. (Carter et al. 2005, 103–4)

The United States and Canada, in their dealings with “Indian, First Nation, or Native American” groups, can be viewed much as colonial powers. The major difference from European countries is that the US and Canada in these instances saw the area where these native populations lived as contiguous extensions of their respective countries, into which their own people would expand. In the latter third of the 19th century, the official policy of the US government, as executed by the military, was to force migratory Indian tribes, who roamed over extensive hunting territories, to relocate permanently on reservations, often of quite small size. Forced to become sedentary agriculturalists, the Indians needed much less land, opening the vacated tribal territories both to great profits for the railroads, whose tracks were leaping across the vast distances of the prairies, and to the flood of white settlers. A natural tendency of colonial personnel was to introduce architectural influences from their home countries (Figure 17-3). The ideas, forms, and changes thus introduced often were gradually adopted in the traditional society. The early adopters usually were those persons most likely to benefit economically and socially, with their influences gradually filtering down through the rest of society. The islands of the Caribbean offer an interesting example of the overall process. Edward

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17-3. A street of Gothic residences in the British Concession in Shanghai, China appear out of context (photo by author, 1977).

Crain (1994, 4–5) observes, “the closer the architecture came to that of the mother country, the less appropriate it usually was to the tropics.” Further, each colonizing country impressed its own distinctive types of dwellings, so that no single Caribbean architecture applies to the entire region. Each island is unique and this even extends to islands controlled by the same colonial power. Writing of traditional rural dwellings in Taiwan, Emily Ahern (1979, 155–9) offered a similar example, with a different arrangement of rooms and functions. “In its simplest form, a traditional rural house (dacu, big house) is a rectangular structure [...] There is one major axis, along the long side of the rectangle.” The entrance is on the side of a file of rooms and directly in to the central, ceremonial, and ancestral room, called the keying. Along the file and increasingly away from this central hall, rooms are steadily lower in roof height and occupied by family members of decreasingly lower family order status. The replacement of local traditional society economies by higherincome activities encourages the introduction of urban structures, or,

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as the rural Taiwanese characterize them, “foreign-style or yanglou” dwellings. But, as Emily Ahern (1979, 160–2) notes, “a yanglou is essentially a rectangular concrete box. Its floors, walls, and roof are poured concrete, reinforced with brick, and at the corners, steel rods” to eventually permit expansion upwards. At the same time: Given the great physical differences between this form of housing and the U-shaped compound, it is striking that a number of general features are common to both. Yanglou of one story almost invariably have the finest room, the room for entertainment of guests and installation of ancestral tablets, if any, immediately inside the front door. Other rooms behind this one are often oriented to it axially, much as if they formed one side of the base rectangle of a U-shaped compound. Bedrooms are often located behind the front guest hall, and the kitchen, bath, toilet, and animals behind them.

In both Taiwan and mainland China after 1949, government policies initially included compulsory land reform which significantly affected traditional building. The frenzy in China of the Great Leap Forward, beginning in 1958, led to an accelerated destruction of old residences, lineage halls, ancestral shrines and temples. This assault on structures was aimed [...] at rooting out “feudal superstitions” and also, in the case of Fujian and other southern provinces, eliminating the power of local lineages by expunging architectural elements that expressed such domination [...] To increase the efficiency of collectivized agriculture and militarystyle organization under the recently instituted people’s communes, various “modern” and purely functional structures were sometimes built [...] using bricks and timber from demolished dwellings and other buildings. Initially during this period, because emphasis was placed on agricultural production rather than consumption, villagers were explicitly dissuaded from investing in improving their housing stock. (Knapp 1996, 781)

Throughout the world of traditional societies, an array of other factors, which also may be grouped under the heading of “modernization,” encourages modifications that change the character of traditional buildings. These factors include the expansion of structures by additions, both horizontally and vertically, by changes in roof type, by addition or repositioning of doors and windows (Figure 17-4), and other structural modifications. That the kitchen and food storage facility remain in the older structures clearly indicates the hold which tradition maintains in the society.

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17-4. New construction with modern window openings will gradually change the appearance of the Taos Pueblo, NM (photo by author, 1967).

At the beginning of the 20th century, sheets of corrugated iron began to cover wooden walls in coastal Iceland, to combat frigid temperatures, unusually brisk winds, and the absence of other economical walling materials (Abrecht 2000, 9, 21). Although these changes were technical improvements, other changes may be motivated by social pressures that manifest themselves in a desire of the inhabitants not to be regarded as primitive, out of date, or old fashioned. These pressures grow as generations succeed one another. Charlotte Wilcoxen (1984,  87) calls this “the vandalism of progress” and John Milbauer (2004, 2) refers to it as “the juggernaut of popular culture.” Navajo children, as an example, were taken away from the reservation, in the 19th century through the early 20th, and forced to live in a government Indian school. Ultimately as young adults they were among the strongest pressure groups influencing the adoption of white housing to replace the traditional hogans (Tremblay et al. 1954, 217–18). Social status, ethnic identity, and improvement in the economy may work together to modify traditional architecture. W. Murray Jack (1955) and John Vlach (1984) each have traced a more elaborate process for two-story dwellings termed “Brazilian” houses, which were introduced to Nigeria in the 19th century: Freed slaves who had served their apprenticeship in the building trade in Latin America [mostly Brazil] were the main carriers, establishing their long-cherished ambitions of returning to their homeland and building

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there. They built in the style of their former masters, just as has happened in so many other instances in history [...] The Portuguese slave traders, themselves, however, were most likely to have been originally responsible for transplanting the style on to African soil. (Jack 1955, 107–8)

“The clearest signal of Afro-Brazilian influence is sent by the many two-story houses now called ile petesi or “upstairs house,” and other bungalows trimmed with molded stucco facades” (Vlach 1984, 7). The somewhat similar British prefabricated houses mentioned above, which were sent from England for English and wealthy foreign trader residents of Nigeria, were objectionable for the Yoruba on two grounds. Not only were they directly linked with colonial domination but they were decorated in a restrained and straight-laced manner. By contrast, the Brazilian-derived ile petesi, being the creation of long lost Yoruba cousins, seemed a better choice. Even though it was not as well adapted to tropical conditions as the British colonial bungalow, its fanciful decoration had a style and manner that approached the exuberance of traditional Yoruba art. (Vlach 1984, 16)

The term “bungalow” arises from British contacts with India. Several different explanations with differing details of its origins have been offered. All agree, however, that the term is an English-language corruption of the Indian adjective bangla, meaning “of the Bengalis” or “from Bengal,” as used in the designation Bangladesh (the country of the Bengalis). Hence, the early colonials returning to England and seeking a new home requested builders to give them a bangla house, one which they were familiar with from Bengal, the most important part of the early British Indian Empire. Over time the spelling and pronunciation evolved into “bungalow.” In many instances, modern materials are less environmentally suitable. Building with “tightly fitted milled lumber” for walls and flooring, with a corrugated-metal roof and louvered glass windows, greatly hinders the “easy movement of air through the building” in Brunei stilt houses, thus negating one of the most important aspects of the traditional nipa-palm structure. The popularization of corrugated iron or zinc, the so-called tin roofs, in tropical areas is an excellent example of the introduction of environmentally ill-suited materials. These metal surfaces conduct great amounts of heat into the dwelling, much more than do traditional roof materials. The preservation of an adequate number and variety of basically unaltered buildings certainly is necessary to show that the material

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cultural landscape of an area changed with the passage of time. Almost all buildings, especially traditional ones, are in a state of continual, albeit often gradual, change. This process is one of the most difficult problems facing the historic preservationist. What should be preserved and/or emphasized? In developed countries, population pressures, combined with a desire to appear modern, often result in irresistible government policies to remove still salvageable, although outmoded, traditional dwellings. Another almost irresistible force to modify traditional housing comes from the insurance industry. Rates for the use of “modern” materials are usually lower than for traditional. Finally, there is the exploitation of local resources by non-local interests. A quite different, and almost diametrically oriented, force – wildlife conservation and the establishment of natural resource reserves and parks – also often works against the preservation of traditional dwellings. The establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the US in 1926 also required the displacing of several thousand residents of that area. The generations-old farmstead and log house of the Walker family lay in the path of the park development. A mountain farm is, by its very nature, not overly productive, but the Walkers suffered no serious privation. It is doubtful that they ever went hungry. Practically all essential commodities were produced on the farm. Luxuries were scarce, but were usually considered useless or sinful. The house was well built and, though crowded at times, was a fine house for John Walker’s family. (Madden and Jones 1977, 18)

The anguish of the family members and their tenacious struggle to retain the only dwelling they had known is recalled in a poem written by Louisa Walker, included in a book published surprisingly by the National Park Service (Madden and Jones 1977, 18–19). Below are several stanzas: There is an old weather bettion house That stands near a wood With an orchard near by it For all most one hundred years it has stood It was my home in infancy It sheltered me in youth When I tell you I love it I tell you the truth

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For years it has sheltered By day and night From the summer sun’s heat And the cold winter blight But now the park Commissioner Comes all dressed up so gay Saying this old house of yours We must now take away They coax they wheedle They fret they bark Saying we have to have this place For a National Park For us poor mountain people They don’t have a care But must a home for The wolf the lion and the bear. Of course, in time the National Park prevailed. “After an early policy change that halted the wholesale elimination of the cultural landscape, the National Park Service used the preservation of traditional culture as an implicit justification for the park’s creation.” But so many traditional structures had been destroyed by then that the cultural landscape created for park visitors was no longer a faithful representation of the original (Williams, M.A. 2001, 33). Destruction of habitat sites also occurs throughout the world in the name of economic development. One of the better-documented cases involves the destruction of early settlement sites on the Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona by open-pit mining operations of the Peabody Mining Company (Warburton 1985, 70). Such destruction is not an isolated or unique situation. I remember walking behind a bulldozer in Guatemala City in 1963 as it leveled prehistoric settlement mounds. Shards littered the ground and I was able to collect several obsidian knives unearthed by the machines. No thought was given by the developers to preserving any of the objects. “As ever, commercial speculation and exploitation lurk as enemies of the unique, the authentic, and the local” (Hayden 2000, ix). The drive for development in underdeveloped countries, while commendable as an economic strategy, often neglects to understand the importance and value of traditional culture (Knapp 2003, 7).

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Kulbhushan Jain and Minakshi Jain (1992, vi) call our attention to the threat which urban development represents to Indian tribal settlements when such “forms from urban areas are imitated without considering their relevance.” Such process is difficult to stop even when the change is not necessarily for the better. “When tradition is lost, not only are settlement patterns and house forms lost, but the very relationships on which cultural identity and survival are based are lost” (Henderson, M.L. 1992, 16). Traditional buildings are usually sacrificed on the altar of development! “Many unnoticed and unheralded dwellings, it is sad to say, continue to be destroyed because their residents and others regard them as too ordinary, outdated, and dysfunctional to maintain” (Knapp 2000, 3). Even in developed countries the drive for “modernization” and additional development inexorably goes on. Beyond a certain amount of academic hand-wringing, both written and vocal, little has been done to alter the continuing destruction of potential and recognized sites of historical value throughout the world. An outstanding exception was the ground-breaking publication of European Towns (Barley 1977), which although limited to urban places, pointed the way dramatically to the cultural threat posed by continued population growth and urban development without adequate attention to preservation of architectural and archaeological sites. Included in the volume was a resolution of the Council for British Archaeology presented at the European Architectural Heritage Year meeting in Amsterdam in 1975. The resolution’s opening paragraph states: The architectural and the archaeological heritage of Europe is, at the present day, threatened by neglect in many countries and by rapid urban change. At the same time we are in danger in these countries of losing the sense of belonging to a society with its roots in the past. To avert these threats we must safeguard the historic towns and villages we have inherited, for their social and historic value no less than for their architectural beauty. We must take every opportunity to uncover and record the evidence of earlier communities and vanished landscapes before it is lost forever.

The danger to traditional structures from population pressures and the attractiveness of modernization are on-going problems that, although significant, attract little attention. After all of the above has been said, it must be remembered that one of the impelling reasons for abandoning traditional practices and patterns so readily today is “that modern technology and materials offer vast improvements in physical comfort and convenience” (Carver 1981, 27). Nevertheless, the approbation of constant population growth, advocated by some

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groups, as well as the tradition-bound dedication to produce as many children as possible, is one of the most insidious causes creating wholesale destruction of the cultural landscape. The power to resist the government and the military, even your own, is difficult in periods of emergency (Figure 17-5). Christopher Weeks (1996, 17–18) reports on the destruction of traditional colonial period buildings in Harford County, Maryland, in World War I when “the U.S. Army condemned virtually all Harford’s bay-frontage in 1917 and turned productive tomato patches and peach orchards into weapons-testing sites.” Finally, in World War II, the last standing 200-year-old house was experimentally fire-bombed by the army. Sic transit gloria mundi!

17-5. Artillery damage to a building wall, Würzburg, Germany (photo by author, 1968).

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Civil unrest and disturbances may also result in changes in traditional buildings. For example, after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, during which many houses were destroyed by incendiaries, thatching was outlawed in British cantonment settlements (Kipling 1911, 308), and it rapidly fell out of favor in other Indian urban settlements. In another example, The absence of timber construction in Ireland can, perhaps, best be explained by the disappearance of the essential material as a result of the leveling of the woods for which the country was famous in the past. In summary, it must of course be noted that modern housing is also subject to damage, modification, and destruction. Consider for a moment the horrific losses in Japan from both natural causes and man-made lapses in anticipation, occurring in a single week in 2011.

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~ 18 ~ Threats: Fire, Wind, Earthquake and Other Natural Hazards Historical records are clearest for cities and show well how critical both natural and man-made disasters have been. In rural areas, because population densities were lower and civil organization less effective, the record is far less clear (Figure 18-1), despite the Great Peshtigo Fire – the greatest fire in North America in the 19th century, which devastated enormous areas, destroyed traditional dwellings on both sides of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and killed thousands. Throughout the tropics, thatch, bamboo, and other light construction materials are subject to frequent fire destruction. Even in the more temperate climates, the settlements of early peoples were often seriously or totally destroyed. As just one example, Thomas Abler (1970, 36) reminds us that even among such Indian tribes as the Iroquois, “fires were a very dangerous threat [...] and quite disastrous fires took place fairly often.” Because of the lack of written documentation, destructive fires in the countryside everywhere often went unreported, and often involved only a single building (Figure 18-2). Mention must also be made of the damage created by natural ageing processes, over which mankind has very limited control, although some technologies and strategies have been evolved over time to lessen the impact and destructiveness. Natural ageing usually proceeds slowly but inexorably, although at times it may occur surprisingly rapidly, especially when aided by faulty construction. John Rempel (1980, 43) calls attention to this process as it occurs in log structures: Settlers also heartily disliked the tendency of log houses to dry and shrink over the years, with the consequent warping and twisting of all openings to windward. Today we demand seasoned timber that has either lain properly out of doors for six or more months or been kiln-dried, but a settler’s house was usually up and occupied within a

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18-1. United States weather map with the extreme low pressure area which was a major element in the Great Peshtigo Fire.

B A

18-2. Fire destruction of dwellings. A – Only the stone walls remain of this dwelling on the Isle d’Orleans, Quebec, Canada (photo by author, 1976). B – The entire upper portion of this dwelling has been destroyed, coastal Norway (photo by author, 2002).

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month of the trees being cut down [...] Rot in the bottom logs, caused by constant exposure to alternate wetting and drying, commonly resulted in settling.

Degradation by termites and other wood-consuming insects, and fungal growth, although gradual, are a continuing menace in all humid environments. The ravages of the wood-eating termite pests gave rise to a popular bit of doggerel: Some primal termite knocked in wood And tasted it and found it good And that is why your Aunty May Fell thru the kitchen floor today. (Archer 1987, 102)

Other vermin also may be a problem. One of the reasons given for the 18th-century substitution of brick for timber, or wattle and daub, as the generally accepted building material in Lancashire and Cheshire, was better protection against rats and other vermin (Singleton 1952, 81). Attention also must be given to volcanic eruptions and lava flows (Figure 18-3) as catastrophic forces of destruction. Graphic television

18-3. Lava flow almost surrounds an Icelandic dwelling. The massive blocks were upthrust by the pressure of gases, stopping the flow just before engulfing the buildings, which can be seen in the right background (photo by author, 2005).

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images abound of peasants fleeing from erupting cones in the Philippines, Caribbean islands, and mountain areas in the Andes, as well as the shores of the Mediterranean – and who has never seen the image of Mount St Helens in the United States? The irony is that these same volcanoes and their accompanying lava flows can produce exceptionally fertile soils in a few short years of erosion. Thus, areas in and around volcanic eruptions support high densities of peasant farmers, most of whom use traditional methods in securing shelter and livelihood. The destructive force of the wind has been mentioned in a pre­ vious chapter. In particularly ruinous storms, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, devastation can be of great magnitude. The middle sections of North America are the places most vulnerable to tornado destruc­ tion. Here tornado winds probably rival fire as the greatest destroyer of traditional structures. Rebuilding is rarely with construction materials or building forms which approximate the original. Hurricanes, often termed cyclones or typhoons, primarily affect islands and continental coastal areas in both tropical and midlatitudes. The devastation from these storms impacts much wider areas than that from tornadoes. The catastrophic impact of hurricanes in urban areas was graphically illustrated in New Orleans by the 2005 storm, Katrina. Vivid depictions were still an almost daily feature of TV programs in the US as late as 2010. Hurricanes are such an ever-present potential danger in Bermuda that they have influenced the form of house roofs. Early eave projections were limited to just eight inches or so beyond the line of the wall because anything longer presented a danger of being lifted by the wind during a hurricane. The walls were strengthened against the hurricanes by placing the hearth and chimney stack to the south, the usual direction of the storms. The effect of earthquakes on traditional building has been largely neglected, although Frederick Aalen (1984, 62) did report that in the Greek Ionian islands, rebuilding after earthquakes changed almost entirely the composition of the cultural landscape. Traditional buildings of gable roof and rectangular plan were replaced by hipped roof, squarish-plan houses, dramatically altering the appearance of the villages. The quake of 1953 was so destructive that in the village of Vasilikades in Cephalonia, Greece, all houses save one were destroyed (Vryonis 1975, 401). Despite such significant impact, the effect of earthquakes on traditional structures has been little explored beyond the recording of the scope and severity of destruction. This is often limited just to urban areas, probably because population density there provides greater visual impact and higher casualties.

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Another consequence of major earthquakes is that casualties are so great and the devastation so widespread and severe that rebuilding must be piecemeal, temporary, and often using scrap materials of dubious long-term value. The vast destruction of the Haitian earthquake of 2010 and its long-term impact fit this description exactly. One unusual effect associated with earthquakes in mountainous areas, where traditional buildings predominate, is the great danger that exists from rockfalls and tumbling boulders, often of enormous size (Ambrasseys et al. 1975). As A.F. Daldy (1972, 1) reminds us: the heavier the building, the greater is the force upon it [...] Lightweight buildings, and in particular light-weight roofs, are desirable in earthquake areas [...] The foundation of a structure moves as soon as the ground moves, but the inertia of the rest of the building causes a slight delay before the upper part starts to move. It is this delay which causes stresses and the cracking which is typical of earthquake damage.

In 1692 the entire town of Port Royal, Jamaica was destroyed, except for the small slave huts, which escaped destruction because of their resilient stick-and-thatch construction. The English survivors ejected the slave residents from their huts and moved in themselves (Green 1984, 44). In coastal areas, destruction to traditional housing often comes not from the earthquake itself, but from tsunamis generated by the quake. In recent memory, the enormous damage associated with the great Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 remains vivid, although as yet little has been written of the impact on traditional dwellings and the long-term consequences of their destruction. Even more horrible is the devastation and loss of life wrought by the combination of Pacific plate shifting and resultant tsunami wave, the combined impact of which resulted in at least 25,000 fatalities in the northern Honshu city of Sendai, Japan. The destruction by these natural forces ultimately also unleashed the man-made dangers of nuclear devastation upon an already weakened, disrupted, and debilitated population. In the final analysis, however, over the long expanse of history it may be fires which have been the greatest threats to traditional building. Builders of traditional structures in both town and countryside have therefore employed various strategies to combat fire. Westward-moving settlers in North America in the 19th century were streaming into areas of prairie grasses, where the greatest natural hazard was fire.

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The fires caused great damage if property was not plowed around for protection. The farm buildings were protected by eight or ten furrows in a large circle around the yard. Inside this circle another circle was plowed and the grass in between was burned. (Marin 1931, 151)

I have only seen one prairie fire, a small one in Saskatchewan, but I was amazed at how swiftly it moved, driven by the strong and constant wind of the prairies. A graphic account of such a fire in 1880 by William Marin was extracted and published in 1931 by the Minnesota Historical Society. Marin relates: Shortly after I had started in the direction of home I saw in the distance a prairie fire coming up from the south with the wind. I hurried the cattle as fast as I could, but apparently that was not fast enough. The fire was still a considerable distance away, but was coming down rapidly, a line of flame on a frontage of probably three or four miles, with nothing to stop it. The fire was coming nearer and nearer [...] Fortunately, I came to a small meadow of a few acres where the hay had been cut, leaving a short stubble grass. The fire would not be very heavy when it struck this small, cut-over meadow and my only salvation was in keeping the cattle within this area until the fire swept by [...] I circled around them several times, until finally I stopped them just as the fire was close upon us. Then the cattle became stupefied and paralyzed with fear and huddled together. The smoke came rolling over us with the flames crackling and roaring. When the fire struck the meadow the blaze was not more than eight or ten inches high and when it came within fifty yards I took the grain sack [...] and fought the fire. Stamping out a piece sufficiently wide to drive the cattle through, back onto burned ground [...] It was a scared, weary, and blistered little boy who came about nine o’clock that night to a frantic mother. (Marin 1931, 153)

* * * Many peoples have used community bakeovens. In addition to reducing fire risk, their building and maintenance required shared community labor costs, and provided a setting for community exchange, in the process building community solidarity. I have seen these structures in such diverse locations as Brittany and Flanders (Figure 18-4), the Rif Mountains in Morocco, and Belgian settlements on the Door County peninsula, Wisconsin (Noble 1985, 245). Where fire danger was minimal, such as in the dry-climate pueblos of New Mexico, individual bakeovens predominated. In the towns of French Canada, house design in the 17th and 18th centuries broke with the earlier tradition of steeply pitched, gable

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18-4. A community bakeoven building now in the Breton Open-air Museum, Brittany, France. The sod roof helped to prevent heat loss (photo by author, 1992).

roofs common in the countryside. In the town dwellings, parapets projected not only above the shingled roof but also carried forward beyond the line of the eaves, on massive corbels to retard the spread of fire if one should break out. A lower pitch in the roof (to allow firefighters to walk on it) was also obligatory. (Cameron, C. 1982, 12–13)

These design features continued to be followed in the countryside, even though the original need produced by close spacing no longer applied, confirming the often-reiterated observation that architectural leadership proceeded from the towns (Carless 1925, 142). A similar design feature of parapets to retard the spread of fire exists on many village houses in China (Lung 1991, 26). Throughout the world, a range of legal measures has been adopted to combat fire. Bergen, Norway in the Middle Ages prohibited the

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use of wooden hoods and chimneys, but not until the 18th century were wooden chimneys outlawed in colonial Georgia. In the UK, thatch roofs in medieval times were required by law to be covered with a coat of lime-wash. Even earlier, London had prohibited the use of thatching. Nevertheless, such prohibition was ineffective in controlling London fires, which, of course, culminated in the Great Fire of 1666. Traditional building must of necessity wage an unremitting struggle against both man-made and natural hazards just to maintain itself. It is unlikely that traditional building will expand in future because of the scale of modern development, the increasing cost and scarcity of traditional building materials, the desire of people for increased standards of living, and the persistence and unpredictability of natural hazards. The great danger is that replacement of the traditional will occur with such rapidity that societies become disoriented and lose the stability which contact with the past and tradition provides.

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~ 19 ~ Openings: Doors In the British Isles, an ancient way to describe an intended visit to someone was to say that you were going to “darken his door,” a phrase that is still used in angry dismissal: “Never darken my door again!” It was accurate symbolism, for in our earliest houses the doorway was not only the way of going in and out, but also the sole source of light for the gloomy windowless interiors. (Breckon and Parker 1991, 126)

In traditional dwellings among the easy-going, sociable Fiji islanders, even today a closed door, especially while eating, is considered unfriendly and improper (Ravuvu 1983, 32). In contrast, however, Gerald Pocius (1989, 246), writing about traditional houses in Newfoundland, tells us: Free access is the norm; anyone can enter at any time without knocking in order to engage in the common activity of visiting. Doors are usually locked only from the outside, and only when the house occupant intends to be gone for a long time. During short absences, residents usually fasten the door from the exterior with a clothespin, enabling any visitor to enter the house and await the owner’s return. Since everyone has free access to every house, residents must always be willing to be interrupted by an unannounced visitor (Pocius 1989, 246).

In much of the world, interior security was provided by keeping the entry size as small as reasonable. Normally, door size is kept small in traditional dwellings, not only to ensure security, but also to keep the door, which has to be swung, lifted, pushed, pulled, or pivoted, to a manageable weight. Smaller and fewer door openings also place less stress on the building frame and/or walls. Furthermore, in cooler climates smaller doorways help to conserve interior warmth. The use of a threshold, against which the door closes, also assists heat conservation by blocking cold drafts (Sjoberg 2003, 37). The word “threshold” is borrowed from a device found originally in the grain-processing barns of England and some parts of continental

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Europe. In those structures, the jambs of the wagon doors were slotted at the bottom to allow the insertion of a board called a “thresh hold” – a term that has clearly outlived its agrarian origins. The original device, as well as the useful dwelling threshold used to reinforce the doorway frame, found their way across the Atlantic with early settlers. I have also seen thresholds used in southern China to prevent the escape of chickens from the house (Figure 19-1), and in western Germany probably to keep larger animals from invading the structure. In some cases, above-average-size doors are required to serve special needs. Inett Homes (1978, 12) reminds us that many dwellings in Herefordshire needed back doors of four feet width, in order to permit passage of rolling barrels of cider, an important cottage agricultural product of the area. Wider-than-average doors are also found on many longhouses in Scotland to accommodate entry to the byre of long-horned Highland cattle (Naismith 1985, 30). Solid wooden doors are a relatively late invention in traditional buildings, and even today many structures throughout the world are built without them (Figure 19-2). The Cape Dutch houses in South Africa possess an entrance door, which at one and the same time is ancient in form as well as innovative. Derived from the early divided door of the Netherlands, it allows the upper part to be opened while the lower stays shut. The door also has a sliding sash window, which can be lowered to replace the upper half-door in windy or cool weather. This allows light to enter while keeping out drafts and wandering farm animals (De Bosdari 1953, 22).

19-1. A peasant-designed Chinese threshold blocks the entry of chickens. Photo taken on a commune near Shanghai (photo by author, 1977).

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Vernacular Buildings 19-2. Rounded door-top reduces the weight of the swinging door, Carpathian foothills village, Poland. Note how well fitted is the arch, confirming good carpentering skills (photo by author, 1985).

Even later than the invention of the solid door is the practice in Europe of providing more than one entry. As buildings became larger, a second door offered convenience, and also provided for the possibility of cross ventilation, especially if positioned directly across from the first door. The desirability of cross ventilation was universally recognized at an early time. The draft provided by opposing doors was useful in ridding a dwelling of smoke from open fires. The problem in Europe, especially in the British Isles, was that of cold winter winds at just the time of the year when accumulated smoke was most bothersome. In Ireland also, such a situation was not very desirable in the long winter season, but two opposed doors did have an important advantage. “Either door is used as occasion requires in order to prevent the changeable winds from entering the kitchen” (Campbell, A. 1935, 70). However, over time the use of the kitchen back door of the longhouse declined along with the practice of milking cows in the kitchen. In order to do the milking, the animals had been led in through the front door and out through the back. The decline in the use of the back door by visitors or strangers is locally given as due to the fact that strangers “might leave the house by a different door

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from the one which they entered and so take the luck of the house with them.” (Evans 1939, 216). Doors not only permit access and admit light, but perform a variety of other functions as well. They are especially important symbolically. In Africa, “thresholds were everywhere imbued with profound ritual connotations as spiritual boundary points” (Denyer 1978, 117). Any enclosed space, whether physical or conceptual, requires an opening: the corollary to the meaningful spatial definition of an “enclosed” space is an entrance into it [...] Throughout West Africa, all rites and rituals relating to change or transition in man’s existence occur at the entrance. “Outdooring” or naming ceremonies announcing the birth of a child, hence its entry into life, are performed at the entrance to the compound. Funerary rites take place at the compound entrance [where strangers are received]. (Prussin 1974, 199)

Throughout India, the doorway, together with the prayer room or prayer niche, and the hearth, represent the three most symbolically important components of the house, regardless of the social position of the inhabitants. It is often the only external part of the structure given any decoration or embellishment. Confirming its symbolic function is the fact that it is the doorway frame, of wood or stone, rather than the door itself, which receives most decoration, usually in the form of elaborate carving (Noble 2003, 49–50). Another indication of the symbolic significance of the doorway can be found in Burmese houses where floor boards must run across the space just inside the doorway. Otherwise whatever energy, good fortune or positive effect comes in the front door simply goes back out, or flows out of the house through the back door (Nwe 2003, 232). This is an example of a modification of the basic Chinese Feng Shui principle. Traditional Greek dwelling house doors also are a center of ritual and spiritual activity and require close attention: Following the weekly and sometimes daily offering of incense to the icons, the incense is placed in front of the door to finish burning. The vertical column of smoke is thought to block any evil from entering the house. Thus the entrance and the house interior are provided constant spiritual protection. (Pavlides and Hesser 1989, 288)

In many dwellings located in the Himalayas, in which the upper story provides the residence and a lower story shelters animals, entry to the living level is by means of ladders (Pommaret-Imaeda

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1980, 253), and an open trapdoor. Such an arrangement obviates the need for an external stairway, which could be a feature weakening household security. It also allows heat from the animal quarters to flow upward, supplementing the poor heating facilities of the upper story, a desirable feature during the long, bitterly cold winters of the mountain altitudes (Denwood 1971, 26). In tropical areas, logs are often cut with primitive steps or at least toe holds to permit access to a structure built above ground. Such a location allows the building and its contents to enjoy some freedom from ground damp with its variety of small animals and crawling insects (Figure 19-3). Another significant function of doors is to restrict passage, thereby ensuring or enhancing privacy. The issue of privacy is double-edged. A closed door enhances privacy by restricting access, but an open door invites entry – visual if not physical. The traditional rural dwelling in parts of Punjab State, India consists of four spaces arranged in a row perpendicular to the street or road. Only the first room serves as a social space. It has two doors, one to

19-3. A log ladder provides access to a farmstead granary raised on short poles to discourage small vermin, in a Colorado Indian settlement, near Guayaquil, Ecuador (photo by author, 1970).

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the street and the other to the rest of the house “positioned in such a manner that direct view into the inner part of the house from the street was completely blocked. The primary function of [this room] was to provide parda (privacy) to the private space in the house.” As Singh (2004, 78) picturesquely puts it “in a way [this first room] served as a ghungat (veil on the face of a woman) for the house as both perform the same function.” Doors not only assure privacy, they provide security and protection, but at the same time the doorway offering entry into a dwelling is a point of potential weakness and danger. In a large number of European and European-derived dwellings with gable or hipped roofs, the doors usually occupy a position on an eave side of the structure. A similar process has been described for extensions of early houses, in what has been termed the New Mexican Hispanic modular building tradition: As the growth of the family required, and as resources allowed, additional rooms were added. Each new room was essentially like the first, a separate module with its own exterior door [...] While each room typically had a door to the outside, there were not always interior connecting doors. Movement from room to room often occurred, instead, outside the house. The narrow porches frequently added after 1880 sheltered this exterior circulation. (Wilson, C. 1991, 88)

Having the door on an eave side of a gable-roofed building could create considerable inconvenience in areas of high rainfall, and especially in areas of high snowfall. Porches were expensive to build. The pent roof, a device designed in Europe, helped, but it was awkward and also expensive to build, and only partially effective. Placing the stove adjacent to the door served two purposes. First, this allowed the source of heat to be where heat was most needed – near the site of the greatest potential loss of heat, i.e. the door. Second, placing the stove near the door reduced not only the distance required to carry heavy fire wood, but also the accompanying debris tracked into the cabin (Wilson, M. 1984, 34). The most carefully studied western log cabin is that which has been given the designation of “Rocky Mountain cabin.” Four chief characteristics or features differentiate it from eastern log cabins: a roof pitch lower than 45 degrees; heating by means of a stove rather than from a fireplace; a projecting, front-facing gable roof; and an offcentered door on the gable-end wall. The forward extension of the roof provides additional semi-sheltered living space, which resulted in a seasonal alteration of room uses (Wilson, M. 1984, 33). Roger Welsch (1980, 319), for example, notes that some early log builders on the Great Plains solved the problem of scarcity of logs

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by shifting the door to the gable. Only about 10% of sod houses that Welsch was able to study closely had doors on the gable, however. Throughout the Muslim world, entrance doors are arranged to guard privacy and shield the house’s womenfolk. In Iraq, entry doors lead into a small lobby with a blank wall facing the doors. Entry to the house itself requires a right angle turn. Thus, line of sight from the street, as well as casual entry, is blocked and controlled (Bennett 1968, 86). A similar control feature exists in Muslim rural dwellings in India. In addition to other functions, doors frequently perform an important symbolic function: For example, the doorways of those who have returned from the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, are brightly decorated with an abundance of inscriptions, folk motifs and images of places and things seen on the journey. In Muslim East Africa, the elaborate wooden doors of Swahili houses, with their heavy brass locks and chains, are considered such an important feature that the construction of a new house begins with the door. (Petherbridge 1978, 197)

In coastal Alaska and Canada, houses had intricately carved clan totem poles attached to the façade. The lowest totem, a symbolic representation of the clan animal, contained an oval hole, which was the entrance to the dwelling (Figure 19-4). Passing through the pole opening, one symbolically entered the clan by passing through the representation of the clan animal. What could be more dramatic or carry such a powerful message? After contact with explorers and missionaries, the totem door was first supplemented and then replaced by a European-style door. As missionary zeal spread, totem poles were often cut down, destroying a key element of native culture. Extended severe climatic conditions, whether it be regularity of tropical downpours, or the continual cold of Arctic winters, prompt a response in traditional as well as modern building. Such adaptations often involve the entryway, examples of which still exist in a series of wider doorways designed by Robert Adam facing Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. In the British Caribbean, where rainfall is frequent and heavy, a unique traditional building feature, none of which now remains, unfortunately, was the development of sedan porches (Crain 1994, 81). The structure was a small, elevated porch completely walled and roofed to permit the sedan chair to be drawn up tightly. The porches were immediately adjacent to the dwelling’s front entry.

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19-4. Entrance to the Pacific Northwest Coast tribal house was through the totem pole, symbolizing entrance into the tribe itself. The house is reconstructed in the Totem Bight State Historical Park, Ketchikan, AK (photo by author, 2001).

J.R. Groome (1964, 33) calls attention to the fact that similar roadside porches are documented from earlier England. Groome also suggests that the Caribbean sedan porch additionally may have been a device to deflect tradewind-driven rain from the dwelling entrance. At the same time, the porch’s lateral doors could provide a “reasonable form of air conditioning.” By contrast, in Polar igloos, air conditioning is certainly no problem, but the bitter and constantly cold temperatures in winter must be addressed. This is effectively solved by building an entrance tunnel at a lower level than the floor of the igloo. This serves as a cold air trap. A similar device is used in areas where the winter season dwelling is a partially excavated structure (Langdon 2002, 34, 50, 70–1). All this simply reflects how important traditional and architectural entry structures are for an understanding of the entire vernacular development, and how significant knowledge of such small features is for the academic student or observer.

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~ 20 ~ Openings: Windows Windows offer an illustration of the differing responses of diverse groups to what are similar environmental challenges. Rural dwellings in the Rhône Valley, commonly aligned east–west, typically have no doors and few or no windows on their north walls, in order to provide warmth, shelter, and protection from the mistral, which sweeps down the valley with great force and velocity. “On occasion the mistral has delayed trains, hindered aviation, turned over carts, and torn off roof tiles. The negative effects of this wind on the human nervous system are part of regional folklore” (Gade 1978, 127–9, 142). Another instance of the effect of the environment on domestic building is found in Sikkim, where houses lack both doors and windows on south and west walls which face the bitter cold and brutally driven storms of winter’s southwesterly winds (Gorer 1967, 63). Intense heat and burning sun provide environment challenges of a quite different sort. In Mediterranean summer climates, these conditions are met by allowing only a few narrow windows in the outside walls of traditional North African houses; wide windows framed with moveable dark shutters in Italy or Spain; and “with wide surfaces of glass lined with light shades as in the Californian ranch houses” (Gottmann 1957, 19). Generally speaking, the number of windows in a dwelling of the middle or higher latitudes is related to the size of the structure and especially the number of its rooms, because a source of light was required in each room (Lebreton 1982, 440). The word window is derived from an Old Norse term, vindauga, which meant “wind eye” (Stewart 1972, 29), a reference to glass-less window openings. The Greek word for window is parathyron, which translated literally means “beside the door.” In this position, the opening let light into the dwelling when the door was closed. It also provided security for the householder who could see who was at the door before opening it (Doumas 1983, 50). A window thus has a strong European history, even more so because the use of glass was essentially a Western characteristic. Elsewhere, window openings were unglazed, and closed only by shutters, which

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of course negated one of the most important functions of the window, the transmission of light into the interior. Individuals sleeping in upper stories or enclosed lofts of dwellings frequently suffered because no windows had been provided for ventilation, smoke exhaustion, and light entry. Sleeping in lofts, where inclined ceilings were unsuited for most other uses, provided the name “dormer” window, derived from the Latin dormitorium or sleeping place (Breckon and Parker 1991, 74). When glass first began to be used, the window was the casement type that opened inward, and the common outside placement of the shutters was continued. Later on, when sash windows replaced casement, the function of shutters shifted to control not just light but ventilation as well. The Dutch seem to have been among the more innovative people in perfecting the window, as demonstrated in Hudson Valley dwellings. Their earliest windows consisted of small, fixed panes of leaded glass on one part, with an opening of equal size on the other, which was closed by a heavy wooden shutter (Figure 20-1). By this means, they added a fixed-casement type to the paneless and shuttered window opening (Sinclair 2006, 2, and insert by John Stevens in the same issue).

20-1. Sketches of Dutch windows, called bolkozijn, that survive in the Hudson Valley, NY (courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture).

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In addition to providing light and ventilation, window openings may have several other functions, especially the expelling of smoke. In Guyana, a window-shutter-shelf combination not only performed privacy and ventilation functions, it also offered a place to hold blocks of ice. Air from the trade winds thus could be easily cooled as it penetrated into the room interior after: ice was brought from the American lakes to Guyana and stored in sawdust or sand until sold. It is easy to imagine that only the richer house owners could afford such luxury: the cooler, however, was built into the fabric of quite poor houses. (Westmaas 1970, 149)

The standard classification of glass-window types is based on the method of their opening, referring mostly to Western usage and as much to formal structures as to traditional buildings (Harrison, H.S. 1973, 266). The earliest glass windows usually consisted of very small, diamond-shaped panes, and were entirely fixed in place (Figure 20-2). The slanting edges of the diamond shape permitted rainwater to run off more quickly than from horizontal mullions (Addison 1986, 21), and the diamond-shaped panes allowed even the smallest pieces of the expensive glass to be used along the window edges (Brown, R.J. 1982, 272). These early fixed windows were gradually replaced by casement types, in their turn replaced by sash windows (Wilson, K.M. 1976), which were invented in continental Europe, probably in the Netherlands or Belgium. The word sash is derived from the French, chassis, meaning frame (Briggs 1932, 88). In the earliest ones the upper sash was fixed. Not until the late 17th century did both upper and lower parts move (Cook 1971, 44). Sliding sash windows normally move vertically. However, in the UK, in an area including Humberside and Lancashire but centered in Yorkshire, those called “Yorkshire windows” slide horizontally (Barley 1987, 263). Another unusual window treatment occurs to the west, in Cumbria, where most windows are large, squarish, and usually with vertical sliding sashes. However, some houses have an ingenious variation in which the top half pivots horizontally and the bottom half is fixed (Penoyre and Penoyre 1978, 134, 143). Two additional factors proved to be considerable obstacles to the early use of glass. The first was its expense of production, and the other was the imposition of taxes on its use. Initially, the manufacture of glass presented such severe difficulties that only extremely small panes could be secured. Early casement windows could only be made by embedding dozens of small panes in surrounding frames of soft lead. Even with the eventual production of larger sheets,

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20-2. The four most often encountered window types: fixed, casement, double/ single hung sash, and sliding sash (based upon Harrison, 1973). glass windows were so highly prized that a house owner would often take them with him when he moved and it was not uncommon for windows to be bequeathed in wills. Although plate glass, rolled into larger panels was first produced at St. Helens in Lancashire in 1773, it was not until the abolition of taxes and duties in the mid-19th century that it began to come into widespread use. (Breckon and Parker 1991, 112)

Finally, the use of window glass in the UK: was sharply constrained in poorer dwellings by a series of Government taxes and excise levies. The levy on glass itself was first imposed in 1695

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and it continued with the occasional let up for 150 years. In the early 1800s it could amount to as much as twice the actual production cost of the glass itself. Even more damaging to the development of light and airy houses was the notorious window tax, also introduced at the end of the 17th century, and not repealed until 1851. The amount of tax paid depended on the number of windows in the house, and between 1746 and 1808 window taxes were increased six times. The Treasury coffers may have been swelled, but the levies and taxes kept the less well-off in continuing dark and ill-ventilated houses. (Breckon and Parker 1991, 113)

* * * Before glass, a variety of other materials were pressed into service with generally unsuccessful results. Paper was often oiled to make it more translucent. It was widely employed in the Orient (Yang 1965, 40), and in eastern Europe (Lodge 1936, 97), as well as in frontier America. Oiled linen cloth tacked to a light wooden frame was also favored early on (Brown, R.J. 1986, 132). In the Arctic and among the Indians of the Pacific northwest coast, fish-gut membranes were placed in small windows (Olson 1927, 25). W. Elmer Ekblaw (1927, 168) noted also that a thin section of sealskin was resorted to in windows above igloo doors. “This window lets the light in, but because it is translucent only, a peep-hole in the center is necessary to look through.” Many early stone structures only had openings reduced to glassless slits in order to reduce rain penetration and to discourage birds and other animals from entering. With the advent of glass, most windows in both stone and sod usually were set out with their wells more or less flush with the outside of the wall rather than inside. Gradually the square window opening was recessed and the sides slanted until the horizontal floor of the window was enlarged on the inside. These changes allowed more light to enter and also created a useful shelf. Splayed window openings in houses built with sod walls allowed more light to enter the dwelling than square-cut openings (Welsch 1968, 79). Interiors of early dwellings were usually quite dark and gloomy because of the lack and/or size of openings (Figure 20-3). One technique to improve lighting was to cover the interior with cheap whitewash. In tropical areas, window openings were used to remove unpleasant odors, but the size was kept small because night air was considered unhealthy (Faculty of Architecture 1978, 456–7). Decorative window surrounds occur in many societies and are especially common in Russia. In adobe dwellings in the Indian town of Bikaner, the openings in the mud walls are painted in white all around to make them appear larger (Jain and Jain 1992, 38).

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20-3. A reconstructed early Icelandic wood-framed, thatch-roofed, and stonewalled dwelling at the site of the birth of Leif Erickson. The size of the smoke hole is undoubtedly too large and the doorway perhaps too large and too finely framed. Otherwise, a thoughtful and a fitting memorial structure (photo by author, 2005).

An interior window, which functions to exert social control, is the small opening in the jamb-wall between the fireplace and the exterior door found throughout Ireland. “A person seated by the fire may observe the caller at the door” and respond accordingly (O’Danachair 1972, 88). Similarly, in India the vital breath force of a house (called prana), is considered to enter the dwelling from doors and windows placed according to Vashtu Vidya (sacred Hindu rules of architecture) direction so it will circulate around the inside perimeter. The center of a house is relatively unaffected by this energy flow. This may be another reason why houses in India are often constructed around an open courtyard (Pegrum 2000, 49). This explanation accords nicely with the more pragmatic and scientific rationale that central courtyards regulate the heating and cooling of the dwelling and provide a secure and private open space for work, sleeping, socializing, and children’s play. Many traditional windows and openings have important religious associations. The January 2006 issue of the Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture Society Newsletter contains a separate insert by John R. Stevens which identifies several examples of cross windows in early Dutch houses in the Hudson Valley of New York State.

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One door and one window often are the minimum in a structure. On the American prairies, a dwelling, whether a dugout, sod house, log house, or claim shanty, had to have these in order to meet the requirements of the Homestead Act. Perhaps the most significant relationship between inhabitants and their shelter is the methods by which death – and especially disposal of the corpse – is managed. The Greeks, for example, employ a symbolic act to mark the removal of a body from the dwelling by smashing a plate outside the door. The act prevents death from returning (Pavlides and Hesser 1989, 289). The vast number of North American aboriginal tribes ensures that procedures to remove corpses, to purify dwellings polluted by death, and the steps taken to avoid deleterious spirits will vary, but surprising similarities exist. Some examples from various parts of the continent are cited below to illustrate just how widely spread are the customs and practices. One North American tribal society, the Navajo, utilized the following method of extracting a dead body from the confines of a dwelling. “The practice was to board up all windows and doors, and make a new opening in the north wall,” through which the body was removed. “In some cases bodies were buried within the home in which they had died and the structures were abandoned, pulled down, or, less frequently, burned” (Cunningham 1989, 198). Abandonment of Navajo hogans may occur for a variety of other reasons, including bad luck or quarreling, lightning strikes, storm damage or flooding, a bear rubbing against it, or infestation of lice or bedbugs (Jett 1980, 117). Among the Menomini people in the northern Midwest, after viewing and wake ceremonies (to use English-language terms) the body was removed through a hole made in the rear of the wigwam. “This is done in order to confuse the ghost, so that it cannot follow the party which carries the corpse to the grave.” After burial a package containing new clothes, including a lock of the deceased’s hair, is kept in the dwelling for at least a year. “The bundle receives offerings of food and tobacco from time to time, and is spoken of as if it were the deceased, still alive” (Skinner 1921, 79). Interring bodies within the dwelling is a practice widely encountered in traditional societies (Yarrow, 1880, 14–15). Labelle Prussin (1976, 11) calls attention to both early and late accounts which “made reference to the non- and pre-Islamic Hausa custom of house burial,” and even in 1974 “the deceased are often interred in the floor of the house and the site is marked on the adjacent wall by an embedded china plate” (Vlach 1977a, 163). Fiji islanders do not inter bodies inside dwellings, but they do recognize the significance of sites where a death or funeral has occurred:

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The scene of the death is thus occupied for a given period, sometimes as long as one hundred nights or as short as four nights. It is believed that the spirit of the departed would be unlikely to linger in the house and unable to kill another victim if it finds its death spot being occupied by another body. (Ravuvu 1983, 65, 67)

* * * The present book is not the place for an extended discussion of the practices that accompanied disposal of a corpse, except as these may have affected vernacular dwellings. The subject, nevertheless, is a fascinating one that deserves a carefully researched volume of its own. However, two traditional architectural features found in the US, and probably elsewhere, should be mentioned here: the gruft and the grave house. Grufts in Kansas have been documented by John G. Brown (1994, 41), who describes one as “a small brick building that contains an altar for meditation and an underground crypt located under two locked iron doors that sit flush with the floor.” The gruft is an import from German communities in Russia and Germany (perhaps Mennonites). Virtually nothing else has been written about this feature. The grave house, usually a small, wooden, gable-roofed structure, often with lattice-work walls, appears to be a worldwide phenomenon (Ball, D.B. 1977, 30; Jeane 1982, 20–1), with two centers of occurrence in the US: Tennessee (Ball, D.B. 1977; Cantrell 1981; Fielder 1982) and Louisiana (Sexton 1991; Framton 1995), although little geographic research has been given to this architectural feature. In 1978 Gregory Jeane (1978, 895) summed up this hiatus: So little has been done toward classifying the American cemetery landscape that the process seems a labyrinth. There are interesting forays into the unusual; while of value, they only whet the appetite. Seldom is an explanation offered for the origin or distribution of particular burial practices and many are treated as unique. In reality, certain practices are essentially the same. For example, the grave house (shelter) has many variants among differing cultures, but performs the same function – protection of the corpse.

Further examination of links of US grave houses to European origins, especially Scottish, English, and Slavic (particularly Russian) is needed. A connection to Amerindian origins (although dismissed by Ball, D.B. 1977) also might be profitably studied, given the Amerindians’ widespread use of the grave house (Jordan 1980b, 250; Skinner 1921, 80). Gregory Jeane (1989, 171) has suggested casting the research net even more widely to identify connections for this

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fascinating structure. Lynwood Montell (1993, 117) indicates that grave houses in the Upper Cumberland plateau of Kentucky began to appear around 1840 and that three cultural sources – European, African, and American Indian – may have influenced the use and distribution of these structures. Another small religious building with a marked ethnic connection occurs in the Door County peninsula, Wisconsin. Farmsteads in the Belgian community contain small, family-size chapels prominently situated (Figure 20-4). Just large enough for two or three people to worship, the chapel reflects the strong Roman Catholic heritage of these people. The chapels, which may be frame or stone, measure only about six feet long by four feet wide, and are universally covered by a gable roof of shingles or metal. The single door is in the gable, and the diminutive altar and figure of the Virgin rest against the opposite gable wall. The combination of distinctively decorated brick houses, elongated log barn, limestone summer kitchen with bake oven extension, unusual privy location, and the tiny chapel unmistakably mark the WisconsinBelgian (Walloon) homestead. (Noble 2000, 356)

A

B 20-4. These tiny chapels originally were built to serve only family members. A – On a Walloon farmstead in the Door County peninsula, WI, 1980. B – In a small village at Cloppenburg, Germany (photos by author, 1982).

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Openings: Windows

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As societies move toward more “modern” approaches to living and away from traditional practices, some earlier functions of dwellings often change. This may be clearly seen in American usages connected with death. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, death occurred in the dwelling most often. Consequently, viewing, wakes, and funerals took place there. A large mourning wreath, placed on the front door of the house, was the sign that a death had occurred, and necessary activities were taking place within. Today, death happens more and more outside the home and a funeral parlor or funeral home becomes the locus of activity. Windows and doors (for which see previous chapter) are necessary features of all domestic structures – at least the openings are. The higher the standard of living, the larger and greater the number of openings, and the more these openings can be blocked and closed easily at required times. Both doors and windows are apt to have symbolic importance. As a result they frequently are highly decorated and elaborately adorned. The door is especially important. It serves not only as the entrance for householders to the outside world, but also at the same time, it admits non-family members into the confined sanctum of the dwelling. A critical function of reception and acceptance is thus fulfilled.

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~ 21 ~ Seasonal Temperatures, Heating and Smoke and Summer Kitchens Traditional structures exist in all temperature environments. Ideally, structures must permit some adjustment for heating and/or cooling. However, the strategies to attain this adaptation vary from place to place. Places with significant rainy seasons, or long, cold winters require further adaptations as well. Warm, dry weather encourages cooking in the open, but a more severe climate needs special thought and action for food preparation. Erecting a kitchen separate from the main dwelling means extra cost and labor, and may involve the bothersome daily transport of food in all kinds of weather. Keeping a hearth within the dwelling does require constant and careful attention, but because it solved two problems simultaneously – space heating and food preparation – it was an early solution that was widely adopted in cooler climates. For example, William Weaver (1986, 254) notes that the typical dwelling in southern Germany during the Middle Ages had a hearth usually dug a little below floor level. Elsewhere, the central hearth was usually at floor level on bare earth. As a final step in evolution, raising the central open hearth up on a waist-high foundation, decreased “stooped” labor significantly, though did little to reduce or exhaust smoke from the dwelling. However, it did consume less wood for fuel than did fires at ground or underground level (Baumgarten 1980, 140). A common feature of later Middle Age German houses (Friesen 1991, 98), the raised hearth was also introduced to Pennsylvania by some German settlers in the 18th century (McCleary 1997, 263). Claes Corlin (1979, 90) mentions oblong, similarly elevated, clay hearths used in ethnic Tibetan houses in a village in northwestern Yunnan, China. Elevated hearths no doubt occur in many other ethnic communities. In a different way, heat and cold influenced the form and use of the Turkish traditional house. Because of significant summer and winter

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21-1. A typical rural Turkish house of an affluent family, near Sultanhani. The remains of the earlier house are to the right (photo by author, 1998).

temperature differences, approaches to housing had to be flexible. In many parts of Anatolia people live in different structures at different times of the year, but many houses are constructed to accommodate the temperatures of both seasons (Figure 21-1). In these houses, to capitalize on cooling ventilation, summer-use rooms were located at structure corners and in single files with large windows; often projecting from the wall, they had thin partitions, were high ceilinged, and of large dimensions. In the same dwellings, to combat winter winds and low temperatures, some rooms were interior, situated on upper floors, and had thick, insulating construction and low ceilings (Kucukerman 1988, 39–40). Perhaps reflecting Turkish influences, seasonal shifts of occupancy within the same traditional dwelling also occurred in the mountainous areas of Bulgaria (Megas 1951, 69). The kasta, a room with its own small hearth, located on the lower level of two-story rural dwellings, sheltered the family during the winter. The rest of the lower level was used throughout the year for the stabling of the family’s cattle, providing additional warmth throughout the winter. A similar seasonal retreat is achieved in cliffside dwellings in Nuristan, Afghanistan, where houses also rise two stories, with

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the lower space used for storage and animal stabling. The upper, inhabited story has two parts, consisting of semi-open front rooms used intensively in summer, and one or two semi-excavated rear rooms occupied in winter and heated by a small, central fire (Hallett and Samizay 1975, 69). R.T. Mason (1969, 76), speaking of peasant farmers in the English Weald from the 15th century, observed that smoke “was a long-term nuisance with which the Wealden peasant lived from generation to generation for at least three hundred years.” Respiratory diseases (Dunham 1987, 18) and chronic eye infection contributed to poor health and the short life expectancies common in traditional societies. Smoke holes, chimneys, and other exits for smoke eventually alleviated much of the problem. Nevertheless, smoky features had remarkable tenacity – an open central fire could be found in the UK as late as 1850. The Amerindian groups on the Great Plains solved the smoke problem by tilting their entire dwelling. The tipi frame was erected so that a tilted cone was created, more perpendicular in the back and more sloping in the front. By tilting the structure this way, the smoke opening at the top of the cone could be fashioned to avoid: a more or less centrally positioned fire pit. Smoke rose directly to the opening at the top, whose size could be altered by opening or closing two smoke flaps or “ears,” each attached to a long pole outside the tipi. (Noble 1984, 1:70)

Much earlier, in many societies the benefit of using smoke to process and preserve food had been recognized. Additionally, the accumulated smoke helped to drive away pesky insects and the annoying strong odors of the animal quarters of housebarns (Seebohm 1952, 74). As early as the Jomon period in Japan (before about 400 BC), “a shelf was suspended over the hearth so that fish and meat could be dried and preserved; it also served to disperse the warm air, spreading heat throughout the room” (Inaba and Nakayama 2000, 16). The initial successful attempt in Europe to control smoke was the use of the smoke hole, an opening in the roof to permit the rising smoke to exit quickly. Without a chimney to create a draft, however, the smoke hole was not very effective. Because of the ever-present danger of fire in houses with thatch, the external opening of the smoke hole might be contained in a rough, sod structure, the forerunner of the true chimney (Gailey 1984, 113). In the poorer houses a cask or barrel with ends knocked out might be placed over the smoke hole to improve the draft (Wood 1965, 277). In the Chitral district of the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Pakistan,

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21-2. Discarded pueblo cooking pots with burned-through bottoms were commonly placed on rooftop openings to provide better draft for interior cooking fires by Pueblo Indians (sketch by M. Margaret Geib, after V. Mindeleff, 1891).

dwellings are built with a wooden architectural lantern covered over with straw and mud, to exhaust smoke and admit light. The whole construction gives a bulging appearance to the roofline when viewed from the outside (ud-Din 1984, 73). Residents of the Hopi Indian dwellings of the early southwestern US solved the problem by using burned-out cooking pots (Figure 21-2). In villages in England, because of the cost of land, two-story structures were desirable, and in the Weald of southern England, where prosperity encouraged the building of substantial two-story houses throughout the region (Harding 1990), a high smoke bay was often incorporated within the dwelling (Harris 1987, 20). In the Weald, two other factors encouraged the building of smoke bays. One was an increase in population needing housing in the very late 16th and the turn of the 17th century (Chatwin 1996, 11). The other was the rise of a “more private lifestyle which was becoming the norm among yeomen. This meant that labourers who had previously been lodged in the farmhouse now had to find accommodations elsewhere.” Twenty smoke bay houses survive, according to a map in Diana Chatwin (1996, 10). From around 1550 new houses were built with a smoke bay rather than the earlier open hall [...] The smoke bay was not a sudden innovation,

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but was a natural progression from the late open halls which had a suspended upper floor over one hall bay and the other open to the roof [...] The smoke bay could be either at the end of the house, when the apex of the gable end was left open for the smoke to escape, or in the middle of the building, in which case there would have been a louvre for the smoke [...] Smoke bays were obviously found to be an efficient and satisfactory means of heating as many of them were not replaced by brick stacks until well into the 18th century. (Chatwin 1996, 41–3)

John Pilling (1993, 38) argues, “the introduction of the chimney to modest houses represents the greatest single advance in living conditions in the sixteenth century,” at least in England. “Their construction was often undertaken simultaneously with the insertion of an upper storey and other improvements.” Fastening outside clay chimneys to the walls by means of wooden collars often braced by posts was reported by Frederick Nichols (1957, 120), who noted them to be especially common in coastal Georgia. Patricia Cooper and Mark Reinberger (2008, 28) report a different method of bringing two side boards into the loft and securing log chimneys with pegs in Georgia’s Piedmont. “In case of a chimney fire, the pegs inside could be knocked out and the whole chimney pulled away from the house.” Early British settlers in New Zealand solved the problem of removal of the chimney for fire protection, yet still keeping it close enough to the dwelling interior so it could be fed and the heat retained inside, by erecting a strange-looking, massive chimney with a roof sloping away from the dwelling. It was not tilted as the Maryland ones were, but its design led fire sparks and smoke away (Salmond 1986, 54, 66). From the side, the form of these chimneys look, to some non-Kiwis, like giant enclosed or boxed stairways, while to others they look like pipe organs, especially when faced by corrugated metal sheets, or even giant harps. An important consequence of the popularization of the brick chimney was to encourage the development of the black kitchen dwelling in east and central Europe. The name comes from the fact that the centrally located kitchen is really a walk-in hearth surrounded by massive brick and mud walls, and provided with a tall tapering chimney on which soot collects. Cooking is done within this room, although other food preparation and cleanup may be accomplished in an adjoining room. Heat is provided to the rest of the house both by radiation from the walls and from low vents, which open into surrounding rooms. The upper reaches of the chimney/room are used for smoking and curing meats.

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Another feature found in Piedmont North Carolina to exhaust both heat and smoke from interior cooking areas has been termed the “kitchen flue.” “A small tower with pyramidal or gable roof and central chimney attached to the kitchen ells of many farmhouses,” it is locally believed to be of German origin, although the history of transfer is only speculative (Bisher and Southern 2003, 476). Is it possible that this feature could be a derivation of the German black kitchen? No examples of black kitchens are known from the North Carolina Piedmont. Clearly some additional research needs to be done on this intriguing question. Within the structure, in addition to the adoption of the black kitchen in various places, the effect of heating decided the placement of rooms. In those areas where the winter season is long and severe, kitchens, or other rooms in which cooking is done or fires kept, tend to be on the north side of buildings in the northern hemisphere (Bemis and Burchard 1933, 264), and on the south side in the southern hemisphere (Metson 1945, 359). Moving food preparation outside had the additional benefits – beyond the ensuring of cooler temperatures in the house – of reducing fire risk for part of the year, removing cooking and other food preparation odors, litter and clutter from the main structure, and reducing flies and bug infestation (Butterfield and Ledohowski 1984, 116). After summer cooking and fall butchering, the unheated “summer kitchen served as a walk-in refrigerator until spring” (Bobbitt 1989, 233). Joseph Height (1972, 120) also links the summer kitchen to German Mennonite colonists in Russia. He provides a “typical plan of a colonist farmstead.” I was able to find several summer kitchens in 21 Mennonite villages in Manitoba in the 1980s (Noble 1992, 279). Amos Long Jr. (1965, 10–19) offers a different explanation for the development of summer kitchens among the Germans in Pennsylvania. He suggests that use as a summer kitchen was a stage in the life of original, small dwellings which evolved as families grew and were not purpose-built buildings. Similarly converted structures can be found in many parts of Europe. In stone or brick summer kitchens, the privy in many cases will be seen snuggling up to the bakeoven to gain warmth in the winter season (Figure 21-3). Such a combination is especially true in the colder, more northerly locations in both Europe and North America. In Canada, summer kitchens have been documented north of the city of Winnipeg and west of Lake Winnipeg in areas settled by Ukrainians (Ledohowski and Butterfield 1983, 90), and also by

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21-3. A village summer kitchen with bakeoven and privy attached, near Avranches, France (photo by author, 1992).

Butterfield and Ledohowski (1984, 115) in extreme southeastern Manitoba by German-Russian immigrants, thereby strengthening the Slavic origin thesis: The “Somma Kjaeck” or summer kitchen, was one to the earliest outbuildings to appear in the farmyard. They were a common feature in the yards of the Mennonite villages in Russia and as soon as the Mennonites became established in Manitoba they began to appear here as well.

Behind and to one side of the house, the structure had a convenient location. Detached or summer kitchens are reported among Norwegian settlers in Texas, although the feature apparently is not found in Norway (Breisch 1994, 99). They also are documented by Claire Selkurt (1993) for 19th-century Norwegian settlements in Rock County, Wisconsin. However, the same designation is used by this author to

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also refer to later-built, attached rooms used as kitchens to replace the rough pioneer hearth of original log houses. Although stone summer kitchens with attached stone bakeovens are a familiar sight on the Belgian farmsteads of the Door County peninsula, Wisconsin (Figure 21-4), in Flanders a communal bakeoven usually stood by itself, conveniently situated at a close distance to several houses. Dispersed rural settlement and the harsher winter climate in Wisconsin made the communal use of ovens impractical. Another difference is in the construction materials. In the old country, brick was used consistently for the fire/baking chamber and for the platform upon which it rested. Among Wisconsin Belgians, local limestone was used since it was more readily available and less expensive than large quantities of brick. (Laatsch and Calkins 1992, 204)

Summer kitchens, because of their detached location, often are not considered to be integral components of traditional dwellings, but, of course, they are!

21-4. A summer kitchen in the Belgian settlement of Door County, WI. A bakeoven constructed of limestone slabs is accessed from within the summer kitchen. Note the privy tucked in the corner formed by the bakeoven and the kitchen where it can take advantage of the warmth on cold winter days (photo by author, 1980).

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* * * To escape the generation of heat was not the only impetus to locating the cooking place outside the dwelling. In most traditional communities, especially tribal societies, males have social benefits not available to females, even to the point of enjoying male-only communal spaces and structures. Among the Fang in West Africa, the council house was such a male retreat, but cooking huts (nda-kisin) were the strongly defended women’s sanctuaries. James Fernandez (1977, 13) calls to mind an old tribal tale: Man and wife built one house to live in together. But life became so unbearable that man abandoned woman to her house and built the aba [council house] in which he might dwell with other men. Men and women can only live together by living apart. So to this day if a man’s presence should bother a woman, she may always smoke the fire and drive him out with eyes smarting. She says: Go to your council house you bother me. The kisin is women’s sanctuary and she means to defend it.

In tropical areas, as much cooking as possible is done outdoors because of the heat generated, the ease of smoke dissipation, and the lower risk of fire. At the same time outdoor cooking must deal with frequent, and often heavy, rainfall. The West Indian cottage, which occurs throughout the Caribbean except in Cuba and Puerto Rico, is the traditional house form introduced by European planters, and gradually modified by them, their indentured laborers, and African slaves. The most logical origin for the West Indian hip-roofed cottage is in the circum-English Channel area. From here, and particularly in the years 1625–1700 when the greatest numbers of indentured laborers were brought to the Indies, very likely came the notion that the newly popular hip-roofed cottage was the proper type of dwelling to build. (Doran 1962, 104)

However, because “climatic differences in the West Indies rendered the internal fireplace unsuitable, most cooking was done in a detached shed, built for the purpose,” to protect the house from odor, smoke, heat, and the danger of fire (Edwards 1980, 312). Beginning in the 1920s, kerosene stoves largely reduced these problems, so that the kitchen could be attached at a rear downwind corner of the dwelling (Figure 21-5). Such a location, taking advantage of the trade winds, increased convenience and avoided the nuisance of rainy season walks previously required for cooking. The house was reoriented often,

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21-5. A house typical of traditional dwellings of the Western Caribbean. The attached shed-roofed kitchen dating from the 1920s is positioned on the corner away from the prevailing trade winds (sketch by author, based on Edwards, 1980).

requiring changing of other room functions. Slowly, the dwelling expanded: an encircling porch could be added and a door opened directly into the kitchen (Edwards 1980, 323). The range of solutions adopted to solve the problem of kitchen design and location is fascinatingly long as well as impressively inventive. As construction skills advanced, the kitchen location also slowly advanced, right back into the newer structures, the location from which it had originally come. The control of fire was one of humankind’s most significant accomplishments. To be able to provide warmth to dwellings, to cook food so that germs and bacteria began to lose some of their power over humans, to light up, even poorly, some of the darkness that enshrouded people – all came from that world-changing event.

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~ 22 ~ Conserving Heat, Cooling and Ventilation For traditional buildings in the tropics, the height of the ceiling, or even its existence at all, often provides an explanation of its temperatureregulating function. If it is very high or lacking altogether, the feature allows hot air to rise until collected near the roof. If it is lower, its function is to conserve heat. G.J. Afolabi Ojo (1976, 17) observed that the Yoruba constructed a lower ceiling in order to deal with the lower temperatures of nighttime, particularly during harmattan season. Russian settlers in Alaska were faced with a different situation. To combat much longer cold periods, they needed to insulate dwellings, which they did by placing a filling of sand between ground-floor ceilings and the floor of the upper story of log houses. Only a solid log or stone house could bear such weight. Another device for conserving heat during the cold season was the bed box, a small built-in cubicle of wood closed by curtains or even wooden doors (O’Danachair 1956, 26; Walton 1961). Its warmth, as well as the long-held idea that night air was unhealthy, encouraged the use of bed boxes in northwestern Europe and colonial North America (Stevens, J.R. 2005, 97–8). In northwestern Ireland, a bed outshot or a wall niche, usually conveniently close to the gable-wall hearth (Figure 22-1), partially served the same function (Evans, E.E. 1940; McCourt 1956; O’Danachair 1956a and b; Lucas 1970; Brannon 1983). The bed outshot, a large alcove or recess projecting outward from the kitchen area, benefited from close proximity to heat from the dwelling’s hearth. Originally accommodating a bed, the outshot today has “usually been blocked up or concealed by furniture.” In the Outer Hebrides: were boot-shaped cells, that went endways into the wall, decreasing in height as they went inwards. There was usually one opposite to the hearth, and where there was one on each side of the fire, the house was considered well supplied. If there were more in the family than these beds would hold, they lay in a corner upon the floor, railed in by a plank on edge. (Thomas 1867, 159)

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22-1. Cottage with bed outshot, Ulster Folk Park, Northern Ireland. The outshot extends outward from the kitchen area (photo by author, 1999).

The bed outshot is associated with early houses from western Scandinavia, through the Low Countries, to the British Isles, with the largest number documented in northwestern Ireland and western Scotland (Aalen et al. 1997, 150). In these latter areas, the bed outshot also appears most closely associated with the two-room house type which dominates there. Furthermore, Desmond McCourt (1973) observes that elsewhere in Ireland, in three-room longhouses, a jamb wall creating a lobby opposite the door, and shutting off the centrally positioned hearth from drafts, appears to be a later innovation modifying the original two-room dwelling configuration. In northern China, the kitchen tends to be centrally located – the most economical location for fuel conservation and maximum heat production in the winter for the entire house. In the south, the kitchen is usually situated in the northern part of the dwelling, which accords with Feng Shui principles. In colonial New England, the central location of the kitchen or cooking place maximized heat generation within the entire house during the winter season. The location of the buttery and dairy rooms followed the reverse process. They needed to be in the coolest parts of the structure, normally in the north or east corner of the rear of the

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house (Cummings 1979, 31). As building practices matured and wealth gradually increased, permitting wider employment of servants, the kitchen frequently came to be located in the basement of the dwelling. Such location had not only the advantage of moving much of the smell, litter, and untidiness of cooking away from the polite precincts of the house, it moved the heat of cooking to the coolest part of the structure, if ventilation was adequate. In the south of the United States, from the beginning of planter settlement, basement kitchens, or even kitchens in outbuildings, were used, due to the longer, hotter summers, warmer winters, and the presence of a slave population to perform the work. Ultimately, the chimney became one of the most distinctive elements of the house, both in northwestern Europe and eastern and southern United States (Figure 22-2) – or at least one of the most critical elements of the system.

22-2. Externally placed chimneys were first adopted by British settlers in the United States primarily to reduce the summer heat in houses. Such placement also was encouraged by the warmer winter weather in Virginia. This cottage is located in the Colonial Williamsburg Outdoor Museum (photo by author, 1981).

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One of the major modifications to traditional dwellings in eastern North America was the introduction of stoves, both for food preparation and space heating. No longer was a massive hearth necessary. Small stoves and furnaces could be located in any room, provided a proper vent pipe also was installed. In attempting to date the construction of log houses in southern Indiana, Warren Roberts (1984, 8–10) discovered that “fireplaces were almost universal before about 1875.” However, in addition to the transportation costs for these often heavy items: one must remember that more is involved than heating. In most oneroom log houses, the fireplace or the stove was also used for cooking the year around. Changing from a fireplace to a stove involved buying new pots and pans as well as learning new cooking techniques. Moreover, the fireplace was an important source of light especially in the winter, and when a stove replaced the fireplace, dependable sources of light such as coal oil (kerosene) lamps had to be used regularly. All in all, then, it is easy to see why stoves were not instantly accepted as soon as they became available.

The same sort of reasoning can be applied to other locations and to other types of changes or innovations. Nevertheless, Lars Sjoberg (2003, 38) reflects: the tile stove, with its system of heating channels, was a major invention of the eighteenth century. Though its use was initially slow to spread, it came to revolutionize living conditions in a way that can scarcely be imagined. It was presumably the tile stove that created the possibility for larger windows, higher ceilings, and all-year living in more of the available rooms.

For the Acadians in French Canada, “No longer did activity need to revolve around the hearth, especially during the long winter months; now rooms could be heated separately, functions could be carried on independently” (Ennals 1992, 41). Another consequence in Acadia of this modification was the shift of the kitchen to a separate wing added to the dwelling. The kitchen became the center of life, and entry to the house came to be through the kitchen door. A similar shift occurred in the American Midwest with the popularization of the upright-andwing farmhouse (Noble 1984, 1:109). Fire has a symbolic or mystical aspect, in addition to simply providing warmth. The domestication of fire proved to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. In the process, fire gained an aura of sanctity not entirely lost today in many societies. Witness the Parsee

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fire temples in India and candles lit for the dead in Roman Catholic churches, as well as the strength of its symbolism in torch bearing at Olympic Games and the various national eternal-flame memorials. In areas with long cold winters, conserving heat within a structure is as important as creating the heat in the first place. The insulating property of construction materials is key: earth materials, even including ice, generally prove superior to wood or metal. Regardless of the particular materials used for insulation (Figure 22-3), effective construction must attempt to block any openings, even wall cracks and crevices. In the middle latitudes, the challenge is not just conserving heat in winter, but also of dissipating it in summer to ensure maximum cooling. Structures built into the earth, and those made of sod or turf, perform this function most efficiently. Adobe, which is one of the most efficient insulating materials, also functions well in desert areas. In humid areas such as the eastern Midwest of the United States, structures were often built with ventilation tunnels. These were not for the comfort of residents, but rather to keep storage cellars cool or to keep the wooden understructure of a building cool and dry enough in

22-3. Hay bales are placed around this Ohio farmhouse to provide winter insulation. A folk practice, but now using modern haying techniques (photo by author, 1986).

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order to prevent rot (Bronner 1980, 14–15). Elsewhere, the widespread use of decorative screens and fretwork was another technique widely employed to promote air circulation. It had the additional important advantage of filtering sunlight and reducing glare (Crain 1994, 5). On some shores around the Persian Gulf, there still are dwellings made of woven palm fronds and panels of latticed stems. “Summer temperatures average 32°C and with an accompanying humidity of 80% the climate is sufficiently oppressive to provide for the cross ventilation of buildings through the open fabric of the wall itself” (Gazzard 1986, 16, 19). Constructing buildings around a restricted courtyard is a widely employed strategy to reduce the effects of heating by utilizing convectional methods. The small courtyard or atrium acts as a ventilator shaft permitting hot air to be expelled as it is warmed by the sun during the day, and to allow cooler night air to sink and pass into surrounding rooms after dark. Frequently, the courtyard of a dwelling in dry climates will contain a pool or fountain and plantings of some sort: The evaporation of water and the presence of plants both raises the humidity in unpleasantly dry climates and helps to keep the air cool. In moderately humid climates such as in Algiers, on the other hand, houses do not contain courtyard pools because any increase in the already high relative humidity would cause discomfort. (Petherbridge 1978, 200)

In the Middle East, several related devices have been evolved to use the wind as an effective cooling agent. The most important of these are the wind tower, the wind catcher, the wind sail, and the porous water jar system. The wind catcher is probably the most widely distributed technique for cooling in the Middle East (Figure 22-4). A variation of the wind catcher can be found both in Kuwait (Lewcock 1978, 40) and in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. A row of openings called badgirs is placed along an upper-floor wall of the dwelling. The top of the device consists of another wooden panel, which can be lowered to reduce airflow, or dropped entirely to close off the intake during sandstorms. A simpler form, called a wind sail, occurs throughout the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman areas. These consist of four vanes of huge cloth sails erected within a wooden frame and placed atop the dwelling. Finally, in Iran and the United Arab Emirates, one encounters the wind tower. These are variations of the wind catcher, but in a much more elaborate and sophisticated form.

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Vernacular Buildings 22-4. Wind catcher cross section (drawn by Drew Frater).

Extremes of heat are rarely encountered in humid tropical regions, but humidity is uncomfortably high. The Panare of the Orinoco Plain, Venezuela construct a densely thatched, conical, communal dwelling, with a roof which reaches the ground. Only a single, small door opening and a tiny smoke hole break the combined roof-wall surface. Admirably suited to provide protection against rain in the somewhat cooler part of the year, the structure – with no cross ventilation – is uninhabitable in the hotter, longer dry season. The solution is for the group to break into small parties, seek temporary places for hunting and fishing, and to sleep in the open in hammocks (Duly 1979, 66). A traditional feature of houses in both Southeast and South Asia is the open, but roofed, verandah. Often almost surrounding the dwelling, the roofed verandah protects from most rain, even in the monsoon. Hence household activities can be carried on in the cooler verandah rather than in the interior of the house. Traditional structures are not always carefully adapted to fluctuations in seasonal temperature. For example: the prevailing type of Japanese house was designed for the neverending summer of the tropics. This would appear to be one of the

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Conserving Heat, Cooling and Ventilation 203 cultural features that the Japanese inherited from that branch of their stock which moved northward from the tropical islands of southeastern Asia. In its present-day modified form it is perfectly adjusted to the long, hot, humid summer of subtropical Japan, which is, to be sure, the dominant season in the populous southwestern part of the country. It is less well adapted, on the other hand, to the chilly, raw winters of the same section, and still less so to northern Honshu and Hokkaido with their continental winter climates. (Trewartha 1945, 185)

“The structure of a Japanese house is completely adapted to the requirements of summer. Indeed, it seems to be only a summer house” (Taut 1958, 79). What more could it be with only paper walls which slide to create wide openings, and with heat only from a charcoal brazier! The emergence of mankind from excavated dwellings raised the critical question of how to deal with greater seasonal temperature variations. In higher latitudes the problem was the extremely cold temperatures of long winters, while in the tropics it was the heat of long summers. In the middle latitudes, both conditions were the challenge. A variety of techniques, slowly perfected because of the low levels of technology in traditional societies, was the result.

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~ 23 ~ Ceremony, Spirit and Devil Houses, Feng Shui In traditional societies, “the act of constructing a house goes beyond simply providing protection against the elements. It also requires assuring spiritual protection for those who will live in the house. Supernatural powers are focused on a site in advance of any actual construction as well as upon the completed building” (Pavlides and Hesser 1989, 290). Among the Sakalava ethnic group, verandahs are a French colonial introduction commonly seen in larger centers, but “seldom found in the country, and taboo in the mahabo and doany [the royal villages] [...] which are organized and occupied self-consciously according to the ‘customs of the ancestors’ as opposed to ‘foreign customs’” (FeeleyHarvik 1980, 563, 568). Finally, masons in central and southern Utah in the second half of the 19th century undertook to disguise adobe walls, which were widely considered inferior. They plastered a rendering of fired brick “intended to be visually pleasing and socially acceptable” (Carter 1981, 69). From these and other examples, it is easily seen that traditional building may operate on different social or cultural levels. Often such differentiation reflects and is controlled by wealth and income, and heredity and power. Community leaders of whatever stripe usually occupy dwellings of better craftsmanship, superior materials, larger size, finer location, and greater permanence (see Feldman 1989 for an example). But this is not always so, and even when it is, it may be only to a slight degree. The influence of prestige and value as an effect upon house building has not been examined to any degree. Miles Richardson (1974, 40–3), however, has shown in a study of San Pedro, Colombia that seemingly similar houses can be typed using value and prestige as a basis for classification. But fashions and social pressures sometimes do shift.

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Throughout almost the first three-quarters of the 19th century, log houses in the United States, as in Norway, were considered to be rough, primitive, and lower-class housing. As a consequence, weatherboards were widely used (Figure 23-1), not only to reduce drafts, but also to mask earlier log construction (Gavin 1997, 13, 21). However, in the affluent 1960s, when many individuals were seeking a challenge to the status quo, fashions changed and social pressure relaxed. These changes encouraged persons who wished to ride the changing US fashion crest to seek out hidden log buildings, to rip off the siding, and to bask in the glow of their visual confirmation of society’s rediscovery of its heritage. Needless to say, this was not a widely pursued innovation, but a number of affluent people did so in their quest to achieve recognition as societal leaders. As a result, the log house reasserted and strengthened its position as an American icon, regardless of the ethnic background of its original builders, or that of its recent discoverers. Another instance of social pressure to adopt a currently popular fashion can be seen in the 19th-century replacement of hippedroof ends by gables in western Ireland (Aalen 1966, 53). Attractive decoration can also result from required and/or desired function (Figure 23-2). The perceived reasons for rituals associated with building were “to ensure good fortune, a comfortable and happy life and a progressive increase in wealth and reputation” (Charernsupkul and Temiyabandha 1979, 57). As a keen observer of nineteenth-century China pointed out, it was a common custom when a house was being built to hang up lanterns and beat gongs to attract luck. In self–defense the neighbours had then to do the same in order to prevent their luck being drawn away. (Quote from Nevius 1869, 176, in Freedman 1968, 9)

Lord Raglan (1964) identifies five types of traditional building rites: (1) those to ensure the building site finds favor with the gods, (2) those to consecrate it after divine approval has been secured, (3) those when the foundations are laid, (4) those carried out during the building, and (5) rites performed when building is completed, but before the structure is occupied. Selection of a suitable building site initiates the process of construction and hence in most traditional societies must be given appropriate ceremonial attention. One important consideration in Ireland was to ensure that fairy pathways not be encroached upon or blocked, and in Sweden permission had to be asked of fairies before building.

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Vernacular Buildings 23-1. Wooden clapboards have been removed on this double-pen log house, near Sharpsburg, MD. It is clear from the photo that the clapboards provided a much more effective barrier to cold than the chinked logs alone (photo by author, 1978).

A

23-2. Two quite different examples of decoration deriving from traditional architecture. A – The gable end ‘owl holes’ helped in rodent control by allowing barn owls and other small birds to enter and exit the house loft, in Holoko, Hungary (phot by author, 1991). B – The flint cobblestone wall had to be laid in mortar in precise layers and held at the corner by brick quoins to provide a rigid and secure wall. This structure is preserved in the UK Weald and Downland Museum (photo by author, 1992).

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A more widely held concern was to ensure that no malevolent forces could infect the proposed house site. This was done in Ireland by placing: two large stones in the positions where the corners of a gable would be. On top of these stones lamps were placed and lighted. If they were not interfered with after a few nights, it was considered safe enough to proceed with building on the site, but otherwise the site was not considered lucky. (Gailey 1984, 28)

Similarly, among certain tribes in central India, the prospective householder: places three stones, one on top of the other, at the four corners of the plot chosen. He also places three stones at the point where he wants to set the three middle posts in support of the ridge of the roof. Then he ties a string round the four corners of the chosen site. This is done in the evening. The next morning he returns to the site and if he finds the stones still undisturbed, he believes this to be a sign that he should build his house there. But if the stones have been disturbed and scattered by some animal stumbling over them during the night, the man goes in search of another site, believing that his family would come to harm if he were to build on that particular site. (Fuchs 1960, 26)

He very well may be right, in a land of tigers, leopards, a few lions, and other dangerous predators. The commencement of building represents one of the most important occasions in which ritual is centered. Ceremonies associated with initiating the “ground breaking” are, or were, performed in many traditional societies, but seem to be most elaborate in the southeastern corner of the great expanse of the Asian continent, from Bhutan and the Himalayas, across India to countries of Southeast Asia, including Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Indonesian islands. A quite different ceremony, practiced in Bhutan, is reported by Chime Wongmo (1985, 109): Lamas make offerings of incense and perform invocations to the local deities [...] Then, the astrologer, in the presence of the lamas and friends, performs the ceremony of digging the earth [...] helped by the head carpenter, he [the astrologer] divides the site into a chessboard of ninety squares. This is done to enable the astrologer to find the exact spot where the first digging of the earth should be done [...] The lines of the chessboard [...] form the framework for drawing the earth-owning deity

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[...] The form of the deity is not actually drawn, but by counting the lines the astrologer locates the place where the figure’s left armpit would lie. It is here that the digging should start.

The ceremonies associated with choice of location have already been discussed above. India offers a wide variety, with many ceremonies related to or controlled by the horoscope of the owner or intended resident of the dwelling. The horoscope “plays an important role in Vastic [traditional building] practices when identifying auspicious times to commence work on a house, to calculate the most favorable position for the main door or entrance, when to move in, or when to hold a house-warming ceremony.” Some occupants have been known to wait over three months to move in (Pegrum 2000, 22). Because Brahmins are considered to be the arbiters of ritual in traditional India, their regional conventions have come to have the force of social acceptance in many parts of traditional or village society. Thus, in Haryana state, Fridays and Sundays are considered the most auspicious days to begin building (Chandhoke 1990, 183). In former times, Muslims wishing to construct a house would often seek out a Hindu Brahmin priest to fix the best day to begin (Clarke 1883, 738). This practice, and other similar ones throughout South India, derives from ancient Indian rituals collectively called vaastu shastra. Hindu workmen followed the Brahmin priest’s conception of a super-human form endowed with super-energy, in order to capture this being’s power in the building structure (Figure 23-3). A different procedure was followed in central India, where “an astrologer calculates the direction in which the world serpent is lying and plants the first brick or stone to the left of that direction.” The explanation is that snakes and elephants are believed always to turn to the right. The house is thus protected from earthquakes or destruction caused by movement (Crooke 1918, 132–3). In a similar vein, “Tibetans find it necessary and auspicious to draw a swastika on the foundation of a new house. This will make the house stable and firm” (Chophel 1983, 43). Among the Savunese, the cosmology of the house also extends to providing the individual constructional components with names of human body parts. Thus, a careful listener can identify neck, head, tail, chest, ribs, snout, and cheeks in the layout of the house. Perhaps the most interesting place is the gap that exists on the thatching framework. “Its ends do not quite meet and the opening is considered the path of the ‘breath’ of the house” (Kana 1980, 228), thus confirming the living state of the dwelling. Elsewhere in Indonesia, similar attempts to humanize dwellings are encountered. In Bali:

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23-3. A large humanoid representing universal power was laid out in powder or chalk on the site prior to construction. By following this guide, which some feel is partly an image of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, accompanied by a host of other deities, structures would avoid evil spirits and enjoy the maximum protection afforded by the gods.

a house, like a human being, has a head – the family shrine; arms – the sleeping quarters and the social parlour; a navel – the courtyard; sexual organs – the gate; legs and feet – the kitchen and the granary; and anus – the pit in the backyard where the refuse is disposed of (Covarrubias 1942, 88).

Although often strongly held, local myths and beliefs, just as often have little or no basis in fact. Jules Janssen (1988, 5) points this out in a humorous poem:

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Bamboo cut with moon on wane Will ensure financial gain; But beetles bore it very soon If cut upon the waxing moon; Moreover it’s a well-known fact That ripe bamboo is less attacked. So say the chaps who ought to know Alas! It really is not so. For Science reared its ugly head And killed these superstitions dead; The lunar myth is utter tripe And borers like their bamboo ripe. He adds that while waxing and waning moons do not correlate with beetle attacks, no technical objection exists whatsoever to prevent following the local belief. When used as posts for house building in eastern Sumba, Indonesia, the felled trees must be erected in the same manner in which they grew, with root end down and the crown end upward. The word used to describe the erection of the post is pamula, meaning “to plant.” Dire consequences would attend those posts improperly planted – early rot, illness of inhabitants, and even death (Forth 1981, 32). Rituals and ceremonies, gifts to construction workers, and feasting are commonly associated with the erection of new dwellings. In Fiji gifts of whale’s teeth and feasting accompany each stage of construction of a traditional house from the laying of the foundation to completion of the work (Ravuvu 1983, 15). All across New England and New York shoes have been deliberately found in the walls. Every person in the family put something in the wall, often it was a shoe, just one. If a person was very poor, perhaps a bottle of urine might be used and sealed in the wall. Anything personal [...] was stored to ward off the evil eye. Though shoes are the common denominator, more than two hundred different personal possessions – coins, spoons, pots, goblets, food, knives, toys, gloves, pipes, even chicken and cat bones – have been found hidden. (Berry 2011, 19)

James Ayers (1981, 17) relates the discovery in 1963 in London of items bricked up in a dwelling wall about 1600. These “offerings” included “a basket containing two shoes, a candlestick, a goblet, two strangled chickens and two chickens that had been walled up alive.”

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Throughout India colorful geometric symbols called alponas, or kolam or rangavalli in the south, are carefully marked out in rice flour just in front of entrances to ensure good fortune on festive occasions (Hakansson 1977, 84). A more frequently performed ritual exists among the Nair caste of Kerala, south India, in the extended family, matrilineal houses called tharavads. Every night at dusk a young girl or woman is given the responsibility to carry an oil lamp to all corners of the dwelling in order to “chase away any evil spirits that may have arrived under cover of the falling darkness” (Subhashini 1987, 59). The close links between agricultural storage, religious food offerings, and ceremonial orientation is nicely shown by Eric Crystal (1985, 194) for the Toraja people of Indonesia: The rice granary is conceptualized as an extension of the “face” of the house. Both granary and house have the same saddleback roof design. Ceremonies relating to agricultural spirits transpire at the front of the house or at the rice granary. Ceremonies concerned with death are held at the rear of the house. Life-side rituals are usually oriented to the northeast and are carried out as the sun rises in the east. Funeral preparations (such as the construction of the bier) are usually conducted on the southwest side of the house as the sun descends in the west.

Totems of various kinds to ensure good luck and prosperity are widely used throughout the traditional world. Naturally enough, women have an especially close and symbolic association with the house in many traditional societies. Not only do they spend most of their life within the dwelling, or very nearby outside, but also in some societies they have been the builders of the structure. Consequently, the dwellings sometimes are “known by the name of their leading and most active woman.” The affinity of women and their dwellings is further affirmed by the custom of burying the afterbirth of babies on the east side of the house in Toraja, Indonesia (Waterson 1989, 484), or even within the structure itself in Botswana (Larsson 1989, 519–20), or at the threshold in central Java (Raglan 1964, 28). Gunawan Tjahjong (1989, 220) noted that in the Jogjakarta region of Java, the space in front of the dwelling and on either side of the entrance is reserved for burying the placenta of newly born children – boys to the east side and girls to the west. “The baby’s spirit is thus guaranteed a place in the dwelling.” Across the Indian Ocean, the Sakalava also bury placenta in separated gender locations. “The placenta of a boy is buried in a hole north of the north kingpost or at the northeast corner; the placenta of a girl in a hole south of the south kingpost or at the northwest corner” (Feeley-Harvik 1980, 580).

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In Upper Egypt, the afterbirth is disposed of by burial under the house floor, or: if a woman is anxious to make sure of having another birth she buries the placenta of the latest-born under the threshold of her house [...] She does this in order that when she desires to have another child she may be able to step over the buried placenta three, five or seven times; for the belief is that the spirit will then re-enter her body, to be born again. (Blackman 1968, 63)

* * * Spirit houses, found in Thailand and Burma, are miniature dwellings carefully crafted to resemble full-scale houses, and often placed atop a pole and in a conspicuous or auspicious location within a house compound. They sometimes are exact models of the larger traditional structures and contain images which represent the spirits who had to be displaced in the construction of the dwelling (Figure 23-4). Somewhat similar to these spirit houses is the devil house found in fields close by many rural dwellings in Sikkim. The structure is an attempt to control a forceful and often highly malevolent spirit. If good-tempered and contented he will bring health and prosperity to the home, and possibly, though people are not so sure about this, punish

A B 23-4. Spirit houses from Isaan, the northeastern part of Thailand (from Chaichongrak, 2002).

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Ceremony, Spirit and Devil Houses, Feng Shui 213 marauders in the family fields: if he is angry he will bring disease and loss to the people who neglect him. (Gorer 1967, 74)

Ronald Knapp (1994, 327) has provided a sympathetic and perceptive statement placing Chinese traditional dwellings in a context of Chinese philosophy and life. His comments might well apply to other societies and their traditional building. Chinese rural dwellings are more than simply vessels for daily life or havens against the changing forces of nature. Common dwellings, which on the surface appear to be nondescript and mute structures, indeed are able to reveal and communicate important aspects of Chinese popular culture. Throughout much of Chinese history, building sites were chosen and structures built based upon an organic view of the cosmos. House construction traditionally has not been seen simply as a progression of technical tasks, but as a means to increase worldly benefits and avoid misfortune. Ordinary houses, just as with other elements of Chinese popular and even elite culture, are texts, tangible manifestations of people’s behaviors, beliefs, and aspirations.

Among the Chinese an elaborate, complex, and all-embracing geomancy casts its influence not only over traditional societies, but even among the sophisticated urban populations of Hong Kong and Singapore. Although Feng Shui is couched in mystical expression and promises security from evil, unhappiness, and misfortune by following Taoist tenants, it can also be valued on a different level as a clever and effective device to create artistically harmonious landscapes and structures (Lip 1987, 44–5). Furthermore, geomancers ensured that each builder “satisfied aesthetic standards as well as hygienic and climatic needs” (Hugo-Brunt 1982, 444). The original practices of Feng Shui may have originated among the cave dwellers of the Loess plateau (Yoon 2006, 24) as an outgrowth of archaic origins in nature worship (Figure 23-5). To achieve full maturity and wide popular acceptance, the Feng Shui system had to develop over hundreds of years in order to be broadly defined as “‘the rules of good order’ which ensured that an individual was in harmony with the gods, the spirits and the universe” (Hugo-Brunt 1964, 443). An early Christian missionary to China, E.J. Eitel, (1873, 5), alert to the teleological orientation of Feng Shui, provided a simple, yet perceptive and sensitive, Western analysis: Natural science has never been cultivated in China in that technical, dry and matter-of-fact fashion, which seems to us inseparable from true science. Chinese naturalists did not take much pains in studying

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23-5. The “dragon” mountain is, by itself, a danger and unlucky, but when accompanied by lower “tiger” hills enfolding behind the dragon like two clasped hands, the combination is regarded as the best shape of all, with the dragon in a tiger embrace. It could also be said that practically this placement with the highlands to the north provides the most desirable shelter from piercing winter winds (from Walter, 1988).

nature and ferreting out her hidden secrets by minute and practical tests and experiments. They invented no instruments to aid them in the observation of the heavenly bodies, they never took to hunting beetles and stuffing birds, they shrank from the idea of dissecting animal bodies, nor did they chemically analyse inorganic substances, but with very little actual knowledge of nature they evolved a whole system of natural science from their own inner consciousness and expounded it according to the dogmatic formulae of ancient tradition. Deplorable, however, as this absence of practical and experimental investigation is, which opened the door to all sorts of conjectural theories, it preserved in Chinese natural science a spirit of sacred reverence for the divine powers of nature.

Presenting the rules and aspects of Feng Shui in the guise of powerful and threatening forces secured their widespread and deep acceptance among a receptive population. What may be surprising to Western observers is the strength of that acceptance among presentday urban dwellers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore (Freedman 1968, 9), Vietnam (Walters 1988, 13), Korea, and elsewhere, even though faced with the onslaught of Western economic technology. Sang Hae Lee (1986, 134) offers a thorough investigation, including an extensive listing of current uses of Feng Shui outside of China. The Western, scholarly yet limited, studies of the evolution and development of Chinese Feng Shui, and its introduction to Korea

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have been discussed by Hong-Key Yoon (2011, 245). Particular attention by Yoon is directed to pibos, which is the idea of remedying inadequacies of an auspicious place by constructing hills as well as other modifications to the landforms and other environmental aspects: The main purpose of practicing geomancy is to find an auspicious site that can bless its occupant [...] [But] a perfectly auspicious site without any shortcomings is extremely rare. Consequently, geomancers developed the concept of pibo in order to compensate for or remedy defects of an auspicious site in terms of geomancy. The various methods of pibo include building hills, establishing groves, changing the direction of water flow, assigning more geomantically [sic] appropriate names to places, and building Buddhist temples and pagodas. (Yoon 2011, 246)

Japan has never been under Chinese rule, yet has adopted much of the Chinese culture. It is not surprising that the Japanese seek a similar harmony, balance, and beauty, but in a somewhat more secular fashion (Taut 1958, 35; Gale 1981, 43–4). It is unfortunate that today a grossly distorted set of fashion dictates is being foisted on a gullible public in the West as Feng Shui. An excellent expanded discussion of Feng Shui is found in Knapp (1999). Before houses were “designed” they evolved with a sensitivity toward their environment that may be seen as truly organic (Ayers 1981, 17). Part of this environment was the world of the supernatural, over which man had little control. Out of this veracity arose the practice noted above, of placing symbols on, and offerings to, the structure to placate the spirits and avoid the evil eye.

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~ 24 ~ Decoration, the Evil Eye, Brick Patterns The roof ridge and the upper gable triangle in many cultures offer the possibility of displaying symbolic decoration. The Maltese, for example, built a small stone shelter projecting outward into the street from the upper-floor windows. “The fact that a girl in the household had reached marriageable age would be announced to potential suitors by placing a pot of sweet basil on the shelf” (Tonna 1989, 167). In Alsatian wine villages along the Rhine Valley, the notice of a daughter of marriageable age was conveyed by the fixing of an upright wooden hand (later often a metal one) to the end of the house ridge. One still finds these symbols, which today compete with stork nests as a lure for tourists. For a different reason, the Tarascans in Mexico affix a cross with an arch over it, decorated with paper flowers, in the middle of the ridge to protect the house against violent storms and the visitation of the devil. In locations as far apart as France and Japan, the ridges of thatch roofs are lined with growing bright colored flowers. Crossed verge boards culminating in carved animal-head finials are another frequent device which places symbols in a highly visible location. Not only can verge board be decorated, in some places the entire gable wall also may be embellished (Figure 24-1). Perhaps the most dramatic gable decoration, however, is found in Southeast Asia, culminating with that of the Sea Dayaks in Celebes (Sulawesi) . Throughout insular Southeast Asia designs based upon traditional boats grace dwellings in many traditional villages. In addition to the dramatic forms of the Toraja in Sulawesi (Crystal 1985, 194–7), several other symbolic dwelling forms exist, including the building in the form of a boat’s hull, a boat in full sail, one in the form of a platform carried on two boats like an outrigger, a building with a boat device placed on its ridge, one in which the entire ridgepiece in the form of a boat, and with a roof in the form of a boat upside down.

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24-1. The numerous windows, carved decoration of the surrounds, and halftimbering all help to identify this house as from the Eifel region of Germany, now preserved in Cloppenburg (photo by author, 1986).

In Taiwan and mainland China, it is not the gable wall that offers decorative space, but the line and form of the verge. These decorative devices “usually express symbolic meanings related to the

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24-2. Sacred symbols and figures from Chinese mythology grace the molded mortar ridge (photo by author, 1977).

24-3. A trullo, Apulia Province, Italy. The circular walls consist of blocks of tufa. The cupola is of limestone blocks pyramided under a decorative finial. Several other trulli can be seen in the background. These structures have a wide range of origin and a very long history (from Branch, 1966).

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five elements (wood, fire, metal, water, and the earth) and the yinyang concept.” On some affluent dwellings which have the graceful swallow-tail ridge lines, representations in carefully molded mortar may be seen of “spirits, animals, auspicious fruits, and other symbolic items placed along the ridge line or along the sweep of the swallow tail” verge boards (Knapp 1986, 106). These are also seen on sacred structures (Figure 24-2). Southern Italy, on the heel side of the Italian boot, contains circular tufa-walled structures called trulli (Figure 24-3). As pinnacles, circles, swastika, celestial bodies, crosses, and more complex symbols are all used, they strongly suggest an original function of mystical protection, rather than mere decoration. Over the trullo doorway, symbols are painted on the stones of the cupola: with the obvious purpose of exorcising or propitiating. It is possible to distinguish among them a group clearly made up of astronomical and astrological signs used in Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt; others clearly derived from pagan or primitive symbolism are from runic rights; and others are from the Christian religion. (Branch 1966, 119)

The trulli attain their high point in the village of Alberobello, where entire city blocks and streets are made up of these structures. When it is all that can be afforded, the cheapest material, such as whitewash, is applied. Externally, the whitewash protects the walls from the elements; internally, the whitewash obliterates grime and dust and increases available light by reflection. If a little more expenditure can be justified, window and door surrounds are covered with a contrasting color. Usually this color had some mystical, political, or at least cultural symbolism (Sweeney 2006, 7). Window and door surrounds in Russia, especially along the Volga River, are particularly decorative. Even in the care of simple basic huts within a compound in tropical Africa, for example, an effective artistic approach may be evident. Since the house is the most dominant part of his environment, man decorates it, taking pride in his worldly possessions. Often, many of these decorations are put on the house for their own sake; at other times they carry a symbolic meaning implying auspiciousness and good fortune for the inhabitants. Certain symbolic images in house decoration are related to rituals that have to be performed on different festive occasions. Absence of decorations can also indicate misfortune experienced by a household (Jain 1983, 46–7).

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Hausa interiors also are adorned with painted forms, and ceilings and interior walls sport decorative china plates. “Doors are often decorated with beer-bottle caps, showing the extreme adaptability of the Hausas to new acquisitions, and their subjugation of them to their own use” (Crowder 1956, 10). Doorways often support a projecting canopy of mud supported by deleb palm trunks, which has a decorative effect as well as sheltering the entry from the occasional downpour (Elliott 1940, 277). Anthony Kirk-Greene (1963, 15) observed that many of the Hausa mud and soft concrete wall decorations on the houses of the prosperous merchant class are the same as found on the leather covers for the portable Qur’an carried by pilgrims on the hajj to Mecca. At the same time, however, he also noted similar decorations on the houses of more affluent prostitutes. Although a religious connection may have been the original impetus for the decoration, it is clearly wealth that sustains and spreads the practice. To return to Europe, one benefit of the introduction of chimneys in dwellings was that they “emptied the rooms of smoke, so that it was possible to paint and decorate them without the risk of soot obliterating the paint” (Faber n.d., 101). Even with chimneys, interior religious decoration is limited in most traditional houses everywhere. In northwest Syria, where mud-brick, beehive houses are whitewashed, both inside and out, “the wooden door, if painted, will be a bright blue as protection against evil spirits” (Copeland 1955, 24). Protective decoration occurs, or occurred, in every society. Protection of a building’s inhabitants against the “evil eye” is another symbol characterizing many traditional dwellings (Chophel 1983, 43). The danger arises from the covetous glance at the structure of a demonic spirit or evil eye. Various totems placed in the yard or the house, or worn by household members, protect against it. South Asia is one center of this idea, but it may be encountered in locations as wide afield as the Nubian desert (Blackman 1968, 218–26; Wenzel 1972, 39), Greece (Pavlides and Hesser 1989, 290), Tunisia (Hallett 1975, 25), Ethiopa (Reminick 1974), the Scottish Highlands (Grant 1995, 138), and Malta, where “cow’s horns were often mounted high on buildings to ward off the evil eye” (Tonna 1989, 166). Furthermore, August Mahr (1945) also traces Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs back to earlier devices in Europe employed to deflect or neutralize the evil eye. These decorative symbols have lost most of their religious significance and are employed today as ethnic identify badges, usually gracing barns rather than dwellings. The concept of the evil eye is an ancient and widespread one (Elworthy 1895, 8), but its association with construction of buildings

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today is more restricted and specific. Throughout India and Sri Lanka a variety of devices and techniques are employed against the evil eye. W. Crooke (1918, 123) suggested that “a bit of the house is left unfinished to avoid the Evil Eye,” while C. Purdon Clarke (1883, 739) noted that a water vessel was placed in front of the house as “a sovereign charm to avert the evil eye of envious folk” (note that the evil eye has taken on a totally different aspect here), and Ilay Cooper and Barry Dawson (1998, 23) remark that “handprints deflect the evil eye and discourage destructive spirits.” Anand (1974, 16) offers a differing explanation of the open-hand decoration, a device encountered so often in India. He suggests that in the Punjab, it is a symbol of generosity. Kulbhushan Jain’s (1983, 49, 54) interpretation is somewhat different: he views the open hand simply as an auspicious symbol of good fortune. An upright hand, painted above the cave entrance in Matmata, Tunisia was described to me as merely a sign of welcome (Figure 24-4).

24-4. A painting of a hand, reportedly a sign of welcome. The fish symbol could not be identified locally, but may have a Christian connection. Located at the entrance to a cave dwelling, Matmata, Tunisia (photo by author, 2008).

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* * * One quite different method of obtaining modest decoration at fairly minimal cost is the use of patterned brick and brick diaper, the latter also variously known as Dutch cross bond, zig-zag, and Flemish checker (Trindell 1968, 485). Examples of these techniques are known from Flanders (Sickler 1949, 6) and Normandy in France (Brier and Brunet 1984, 49), and Norfolk in the UK, where bricks are intermixed with flints (Briggs 1953, 73), to Connecticut (Watson 1984), New Jersey (Sickler 1949; Love 1955; Eberlein 1921; Gowans 1964, 14), Maryland (Trindell 1968, 486), and Michigan (Noble 1996, 14–15). Paul Love (1950, 173) provides a useful tabular summary of patterned-brick houses built in the United States between 1670 and 1820. Fully ten states are represented with a total of 197 such dwellings – 110 of these occur in New Jersey and 32 in Maryland. The decorative element is achieved by widening the mortar between key bricks, to emphasize natural diagonal lines, creating geometric figures, and by using bricks of slightly different colors or hues. Variation in hues is achieved according to how and where in the kiln a newly molded brick is placed. Those in the hottest part of the kiln will have a darker, bluish hue (Watson 1984, 4). Placing the end of a brick toward the hot center of the kiln results in headers being darker than stretchers when they are later placed in a wall. Considerable skill is required to use these methods effectively both in the kiln and in bricklaying. Another method of achieving decorative effects is to employ different clays, which results in bricks of different colors. This technique is known as dichromatic brickwork if bricks of two different colors are used, and polychromatic brickwork if more than two. In southern Ontario red and yellow bricks were used to great effect late in the 19th century (Ritchie 1979, 60). A smaller area of distinctive brickwork occurs in the Dutch-settled area of southwest Michigan (Noble 1996). Most often the design is concentrated on the building’s corners and around windows and doors, although some diamond and zig-zag patterns exist. One of the few remaining traditions still practiced by present-day builders in parts of Europe and North America is the ceremony of “topping off,” in which a small evergreen tree is erected at the top of a structural framework, or along the ridge, usually at one gable end. John Stilgoe (1980) suggests that the custom, which appears to have originated in Germany, is deeply rooted in a mix of paganism and Catholicism. Over time the evergreen came to represent permanency, in its fixed shape and little changing color, as well as completion of construction. Today, the symbol survives even though it usually marks only the completion of the structural framework.

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For a different area and perspective, Alan Gailey (1961, 16) reports: In east Ulster it is the custom often to erect a flag, or some substitute for one, when the chimney has been reached during the building operations, often as a hint to the owner of a new house that some refreshment or a gratuity would speed the work to completion.

* * * Even in areas where traditional housing is able to maintain itself in the face of competition from “modern” building, a steady decline in ornamentation is perceptible (Feeley-Harnik 1980, 568–9). Machinemade materials are used primarily because of their lower cost, immediate or eventual. Decorative devices are mostly hand-made and therefore expensive and time consuming to produce. The tyranny of economy works constantly to eliminate all but the most regular (i.e. machine-made) decoration.

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~ 25 ~ Communal Dwellings, Communal and Non-Communal Religious Groups Over much of the world, a dwelling is the domain of a single family, either nuclear or extended. In some places, however, traditional structures may incorporate several more or less independent housing units. When such dwellings are communal, they shelter a large number of individuals, most of whom are at least distantly related, and thus have a common ethnic identity (Figure 25-1). The relatedness of the dwelling’s inhabitants, and to a lesser extent their close ethnic unity, is what defines the structure as a traditional communal dwelling, and what distinguishes it from the modern apartment or flat building or condominium development. There are a huge range of communal dwellings across the world, including: the pueblos of the southwestern United States; the clan homes of the Pacific Northwest Coast in Canada and Alaska; barkclad shelters of the Iroquois and related peoples of eastern Canada and the United States; the semi-subterranean dwellings of southern Russia; the maloca bamboo and thatch structures of the Amazon and Orinoco basins; elongated huts housing over 100 persons reported in the 16th century from the Chaco (Nordenskiold 1979, 24); tropical longhouses of Southeast Asia; circular strongholds of the Hakka people in southern China; and the multi-structures within compounds in Africa south of the Sahara. Given the scarcity of communal housing and the abundance of single-family structures, it seems likely that, for whatever reason, the communal was only an occasional outgrowth of the individual. Such a process was identified by Cosmos Mindeleff (1898b, 114) as the origin of pueblos in the southwestern United States. However, in the 20th century a reverse process in the pueblo appears to be taking place, the former apartment-like family homes are giving way to separated single-

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25-1. Early partly excavated and partly adobe-walled cliff dwellings can still be found throughout the southwestern United States. This photo is of part of a settlement in Mesa Verde National Park, CO (photo by author, 1967).

family dwellings (Dozier 1970, 11). Nevertheless, Charlotte and David Yue (1986, 107) reported about 30 pueblos to be inhabited in 1986. Although the word pueblo is Spanish for village, town, or inhabited place, it has come for many to refer especially to the Amerindian adobe buildings of the southwestern United States. These pueblos include both cliff dwellings and those located on valley bottoms or mesa tops (Figure 25-2). The most dramatic pueblo site is that of Acoma, west of Albuquerque. Perched high atop a steep-sided mesa, it dominates the countryside for miles around, but most of its residents have shifted to more accessible housing on the lower plateau level, leaving their original privies for possible use if needed during visits to the mesa (Figure 25-3). This move, together with the growing interest of tourists who wish to visit the original dramatic settlement, and the strong control and protection by tribal authorities to thwart undesirable commercial exploitation, seem likely to be sufficient to secure preservation of the ancient settlement. Pueblos were not conceived of in their entirety; they grew by the steady accretion of single-cell units. They are, therefore, structures of basic and simple construction. Furthermore, the Pueblo Indians were not concerned with building for posterity. They built their houses to satisfy an immediate need, the need of a lifetime or perhaps two. They never intended to erect lasting monuments and

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25-2. Perhaps the best known of the American Indian communal dwellings is the Taos Pueblo, which consists of two adobe structures, the larger of which is five stories high and up to ten rooms deep at ground level, Taos, NM (photo by author, 1967).

25-3. Family privies used the force of gravity to remove waste, Acoma Pueblo, NM (photo by author, 1996).

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consequently never learned how. They never thought of buildings as works of art and therefore made no effort to adorn them. (Jackson 1953, 21–4)

Even further: the Hopis (Pueblo Indians) have no architectural terminology that classifies buildings into types, and no word for room or interior. Instead they use the term “the place where” a certain action takes place or a certain object is to be found. In other words, if an action ceases or if the object is removed, the house no longer has any identity; it is simply a solid, a man-made lump of adobe.

The most critical items of construction were the wooden beams required to support mud roofs. Since timber was scarce in the desert environment of the southwest, roof beams often had to be brought from some distance, requiring great effort. Not surprisingly, these valuable lengths of wood frequently were cycled through several subsequent buildings, even when their lengths were not entirely appropriate. Ends of the ad hoc beams at times projected irregularly beyond the walls, creating one of the most characteristic and attractive visual features of the buildings. For a recent, more extensive discussion of pueblo adobe construction, based upon the original research of Victor Mindeleff, see Allen G. Noble (1984, 1:78–83). Reuse of building materials was not just an Indian trait. In all traditional societies, where already used yet still serviceable materials were combined with a need for the cheapest building items, recycling of such material – especially in structures of timber and log – is a standard practice. Newly constructed buildings often did not mirror exactly the earlier ones, and may lead the casual observer to erroneous assumptions and conclusions. Among the Coast Salish, one clan house was estimated by an early visitor to measure 650 feet long by 60 feet wide, with a height of 18 feet (Stewart 1984, 65). The interior was divided into individual family spaces, each complete with its own hearth. Most Salish and other tribes’ dwellings, however, were not so large. Those erected by the Tsimshian were considerably smaller and roughly square in plan, 50 by 55 feet being average size (Drucker 1965, 119). Their interiors were also partitioned into open cubicles occupied by the different families. The Tlingit live northward of both the Tsimshian and the Salish. Perhaps because of this more northerly location and the consequently colder winters, their traditional homes were smaller.

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Vernacular Buildings 25-4. Mortise-and-tenon joints used to connect roof beams and wall posts, both of heavy cedar (photo by author, 2001).

Everywhere along the coastal zone the houses were of post-andbeam construction, usually with the beams mortised into the posts (Figure 25-4). Away from the coast, with almost every tribe oriented to a river valley such as the Columbia, the Nooksack, the Fraser, the Thompson, and so on, dwellings assumed an excavated form usually given the term of pit dwellings. The detailed construction of these houses differed from tribe to tribe, but in general they consisted of a circular pit dug four to twelve feet in depth, with sides of timber or slabs (Waterman 1924, 10) and a framework of light poles connected at one end to a central pole or poles over which roofing material of cedar or fir bark was placed. The roof was completed with layers of grass and earth. Smoke from the central fire was exhausted through a central smoke hole. Among the Nooksack Indians, “attached to the walls of the pit were cedar-plank platforms covered with reed mats which were used for seating or beds” (Tremaine 1975, 54). On the Columbia plateau, the Yakima tribe constructed elongated lodges consisting of a framework of poles over which tule rushes were secured. “Lewis and Clark reported seeing a lodge of this type

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which was 150 feet long and housed about 50 families, but the lodges more typically measured between 20 and 70 feet in length” (Sampson 1991, 187). Communal dwellings also housed the Iroquois, primarily in New York State and the province of Ontario. In New York they even styled themselves the “people of the longhouse.” The dimensions of Iroquois houses varied from 30 to more than 150 feet in length and 10 to 30 feet in width, with the average about 60 feet by about 18. New York longhouses reached maximum length during the 15th century and declined thereafter, perhaps as a result of European contacts (Dodd 1984, 217, 224). A framework of light timber was covered with slabs of bark: cedar in Ontario and elm in New York being preferred, with ash and spruce used later. A central aisle about six inches in width ran from one end to the other. Roofs of the single-story structure were reported to be continuously curved from side to side (earlier) or of gable type (later). In 1964, four Iroquois longhouses were excavated in central New York State by archaeologist James A. Tuck (1971, 32–42). He estimated the site had been occupied from 1380 to 1400 [...] The largest longhouse, a building 334 feet long and 23 feet wide, contained two rows of vertical poles which defined the inside central corridor and supported both sleeping bunks and roof. He speculated the building was erected for between 150 and 200 people.

The interior of Iroquois structures were divided into small family spaces or cubicles of about six-foot width on either side of the main aisle. A common interior arrangement consisted of two higher platforms running the length of the longhouse, where people slept in the summer to escape fleas. In winter the cold forced sleepers closer to the fire (Abler 1970, 29). The longhouse was heated in winter by fires in small hearths along the central corridor at alternate places between units (Duly 1979, 62). Communal longhouses exist in other parts of the world and are a type rather than an architectural phenomenon. They are scattered across the length and breadth of Southeast Asia, and some investigators would include the extended dwellings of the New Guinea Enga (Figure 25-5). All communal houses are single story, much greater in length than width, and contain numerous hearths; they are often elevated on piles, thus creating a ground-level workspace also used for animals and storage, and, of course, their materials of construction and covering are different. The length of these structures as seen by early anthropologists was awe inspiring (Metcalf 2010, 31–6). Much

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25-5. Side sketch and floor plans of Enga, New Guinea axial pitched-roof longhouses. The sloping axial pitch assists in interior smoke disbursement (drawing by Kevin Butler, based upon Marshall, 1981).

later Roxana Waterson (1990, 84) reported a Sea Dyak longhouse of 771 foot length, and Dawson and Gillow (1994, 140) tell of one measuring between one-sixth and one-fifth of a mile, although most are considerably shorter. Peter Metcalf (2010, 38) cites reports of longhouses having “forty, fifty, or sixty doors, and at least one report of a single longhouse with 100 doors and a length of half a mile in length! The Sea Dyak and Toba Batak longhouses of Indonesia have the additional roof characteristic of an impressive outward-sloping gable wall, which “protects the painted front façade as well as a balcony which accommodates guests or stores musical instruments or coffins” (Cameron, E. 1985, 80). The gable wall slope is roughly 30 degrees from the vertical and is frequently supported by a wooden

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pillar physically displaced forward from the gable wall (Dawson and Gillow 1994, 115–20). The great roof height accounts for more than half of the elevation of the building, making it the most impressive structural feature of the dwelling. Elevated rice barns also serve domestic functions: during the daytime as community gathering places, and at night as sleeping quarters for single men, who thus provide protection for the all-important food resource. An interesting characteristic of some Dayak longhouses is the position according to status evident in the interior arrangements: The room at the center of the house is often occupied by the chief, or family of the highest ranking, usually ruling, class. The class levels and relative status of the families occupying the rest of the rooms declines progressively as they are further distanced from the central room. (Sumnik-Dekovich 1985, 102)

A quite different form of communal dwelling has evolved in southern China, where the Hakka people reside. Both rectangular and square plan, three- and four-story structures resembling fortresses have been built, but the most impressive and unusual are those of a circular ring plan, unlike any other structures in China (Knapp 1986, 45–9). The rammed earth walls, also containing a mixture of glutinous rice and egg whites (Ho 2003, 341), range over three feet in thickness, above a stone base which can be up to 30 feet wide. This again probably reflects the early necessity for a strong defensive structure. The dun and dark-yellow hues of the unpainted walls, complemented by the grayish-black color of roof tiles, are completely without exterior, or much interior, decoration or embellishment, further contributing to the somber character of these dwellings. Another important area of communal dwellings occurs in the Amazon and Orinoco lowlands, extending to surrounding higher country. The term maloca has been used to refer to all Amazonian and Orinoco communal houses. The occupants of the building are all kinfolk and they shelter under a common roof. The average inhabitants of these structures number between 65 and 85 people. The largest of the dwellings are well over 200 feet in diameter, but even with average diameters half that size, they all rise up to 25 feet high or beyond. In addition to the circular forms just mentioned, some tribes build structures of rectangular or oval plan. Each tribe has its own variations in form and details of construction, but these architectural differences appear to be variations of a common theme. Although most malocas are completely communal, some tribes place males and females in separate structures (Braun 1995, 62).

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Vertical zones recapitulate not only human conditions, but also express them in the structure of the communal hut itself: The round house’s soft, low-growing palm thatch harvested by women, forms the lowest shingles; higher up the cone is a stiffer, taller-growing palm thatch harvested by men. The conical roof ends in tall, protruding phallic center post (not structurally necessary for the hut, but brought in through the single vaginal door in an act of symbolic intercourse), which ends in a single, round, feminine, gourd finial. (Braun 1995, 62)

Houses from the Enga Province (Figure 25-5) have been referred to as axially pitched longhouses to emphasize the importance of the roof pitch from front to back. When air is passing over it from the narrower to the broader end, the aerodynamic shape of the roof results in the creation of a decrease in pressure and a back-and-up draught in the interior which causes removal of smoke more efficiently through the roof at the rear of the longhouse, an area which is less frequently occupied than the social areas at the front [...] Since the crown of the roof is the most vulnerable to rain and to consequent erosion, the increased and continual deposition of soot and smoke-derived resins at the apex provides the thatch in that area with increased bonding and resistance to the effects of weather. (Marshall, A. 1981, 104)

Terminology and social relationships can be quite confusing. One fine example exists in Haryana State, India. Here, segregation of women, men, and animals is practiced up to a point, usually depending upon income and wealth. The ideal is for each rural family to have three structures: a ghar in which women of the family sleep, work, and socialize; a baithak in which males sleep and socialize; and a gher in which animals are sheltered (Chandhoke 1990, 223). In some cases, the baithak and ghar occupy one compound or plot of land, and the gher a separate one. In other instances, it is the ghar which is separated. If the farmer lacks sufficient land or resources, all functions will be accommodated in a single compartmented building, in which case the structure will be termed a ghar. If the separate gher is large enough to have an entrance through which a tractor can be driven, the structure is called a darwaja. Men may enter the ghar for meals and after dark, but women do not visit the baithak. Every built-up space is referred to as chhawa, or more rarely makan. Is it any wonder that students of traditional structures often lose their way in this tangle of terminology? To make the terminology even more

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difficult to comprehend, the term ghar also is used in a general sense to mean home or dwelling, perhaps because normally all meals are taken there by all members of the household. The very late 18th and especially the 19th century saw significant growth of world population; the impact of industrialization increased contact and interaction between formerly separated and even isolated societies. An important counter-movement was the rise of communal religious separatist groups, especially in North America. These included the Doukhobors, Hutterites, Shakers, Harmonists, Oneida, and Amana communities, as well as many other smaller ones. However, in the long run the effect on the cultural landscape of these and other communal and religious societies, which usually lasted only a brief time, and possessed small numbers of adherents in restricted geographical areas, was fleeting. However, two non-communal groups, the Mormons (Noble 1984, 2:157–63) and the Amish (Noble 1984, 2:151–5), did successfully establish themselves permanently with traditional housing, as well as other material cultural elements. Richard Francaviglia (1978) has provided an excellent analysis of the Mormon landscape of Utah and closely adjoining parts of surrounding states. Mook and Hostettler (1957) and Noble (1986) have provided investigations of the largest county-size Amish landscapes in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and Holmes County, Ohio, respectively. In the 19th and 20th centuries, communications facilities steadily became so perfected that, in most instances, it was ideas that moved, rather than the physical objects themselves. Neil Davis suggests a good example in the conception of the Irkutsk Siberian log house as an import to Fairbanks, Alaska in the 19th century: Travelers to Siberia, particularly in the regions around Irkutsk, will be struck by the similarity of the Fairbanks log house to the log cabins there. In the Siberian cities the log houses frequently have ornate painted window shutters and eaves which the Fairbanks cabins do not, but the basic style is unmistakable. To stroll through a country village today [i.e. 1982] in Siberia is to stroll through Fairbanks 30 or 40 years ago; the houses are identical. It is not too farfetched to think that the Fairbanks log house had its origin in Siberia [particularly as] Irkutsk used to be the effective capital of Alaska before Sitka was. (Davis 1982, 188)

This statement, however intriguing, needs more field investigation and careful analysis to be confirmed and accepted.

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~ 26 ~ Seasonal Shelters, Transhumance, Prefabricated Structures At one end of the fixed-accommodation scale are those families who regularly, but most often seasonally, occupy at least two dwellings, either in the same physical location or in geographically separate places. This may involve the tending of domesticated animals that must move to secure food or water, or to escape extreme weather. Some nomadic peoples may continue to reside in a single dwelling, rather than two separate ones, but two or more locations always are used, with the shelter being moved as necessary. Many people, for a variety of reasons, periodically shift residence to different seasonal shelters. For some, the seasonal shift involves merely a movement from one part of the dwelling to another. In many Turkish houses the winters are spent on the ground floor, which is built of stone, while summers are spent on the upper floors, which are of wood [...] Alternatively, in many areas, the winter and the summer rooms may be on the same floor, but are situated, respectively on the south and north sides of the house. (Petherbridge 1978, 204)

Among the Kickapoo Indians, who migrated in the 19th century from Wisconsin to Coahuila, Mexico, separate summer and winter dwellings occupy the same compound (Figure 26-1). Lack of space caused merely by the growth of the family rarely resulted in shifts to new quarters. The original dwelling was expanded, if at all possible, or increased crowding was accepted until newly married children could shift to a dwelling of their own. The Amish communities address family growth in a different way. Marriage is virtually universal, with daughters at marriage changing their residence to be with their new husband’s family. Sons remain in their family’s abode and because they practice ultimogeniture rather

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26-1. In addition to dome-shaped winter houses with extra blankets of vegetative material, and rectangular summer houses, some of which have lost their roof thatching to expose the wooden frame, at least one wall-less ramada and several minor structures are evident in this Kickapoo settlement in northern Mexico (courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum).

than primogeniture, whenever the eldest son’s marriage takes place, a smaller dwelling is erected close to the original farmhouse. Sometimes the two structures are connected by a roofed- or even a closed-passage way, or they may share a porch, or perhaps just their corners touch if built obliquely – a nice symbol of family solidarity! Because sons marry in order of seniority if possible, the new couple moves into the smaller house until the entire family has resources enough to support them, usually on a new farm. The next eldest son and his new wife then move into the vacated small house; when only the youngest son remains, it is the grandparents who move into the smaller house and that son inherits the original homestead. From this end of the chain of moves comes the vernacular name for the small dwelling: the “grandfather” house or the “gross-dawdy” house (Noble 2000, 368) (see Figure 7-2). Usually the use of seasonal dwellings involves the migration, short or long, to new venues. The specific reason governing such movement is often the need to secure forage for grazing animals. Geographers, anthropologists, and some other scholars refer to longer-distance periodic movement as transhumance. Such movement is of three types,

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all of which are to a large extent related to either water sources or seasonal climatic control. Type one (food based) occurs near bodies of water where fishing can support the community, and where an interior location where food resources are based upon gathering, hunting, and sometimes simple agriculture. The other two kinds of transhumance are a response to the need to provide forage for the animals on which the community depends. Type two (water based) occurs in desert and steppe climates, and type three (temperature based) in mountainous regions (Peattie 1936, 134–48). The Iglulik Eskimos living on Southampton Island in northern Canada regularly occupied at least three quite different dwellings in response to seasonal changes of weather (Mathiassen 1928). During the long winter, the igloo of snow and ice provided surprisingly warm shelter, although, if internal temperatures rose too high, melt water became an annoyance. From May to October, seal- or caribou-skin tents were occupied. A large number of sizable stones anchored the tent, keeping its wooden poles from blowing over in the frequently strong winds. In the autumn, and less often in spring, a rough, partly excavated, dwelling covered by a tent roof and anchored by stones, earth, and whale skulls was used. However, throughout most of polar Eskimo country from Bering to Greenland, people used semi-subterranean earth-and-stone winter houses and skin-covered tents in summer. During the brief transitional periods in spring and autumn, “when it was too cold to live comfortably in a summer tent, but too warm or wet to occupy the usual winter house,” a small crude non-descript shelter sufficed (Lee and Reinhardt 2003). Elsewhere in North America, where climatic extremes were more moderate, a number of interior-dwelling tribes built both summer and winter houses. Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, living in the taiga rain forest, had a strong seasonal regime only indirectly related to temperature changes. For some groups, decline in fertility of surrounding fields may necessitate a shift of up to several miles (Dunham 1987). Deterioration of the structures, especially those of light construction in the tropics, also requires the building of a replacement. Intra-group conflict, changes of group leadership, and other stressful situations may each result in a move of some members to new dwellings in different locations. Natural disasters, changes in environmental conditions, improvements in economic levels, and other circumstances also may trigger habitation changes. Nevertheless, Patricia Cooper (1994, 272) reminds us that the Cherokee Indians of the southeastern United

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States shifted domicile simply to attain better winter heating. Their conical winter dwellings were small, dirt-covered, “snug [...] and very warm from the constant fire,” while summer houses were much larger, rectangular, and bark-roofed to deflect rainwater, but had only walls of wattle or interwoven twigs covered with clay. Before the advent of the “white man,” the vast reaches of the American Great Plains supported enormous herds of buffalo and some antelope. The economy of the Plains Indians, oriented to the great herds, demanded a lightweight, easily erected and equally easily dismantled shelter, so they could follow the migrating and roaming herds (Figure 26-2). The word tipi for such structures is derived from two Sioux words, ti meaning “to dwell,” and pi meaning “used for” (McClintock n.d., 1). The Omaha tribe inhabited earth lodges for part of the year, but retreated to the buffalo-hide/canvas tipi in winter. Bushnell (1922, 84–5) reported: the tent was used when the people were migrating, and also when they were traveling in search of the buffalo. It was also the favorite abode of a household during the winter season, as the earth lodge was generally erected in an exposed situation, selected on account of comfort in the

26-2. Map showing the extent of the Indian use of the tipi dwelling (drawn by M. Margaret Geib.

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summer. The tent could be pitched in the timber or brush, or down in wooded ravines, where the cold winds never had full sweep. Hence, many Indians abandoned their houses in winter and went into their tents, even when they were of canvas.

Some desert-edge nomads move the skins or cloth of their tents, but leave the framework behind to be used at some future time (Faegre 1979, 55, 61, 67). Such a strategy enables them to move quickly and lightens the burden on pack animals, but of course, it can only be utilized in country where some wood is available for a new frame, or where their old frame will not be disturbed. The Rabaris, a semi-nomadic group in the desert of Kutch in western India, occupy permanent houses during the monsoon. Beginning in November, they take to their tents to follow herds in search of grass and water, orienting their tents to provide maximum shelter from prevailing winds (Figure 26-3). Seasonal shift of residences everywhere requires that either permanent structures be located in each place, or that at least one structure be portable. The moveable tents and yurts of nomadic peoples are well known. Both tents and yurts are used by nomads in Central Asia, but the tent is much more transportable than the yurt. Mention should be made of early accounts from Central Asia of “cart-tents” or kibilitas (Maidar 1976, 20). William Dinsmoor (1985, 22, 25) and other investigators describe these as tents or yurts pitched on carts, presumably faintly resembling the later and more familiar covered wagons of North America. Little additional information exists on these shelters, although a clear photograph of one was published by Owen Lattimore (1941, facing p. 52). The seasonal migrations included in type-three transhumance are probably the most dramatic of all movements. Roderick Peattie (1936, 139–41) provided a graphic description:

26-3. Sketch showing the reversal of tent orientation with passage of the seasons, a practice followed by the Rabaris (sketch by Myriam O’Neill).

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The most extraordinary example of nomadism is found in the Val d’Anniviers [...] The visitor to the valley is surprised to find that always a part of the population is on the move. Month by month the people move up and down the mountain slope. Because of the rigors of the climate, each halting place requires substantial protection. There must be shelter for the family, stable, granary, and cellar.

The calendar year begins with valley residents in winter villages at altitudes between 1,400- and 1,600-meter elevations (Figure 26-4). A descent at the end of January brings the villagers to about the 1,000meter elevation, where they sow grains to be harvested later. Within a month another descent is made to tend vineyards and to sow crops in the Rhône Valley. By the end of March an upward migration takes place back to the February dwellings to cut hay for forage. The end of April sees a return to the winter dwellings where gardens are planted and some grain also. The most unusual migration begins in late June. The herders and cheese makers, with cattle, move in stages to the

26-4. Fully eight altitudinal movements were undertaken during the passage of a year by dwellers in the Val d’Anniviers, Switzerland to secure food and forage in the differing temperature zones.

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high alpine pastures, fully 2,600 meters in altitude. At the same time, the rest of the village population moves rapidly to the Rhône Valley again for grain harvest. However, by mid-July the harvest is over and a shift upward of 1,000 meters is necessary to harvest other grain and hay, and to await the return of the herders, cheese makers, and cattle. By October a return to the valley is required to harvest grapes and make wine. The last annual shift is a return in November to the winter residence. “This is one of the most complicated of nomadisms. The full horizontal range of movement may amount to 20 kilometers. The altitudinal range amounts to almost 2300 meters” (Peattie 1936, 141). Fewer and fewer farm people still adhere to this strenuous ritual. Soon it may disappear entirely. Herders in southeastern Poland along the Carpathian Mountains follow a pattern closer to that followed by other transhumance peoples. A permanent winter home in a lowland village alternates with another summer habitation, for which considerable energy and effort may be expended. A similar pattern was followed from at least the 10th to the 18th century in Wales. The summer house (hafod) was a primitive structure, which, however, sometimes became “the permanent home of a new branch of the family” (Smith, P. 1967, 772). Dry stone huts built in the corbelled method and termed clochans were widely built in the Irish uplands for herders tending cattle or sheep in summer. They served not only as storage places for milk and safe shelters for the men, but also as refuges for the stock at night (Aalen 1965, 41). The preferred site for clochans was on dry mounds in bogs, or more usually in better-drained patches of level mountainous pasture, in proximity to a water supply, with an abundance of stone fragments for building material (Aalen 1965, 41, 43, 44). Herders in Ireland in 1690 were reported to have dwellings “built so conveniently of hurdles and long turfs that they can remove them in summer towards the mountains, and bring them back to the valleys in winter” (Evans, E.E. 1969, 81; see also Evans, E.E. 1974, 62). More common and widespread in Ireland were simple, rough stone or local sod huts called booleys. These were occupied only in the summer season, when cattle moved to summer hill pasture. In parts of County Mayo and County Kerry, beehive huts were still used as milking houses and for storing turf at least to the time of World War II (Evans, E.E. 1939, 221). Some peoples who periodically shift residence are not really nomads nor are their movements included within the accepted definition of transhumance. They do, however, have at least two residences, though they may not necessarily exercise a complete or seasonal

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migration – they may spend only a few days at one location. Improvements in transportation equipment and access continue to speed up the process. The normal technique to move a structure is to dismantle it. In Thailand pre-fabricated sidewall panels and gables made moving easy, but dismantling and re-erection were not undertaken on the same day because of religious strictures (Chaichongrak et al. 2002, 11, 182). Among the Tonga in southern Africa, entire villages are periodically moved. When this happens, the new mud walls are constructed on site, but the roofs are carried from the old to the new location (Oliver 1977, 7). On the American Great Plains, the Homestead Act of 1862 provided for eventual private ownership of the government land if a settler met certain conditions, one of which was residence on the property for five years, and another was “improvement” of the claim. These requirements were often met by quickly constructing a small, flimsy frame hut, universally called a claim shanty. Every five years these could legally be moved quickly and easily to another claim (sometimes illegally sooner) to gain more land (Straight and Mustoe 1996, 77–8). Heavy wooden structures usually are moved by disassembly rather than intact (Burris 1934, 48). An easily moved dwelling is the wanigan, a rectangular, one-room building with very gently pitched gable roof and tarpaper walls, anchored by vertical, wooden battens (Hoagland 1993, 50, 228). They were used in Alaska in the 1930s and later to house itinerant workers. The wanigan was mounted on skids to enable its relocation on frozen ground or snow during the winter season. The movement of entire houses was usually limited to lighter structures. The so-called miner’s cottage of 19th-century northern Queensland, Australia also lent itself to movement (Figure 26-5). Melbourne, Australia was an early center of prefabricated dwellings, but their popularity was not entirely responsible for a shortage of native building material: It was partly due to the natural canny caution of its settlers in guarding against the common and unscrupulous sale of land without titles that existed widely, so that in case of a bad buy, the house at least could be retrieved. (Cox and Freeland 1969, 56)

Shipping prefabricated buildings from industrial countries to overseas destinations, however, is a phenomenon which developed mostly after the mass production of milled lumber, the introduction of steam navigation, and the perfection of railways. The design of exported portable houses sent from metropolitan countries to Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in the tropics in the early 19th century “seems to have made little concession to the different climate, let alone

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26-5. A miner’s cottage from northern Queensland. Simple, two-room, elevated structures such as this were utilized in the early days of mining settlements in Australia. Many are still occupied, in part because they were easily dismantled and transported (courtesy of Bell, 1984).

lifestyle, or social conditions of their inhabitants. After the 1850s, however, they became increasingly adapted to tropical requirements” (King 1984, 197–8). Everywhere modern materials, forms, and techniques have grown steadily more acceptable in replacing the traditional. Nowhere is this more strikingly seen than in the tropics, where cement wall blocks are replacing wattle and daub, and metal roofs supplant thatch, even though these “modern” building materials provide environmentally inferior dwellings to the traditional ones. Rapidly expanding urban areas also contributed significantly to the decline of traditionally oriented life. For most peoples, the future lay in the cities.

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~ 27 ~ Constancy, Open-air Museums The study of architecture, whether vernacular or formal, allows us, in the picturesque and memorable words of Professor William Carless (1925), “to steal a glance down the vista of time.” We see in the case of traditional building, the constancy of approaches and concepts, and at the same time, the modifications reflecting changes in culture, environment, economy, and lifestyles. We often find that the people and expressions which we study [...] are always changing. Yet old forms do persist, often scarcely changed despite their passage through years of use [...] traditional societies save as much as they throw away, remember as much as they forget, recreate as often as they create anew. (Vlach 1984, 3)

One must be careful, however, in assessing the influence of modifying elements, especially when searching for type origins. Remember the words of Viljo Rasila (2007, 64), who cautions researchers: After all, we are all inclined to come to logical, and to our own mind correct, conclusions on the strength of the information that is available to us. This is a frightening thing, for not only our unshakeable beliefs but also our thoroughgoing research will always be based on logical conclusions derived from information which may in itself be inadequate for the purpose or plainly erroneous.

The concepts that gave rise to the buildings have an obstinate tenacity. It is not the house itself which has such a hold on human intellect, but rather the ideas intimately associated with it – the materials of which it is built, the form it assumes, the location and orientation of the building, and the mystical and symbolic significance of each of these elements. As an example, one may cite the report of Timothy Yates (1989, 249), which notes that over the span of two centuries (1700 to 1910), a continuity in the form and use of the Mountain Saami (Lapp) tent space existed and is quite demonstrable.

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Furthermore, Vershoyle Blake and Ralph Greenhill (1969, 18) observe, “a lag or style might be expected, for settlers in a new country seldom imitate the most recent fashions in the land they have left, but rather those which are at the same time familiar and reasonably modern in appearance.” It could be added that if the group remains largely isolated from the culture of the larger surrounding peoples, they will continue to perpetuate the traits of their place of origin. As one example in the view of many other Americans, the hill folk of the remote areas of Appalachia deserved the derogatory designation of “hillbillies,” because of their many archaic practices. However, improved means of transportation and communications in the recent past have served to alter the outlook of hill folk and to soften the views and prejudices of the larger outside community. Remoteness and isolation have always functioned to protect and conserve ethnicity. In mountainous northern Spain, low, circular and oval plan, thatch roofed, stone huts, called pallaza houses, persisted until well into the 20th century. They housed both humans and animals. Norman Carver (1981, 26) reflects: These basic, almost prehistoric forms show little effect from even so radical and durable an influence as the 700-year reign of the Moors – strong evidence that, when the conservative countryside created a viable custom, it was not easily diverted.

Lena Andersson Palmqvist (1983, 46) offers a locationally more specific, and somewhat different, view from that of Trask. She writes: When comparing the rural [Swedish] architecture in Minnesota with contemporary Swedish buildings one is more apt to find similarities in the building technique, the type of house plan, and the style of the building [rather] than direct copies of Scandinavian houses. The buildings of the Swedish pioneers give many examples of direct cultural influences, and certainly also of improvements in technique, building material, form and architectural style.

In part it is the constancy that helps maintain stability in societies by providing continuity (Scofield 1936, 230). It helps a society to maintain integrity and identity, especially in those instances where the group has migrated into alien territory. The hold which tradition exerts is profound. The tenacity of tradition is expressed nicely by the continued adherence by many communities to thatched roofing. However, in the tropics, thatch today fights a losing battle with corrugated metal,

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27-1. A thatchedroof dwelling in the Kikuyu Highlands of western Kenya. The thatch is laid in rows of bunches and the roof is finished by tying a large knot at the apex (photo by author, 1970).

and in the middle latitudes, once dominant over vast areas, it survives today only in widely scattered pockets (Figure 27-1). In all these areas it also fights a losing battle with metal sheets, asbestos shingles, and even slate in some cases. An important facet of constancy is the surprising permanence of some individual traditional structures. Time and time again, writers have stressed, as I have done in the beginning of this chapter, the impermanence of vernacular or traditional building. Albert Manucy (1962, 10) cleverly observes, “the home of the common man seems to have a special kind of impermanence, as any homeowner can tell you.” In a more formal tone, Ronald Knapp (1999, 8) observes: no dwelling is static and fixed in time; rather, each dwelling mutates as fortune and human circumstances change. Whenever one encounters a complex dwelling, one must generally see it as an accretion of elements formed over a period of time that may be quite long.

Similarly, Nathaniel Alcock (1978, 109), stating the viewpoint of the archaeologist, writes: “Houses are hardly ever of one date; it would not be accurate to say never. They have always been altered, added to, or – worse – subtracted from. There will, therefore, be technical problems identifying and separating the various phases.” Hence, the importance of the archaeologist! Tradition may also be strengthened by a strong government which seeks to preserve its powers and those of the favored “establishment”

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by restricting innovation from other sources, thus effectively controlling possible competition. For a more modern instance of the opposite phenomenon, one need only recall the wholesale destruction of traditional houses initiated by Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania in the 1990s, in order to demonstrate the progressiveness of his Communist society. One of the most significant agents in the process of preservation of cultural links is the skansen, or open-air museum (Allan 1956). Most widely spread and successful in Europe, they now operate to some degree on every continent. The earliest and perhaps still the best of true open-air museums is that of the original Skansen in Stockholm, established in 1891 (Figure 27-2). Other open-air museums exist in Sweden, but they have not reached the size or the support received by Skansen. A similar situation exists in many other European countries. In some countries, a different system operates and attention in each museum is focused on a region or political subdivision. The best of these are excellent and would include the Weald and South Downland and the Avoncroft open-air museums in England. Professional preservationists know that all assembled and otherwise recreated places are abstractions of reality. Even if based on prototypes or historical photographs, re-created villages, farms, seaports, and the like portray very selective images of the landscape [...] he images that were preserved and reassembled were selected through a rather complicated, if subconscious, process of inclusion and exclusion (Francaviglia 2000, 61).

The visitor’s guides which the European open-air museums publish are excellent, quick-reference documents, enabling visitors to help understand the structures they see (Figure 27-3). They also raise the intellectual curiosity of a larger population to appreciate traditional buildings more fully. The value of these museums lies in the faithfulness with which they preserve structures in their original form and context as far as possible. At the same time, important modifications, which were widely spread, or which illustrate important changes in the society, should not be overlooked. Optimally, a mix of the two approaches is desirable. Old World Wisconsin, perhaps the premier open-air museum in the United States, has approached this challenge by creating ethnic groupings typical of different time periods (Figure 27-4). All of the museum’s structures are buildings originally erected by immigrants within the state of Wisconsin. The museum is situated in a glacial

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27-2. A series of summer-season log dwellings typical of central and northern Sweden, in Skansen Open-air Museum, Stockholm. Noteworthy are the rocky ground, the feeding rack and sheep, lack of windows on the huts, ridge combing of the roof, and the Shanghai-type fence (photo by author, 1994).

27-3. Visitor guidebooks from Swedish, German, English, and Finnish open-air museums. Each contains at least one map of its museum grounds, a brief description of each building or grouping, and often useful details such as floor plans or architectural sketches (photo montage by Myriam O’Neill).

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27-4. The German grouping at Old World Wisconsin Open-air Museum (photo by author, 1991).

landform called the Kettle moraine, where the naturally undulating topography and a dense forest cover separates each group of buildings, so that each time-period and each ethnic group cannot be seen clearly from the others nearby. A differing philosophy energized the creation of Upper Canada Village, north of Toronto (Cochrane 1976, 31–4). Established to memorialize the early settlement of the upper St. Lawrence Valley by the United Empire Loyalists, who fled there from the United States after the American Revolution, its scope has continued to broaden as an inclusive open-air museum for Ontario. Its initial momentum was preservation of early traditional structures from destruction by flooding resulting from construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway project. Today, it represents the leading open-air museum of eastern Canada. Open-air museums in Africa and Asia are only at the beginning stages of this type of preservation effort. Most of these were established or significantly extended in the 1960s, in the realization that such complexes could serve as important tourist centers, primarily to attract North American and western European tourists. The major difference between the African museums and those of Europe is that “while vernacular architecture in Europe is, generally speaking, a phenomenon of the past, in Africa it is still a living reality, providing housing for the majority of the rural inhabitants”

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(Mturi 1984, 276). Often planners and developers, who favor replacement of the traditional with the modern, take a dim view of such museums, which they feel compete with their projects for limited government resources. The establishment of open-air museums in Asia is also less well developed, but noticeable examples such as Meiji Mura, the Hida Minzoku Mura Folk Village and Nihon Minka-en (Museum of Japanese Folk Architecture) in Japan (Barucki 1990) and the Korean Folk Village near Seoul have a growing impact. The Museum of Isaan Houses at the Maha Sarakham University in northeastern Thailand is the notable open-air museum in all of Southeast Asia, despite its remote location. It deserves to be more widely known. The Muang Boran, an extensive collection of vernacular Thai structures from many parts of the country is also praiseworthy (Barucki 1990). In an attempt to bring about the conservation of Ming dynasty structures slated for destruction, China’s first open-air museum dedicated to residential architecture was created in Qiankou, Anhui in 1988. A much larger, more accessible, and thus better-known, open-air museum is the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing, opened in time for the Asian Games in 1994. Carefully preserved dwellings of different tribal peoples also have been collected and re-erected by the Department of Tribal Welfare in an open-air museum located in Orissa, India (Mahapatra and Patnaik 1986). Much work still needs to be done elsewhere in the country to document the great heritage of Indian vernacular architecture. A somewhat different approach from that of other open-air museums underlies the Taman Mini Indonesia Indah in Jakarta. Here, original traditional specimens of vernacular buildings are not moved to a unified site. Rather, a model representing each province of the country has been assembled. “Each model building is in fact a museum representing a province, within which exhibits and information on the cultures of the ethnic groups of the region are displayed” (Tjahjono 2003, 174). In all of the various facilities the principal idea is to interpret earlier folklife primarily to local populations who are increasingly affluent and urban, and hence largely divorced from traditional life (Knapp 2003, 78). The concept of open-air museums as a strategy to preserve traditional architecture has not yet taken firm hold in Latin American countries. Interpretation is largely lacking and no clear focus has been established. It is to be hoped that the existing collection may provide a nucleus for further development of a true open-air museum. Paul Oliver (1969, 13) raised several important, but unfortunately usually overlooked, philosophical considerations which ought to

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govern not only open-air museums, but all architectural preservation efforts. According to Oliver: The bases for evaluation, whether on aesthetic, planning, structural or other grounds, the decision whether to preserve the best, or the most representative: whether to preserve the virtuoso example or whether to save the anonymous but truly characteristic one without outstanding features or excess of detail – these remain problems for the preservationist. There are fundamental questions which must be asked on why examples should be preserved at all, and for whom and by what criteria.

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~ 28 ~ Change, Cultural Baggage and Borrowing, the Future Change and regular (even if slow) modification are basic characteristics with which traditional building must contend. It can be argued that there can be no change without tradition, that tradition provides the matrix within which any changes may be introduced. Even so, the rate of change may be virtually imperceptible, as small innovations are tried, repeated and proved to be effective and gradually incorporated into customary practice or are found wanting and dropped. (Oliver 1989, 58)

As an illustration of adjustment to change, Reidar Bakken (1994, 78) calls our attention to several differences in traditional building techniques between the migrant source region of western Norway and Coon Valley, Wisconsin, the area into which Norwegian migrants moved, beginning in the late 19th century (Figure 28-1). In Coon Valley, settlers abandoned many common Norwegian techniques, yet the specific origin of each migrating group could be determined from certain aspects of their traditional architecture, and for a time this kept the groups apart. Although the emphasis in traditional building is on constancy, and change is often viewed with suspicion, if not actual alarm, innovations are steadily experimented with and modifications are regularly adopted. Usually this process operates slowly, but in some instances the pace of change may be swift. Often modifications in traditional building are the result of contact between two different ethnic communities. Improvements in accessibility frequently allow a more affluent community to move into an attractive area of cheaply priced but wellbuilt traditional dwellings, whereupon they begin to improve, expand, and radically change the structures. A good example of this process exists in the Cotswolds where Londoners and other urbanites have taken over the fine cottages and proceeded to alter significantly their

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28-1. Norwegian immigrants to Coon Valley, WI originated in three different places in Norway. Although not recognizable to other Wisconsin settlers, the subtle differences in architecture that each of these groups brought as part of their specific cultural baggage helped initially to keep the groups separate (drawing by M. Margaret Geib).

appearance. Another example of this cannibalism is the modification of the Sunday houses by wealthy Texans from Austin for use as vacation houses. John Messina (2005, 30) calls our attention to the influx of affluent Americans and Canadians into the Mexican community of Alamos, Sonora to purchase and remodel stone houses. He says Jorge Olivera (1998) noted: By 1965, United States and Canadian citizens had been purchasing and rebuilding houses for almost two decades [...] although usually well intentioned, many of the foreign owners took liberties with their restoration efforts. For example, it has been common for them to change room sizes by removing walls, to add additional spaces, as well as to import and install architectural features such as fireplaces and door surrounds, carved stone fountains, etc [...] This practice not only violates the established policy of a true restoration – to return a property to its specific period and not to make changes that mix periods – but it also makes the effort of understanding the original building all the more difficult.

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Probably the solution to these problems rests with the weak acceptance and the poor enforcement of strong local regulations, a policy difficult to have accepted and enforced, especially in traditional societies where incomes are low, and where purchases by “gringos” are economically beneficial. Innovation also arises from inventions and new techniques. Throughout the world, numerous agents for change exist, often prosperity and innovations in technology, especially in transportation (Figure 28-2), which affects accessibility or availability of materials. A fine example of the kinds of changes that are occurring in many parts of the world has been provided by Mehar Singh (2004) with reference to India. “The traditional rural house of Punjab was a single story, flat-roofed, kutcha [poor quality] structure.” It usually consists of two physically separated units. The vasughar, meant for most residential purposes, is commonly situated fully within the village, while the bara, meant primarily to house cattle and as a dormitory for males, is invariably found on the edge of the village. Four separated rooms or spaces in the vasughar each have a different function (Figure 28-3A). The first, called the deodi, receives visitors. The second, an open courtyard has a covered verandah on

28-2. A row of dairy farms in southern Wisconsin. Their current affluence is in large part due to the far-sighted government emphasis on development of an excellent rural highway system, which enabled farmers to send milk to processing plants quickly (photo by author, 1980).

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28-3. Floor-plan evolution in the richer agricultural plains of Punjab State, India. A – The pre-20th-century traditional floor plan. B – Changes in the plan induced by adoption of mechanized farming and the Green Revolution. C – Agricultural prosperity permitted expansion of the house, incorporation of the baithak, formerly located in the bara, and addition of a second story (not shown). This greatly increased the house area (drawn by Drew Frater, based upon Singh 2004).

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one side and an open kitchen area in one corner. The third space is a multi-purpose living area, and the last is for storage. However, general prosperity, largely resulting from the Green Revolution and the accompanying introduction of mechanized farming, has brought significant alterations to the rural housing of the Punjab (Figure 28-3B). The reception room (deodi) which guarded the courtyard entry and the privacy of the dwelling: rendered it impossible for the bullock cart or the tractor-trolley to be taken into the courtyard [...] Thus, arose the need to provide a separate passage from the deodi and hence, to fulfill this requirement a straight wide corridor was carved out of the deodi, as a result of which the deodi lost much of its intended purpose of blocking free entrance to the inner part of the house. The truncated deodi then came to be used for other purposes and in most cases was converted into a baithak [male sleeping and social room], but without any door or window opening towards the inner side of the house. Entrance for the guests was provided from the outside. It had an additional door opening into the corridor but that was used only for serving tea or food to guests. In other words, this baithak was designed in such a manner that the privacy of the inner part of the house was fully preserved. (Singh 2004)

The shift of the baithak, which earlier was located in the bara (Figure 28-3C), to its new position in the deodi “marked a major departure from the old value system.” These changes were not merely acts of “re-alignment or replacement of one element by another, it was much more than that, it signified a change in the attitude of the people towards the parda system,” and against the societal seclusion of females. Later modifications, when the prosperity of the Green Revolution was fully felt, included a shift away from mud walls to brick, the addition of a second story, an increase in the number of windows, construction of a roofed kitchen, installation of a latrine, a separate bathroom and water hand pump, and the roofing of a much larger portion of the courtyard to more adequately shelter work space. These changes resulted directly from economic prosperity, which is pronounced in the Punjab, but economies do not always improve, and resources also can become overtaxed. Consequently, in such situations traditional ways of life must be modified. The Lapps (Sami) of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia are an example where shifts in economic activities resulted in drastic changes in vernacular architecture. Grouping all Lapps together for the sake of simplicity (Coastal, Mountain, Forest, Skolt), the shift was generally from tents, to turf huts, to log dwellings as economic

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support slowly changed from hunting, to nomadic herding, fishing, and finally to reindeer stock farming (Ruong 1956, 105–17; Vorren and Manker 1962, 42–87). The environment may be altered in other ways, too. Henderson et al. (1978, 23) noted that Plains Indians were forced to abandon skin tipis and use canvas when buffalo herds were decimated by white hunters in the 19th century. In a different example from South Africa, increasing population in the 19th century reduced the supply of range grasses suitable for construction uses, with a resulting shift to inferior wattle-and-daub construction for tribal huts (Frescura 1981, 13). The alteration in environment experienced by migrating groups as they enter a new area also may function as an agent of change in traditional building practice. The experience of European-derived settlers encountering the largely treeless midsection of North America and the need to shift quickly to sod houses and dugouts has been extensively documented. Long-accepted ways of doing things migrate with the individuals themselves. This cultural baggage, as noted earlier, enables the migrant to feel comfortable in an alien environment (Rees and Tracie 1978, 3). Thus, the commonplace colonial dwellings of New England were distinct from those of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay region, because the initial English settlers came from quite different parts of England, and settled in climatically different areas. A similar example is offered by Lin Heng-tao (1975, 26), who notes that the earliest Chinese houses in Taiwan are in the south and match those of Ming and Ching times in southern Fukien, from which the immigrants originated. Later colonizers settled primarily in the north of Taiwan, where they preserved the housing characteristics of northern China. Nevertheless, new settlers will invariably come into contact with other ethnic communities, with a likely result of cultural borrowing. The change may be as seemingly simple as happened with the Tuareg, who changed the orientation of their tents from west to south to follow the practice of a numerically superior Arab population (Faegre 1979, 70), or it may involve a change of construction materials, or even form. However, cultural borrowing does not operate in all situations of close proximity. In these examples, the transfer of technology is clear, but it is not always so. William Sherman (1974, 194) asks the question, “Who borrowed from whom?” pointing out that cultural borrowing is a complex process, often operating in both directions. The transfer of technology also may operate entirely within a single culture as economic levels rise and social customs change. As people become more urbanized and exposed to “modern” concepts

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of housing, traditional building is steadily altered in form, materials, and even function. The almost irresistible pressure to keep up with changing fashion is clear. Admittedly such pressures frequently improve housing conditions, but often the “improvements” are little more than cosmetic alterations. A final consideration is the natural disappearance of structures. All buildings decay – especially rapidly for those of mud or wood. Major social changes, including the increasing number of nuclear families, the decline of polygamy, and the reduction in number of children per couple in higher-income families also have affected domestic architecture, primarily in the decreasing size of dwellings (Petherbridge 1978, 208). Traditional buildings function – although often only imperfectly and always only partially – to preserve a society’s way of life (Bell 1973, 107). The struggle is difficult and often ultimately lost. The concept that the traditional dwelling is a microcosm prevails in

28-4. Symbolic representation of Pacific Northwest Coast houses. Smoke rises towards the sky world, the hearth and life are upon the earth, and after death the spirit is embedded in the underworld (from Nabokov and Easton, 1989).

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many societies (Marh 2004, 65), even though the concept may not be recognized entirely by the group’s members. The structure, explained by its ceremonial aspects, its traditionally accepted components, and its symbolic rules of usage, expresses categories and principles with the widest application in the society’s thought and action, and “so provides a comprehensive representation of orderly, universal forms and relations” (Forth 1981, 23). The plank houses of the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians replicated the world in a symbolic way. An aura surrounds the location and orientation of their structures (Figure 28-4). The coastline dwellings of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples are oriented to the water, but situated at the junction of ocean and earth, adjacent to the forest. Smoke rises toward the sky world; the hearth is upon or embedded in the underworld. Change and constancy are two fundamental qualities of traditional building. Constancy permits the scholar to identify the evolution of types and characteristics, even in quite widely separated locations. It helps trace the origins of structures, despite later modifications. Change, on the other hand, allows one to trace the effects of differences in environment, fashion, cultural ideas, and economic influences. Change and constancy operate together, although one or the other may dominate at a particular time and place. As my last thoughts, I call your attention to the fine statement of Maurice Beresford (1971, 4), which has guided my work herein. “Although I have tried to take account of all work known to me, there must be omissions which are due to that most subjective of academic traits, sheer ignorance. Fellow authors must not mistake this for indifference.”

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Index Acadia 8, 199 access 46, 57, 107, 111 adobe 72, 76, 78, 139, 141, 142, 180, 200, 204, 225, 227 Afghanistan 2, 19 Africa 42, 48, 77, 128, 138, 148, 194, 241, 248 Alaska 36, 58, 64, 114, 233, 241 Algeria 33, 53 Amish 64, 233, 234 Appalachia 15, 28, 55, 57, 101, 244 archaeology 11, 81, 146, 229 architecture 6, 55 arrangement of buildings 64, 67 Australia 102, 110, 122, 126 Baghdad 53 bake ovens 165, 184 baled-hay construction 90 Balkans 38, 81 Baltic three-room house 21 bamboo 87, 89, 107, 109, 123, 138, 224 Bangladesh 44 bark roof 126, 224 bastle house 23 bay 44 bell casting 134 Bhutan 57 “big” house 35 black house 124 block house 91 Blockstaenderbau 93 box framing 97 Brazil 59 British Columbia 115 bungalow 154

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Canada 16, 51, 91, 94, 95, 115, 134, 139, 149, 174, 236, 248 canal construction 84 Caribbean 49, 150, 151, 163, 174, 194 cavate lodges 119 Central Asia 40, 123 chattel house 29 Cheshire 162 China 9, 30, 36, 46, 48, 67, 70, 72, 108, 109, 116, 117, 123, 126, 152, 169, 186, 231, 249 chinking 41, 91 claim shanty 182, 241 climate and weather 7, 15, 32, 34, 36, 39, 48, 53, 56, 67, 69, 72, 93, 115, 122, 126, 137, 138, 141, 146, 174, 236 cobblestone construction 83, 141 cooking fire 32, 34, 41, 59 corbelled stone huts 83 cordwood 95 Cornwall 85 courtyard 47, 48, 49, 64, 201 coyau 134 cross ventilation 170 crow steps 85 cruck framing 97 cultural baggage 13, 256 cultural borrowing 13, 42, 256 cyclone cellar 144 dacu 46 death practices 33, 182 dendrochronology 102 destruction of habitat 156, 158, 159 Devon 23, 85 Direct Tax of 1798 44

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dog trot 28, 39, 93 doors 16, 25, 28, 41, 47, 50, 67, 68, 87, 141, 199, 220 drywall construction 82 dugouts 113, 116 dung 71, 90, 128 Dutch 8, 15, 42, 81, 126, 134, 177 earthfast 14, 23, 71, 108 earthquakes 109, 111, 163, 164, 208 elevation 50, 53 England 18, 21, 25, 51, 147, 154 see also Cheshire, Cornwall, Devon, Lake District, Lancashire, Worcestershire English family names 99 Ethiopia 16, 71 Europe 25, 38, 49, 58, 78, 113, 173, 180 eyebrow window 104 felt 40, 123 Feng Shui 70, 171, 197, 213, 214 Finns 16, 20, 64 fire 160, 164, 165, 166, 199 fired brick 30, 78 “fish scales” 131 floods see rain floor plan 33, 39, 41, 42, 49 food safe 109 fosgalan (stall) 32 France 37, 74, 94, 120, 144 functional decalage 12 garret 51 geographers 5, 8, 235 geomancy 57, 215 German/Germany 39, 49, 59, 84, 94, 127, 169, 183, 186 grave house 183 Greece 83, 119, 168, 171, 182 grubenhauser 22, 113 gruft 183 Guatemala 156

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half timbering 93, 99 hall and parlor 25 Hawaii 86 hearth 34, 50, 109, 186, 227, 229 hearting walls 32, 136 Hebrides 32, 55, 124, 129, 136 Himalayas 20, 33, 70, 123, 139, 143, 171 Historic American Buildings Survey 1, 7 Hopi Indians 67, 227 horno 74 hounds-tooth construction 79 housebarn 15, 18, 19, 23 Hudson River Valley 134, 177 Iceland 58, 77, 153 igloo 85, 175, 236 ile petesi (upstairs house) 154 Illinois 73, 74 India 3, 13, 20, 34, 38, 48.58, 68, 71, 107, 110. 125, 128, 176, 181, 207, 121, 249, 253 Indian adjustment 149 Indian earth lodges 114, 115 Indiana 60, 127 Indonesia 36, 42, 53, 57, 68, 104, 135, 146, 230 Ireland 15, 21, 22, 24, 34, 44, 50, 51, 53, 55, 81, 104, 126, 130, 181, 240 Iroquois 23 Jamaica 36, 164 Japan 13, 36, 42, 61, 67, 122, 139, 202, 164, 249 jian 46, 151 Kentucky 32, 101 Kibilitas 238 kitchen 20, 33, 34, 36, 170, 190, 194, 195, 197, 199 koshel 16 laithe housebarn 23

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Lake District (English) 85 Lancashire 162 Latin America see South America lava tubes 120 Lebanon 39, 123 ligluaq 58 Lithuania 20 liwan house 39 loft 50, 177 log building 25, 27, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 205 log corner notches 92, 93 longhouse 21, 23, 25, 104, 110, 229 Madagascar 41, 62, 69 Malaya 15, 132 Malta 83 Manitoba 5, 16, 58, 67, 137 Maryland 44, 158 Mennonite 5, 16, 115 metal roof 131 Mexico 42, 48, 90, 127, 141, 252 Michigan 58, 84, 95 Midwest 29, 68, 144, 199 modernization 152, 153, 154, 157, 185, 256 Mormons 74, 233 Morocco 20 mountain house 3, 71, 155 nail types 102 natural ageing 162 Navajo 60, 63, 68, 113, 115, 149, 153, 182 Nebraska 73, 90 Nevada 73, 96 New England 18, 19, 37, 51, 91, 94, 99, 101, 127 New Guinea 58, 108, 229 New Mexico 142, 165 New York 19, 23, 51, 73, 83, 84, 229 New Zealand 39, 44, 90, 104, 122, 127, 137, 190

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Newfoundland 8, 168 Nigeria 33, 49, 58 North Carolina 35, 36, 47, 93, 101, 191 North Dakota 59, 72, 73 Norwegian 81, 166, 192, 251 Nuristani 19, 109, 114, 187 ocotillo 90 Ohio 58, 61, 84 Ontario 23, 29, 101, 229 Ordos 41 Pacific Northwest Coast tribes 23, 41, 47, 126, 149, 227, 236, 258 Pakistan 55, 188 palm (for building) 87, 89, 125, 154, 200, 220 Pennsylvania 49, 79, 127, 191 pent roof 136, 141, 173 permafrost 58 Philippines 107 piles/stilts 107, 108, 109, 110 pit house 112, 113, 115, 228 plank framing 99, 101 Poland 78, 93, 101, 170, 240 population pressure 146, 155, 157 Portugal 6 prefabricated building 154, 241 puddled adobe 73, 74 Quebec 135, 139 railroad-tie construction 96 rain and floods 47, 49, 60, 62, 85, 96, 89, 107, 136, 139, 141, 144, 178, 238 religion 41, 62, 149, 171, 219 ridge combing 134 rituals 205, 207, 211, 212 Rocky Mountain cabin 141, 173 roof pitch 122, 135, 166 roof types 132 roofs 51, 97, 122, 123, 126, 132, 136

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Russia 16 sandwich house 74 sawn lumber 16, 93, 102, 103 Scandinavia 21, 50, 95, 144 Scotland 21, 22, 32, 81, 97, 124, 128, 136, 144, 169 see also Hebrides Scots-Irish 25, 39, 44 sedan porch 174 semi-subterranean house 41, 114 shakes see shingles shingles/shakes 93, 123, 126, 127, 134, 143, 232 Sikkim 33, 36, 57, 176 skywell 48 slate 84, 130 smoke bay 189 smoke hole 41, 109, 115, 188, 228 sod houses 76 South Africa 146, 169 South America 48, 90, 107, 114 Southeast Asia 108, 134 Southwestern United States 12, 90, 119, 141, 149, 224, 227 Spain 48, 81, 83, 121 stack house 29 stilts see piles stone building 79, 81, 130 stovewood 95 summer kitchen 18, 191 Sweden 50 Swiss 136 tabby 77 Taiwan 46 tank house 60 Tanzania 115, 142 taxation 29, 30, 91 temperature 15, 56, 86, 109, 114, 138, 143, 145, 186, 201, 202 Texas 81, 93, 192 Thailand 29, 108, 109 thatch roof 34, 123, 124, 130, 136, 144, 166, 167, 244

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threshold 33, 168 Tibet 4, 33, 38, 40, 50, 56 tile roof 131, 144 Toda 13 toilet 33, 36, 37, 38 topping off 222 totem poles 149, 174 tower house 20, 51 traditional building 1 treenail (trunnel) 97 triple-decker 51 tsunami 164 Tunisia 39, 116, 117, 119 turf houses 20, 77 Turkey 41, 116, 119, 186, 234 UK 5, 22, 25, 30, 42, 46, 78, 85, 97, 113, 124, 130, 167, 168 see also England, Scotland, Wales/ Welsh Ukrainian 67, 72, 115, 128, 192 unsympathetic restoration 148 urine bowls 36 Vermont 8, 55, 101 vernacular architecture 5 Virginia 25, 49 water 15, 33, 53, 60, 73, 76, 82, 126, 238, 240 wattle and daub 14, 23, 90, 108, 146, 160, 242, 256 weaver’s cottage 56 Wales/Welsh 23, 35, 49, 124, 126 wind 15, 37, 39, 70, 111, 123, 125, 130, 143, 144, 145, 163 wind destruction 39, 144, 163, 176 windows 30, 42, 56, 87, 104 Wisconsin 5, 36, 58, 80, 81, 84, 160, 184, 192, 251 Worcestershire 46 yurt 39, 123

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