Building Tradition
How We Build: Part IV
This is an attempt to write, in a wholly inadequate way, a brief history of the who, what, and why of early building in North America. An attempt to begin putting our development pattern into context.
The primary source is the seminal Field Guide to American Houses, a dense, heavily-illustrated jaunt into the predominant architecture of the United States. It tells a good part of the story—not the whole story, but some knowledge of traditions of building on this continent.
There are, I think, a few similarities in early American architecture: Indigenous and early European building was simple, context-dependent, and communal. Both used the techniques that Christopher Alexander called patterns to build the places that they lived and worked, from plankhouses to wickiups to Capes and dogtrot cabins. The ways of building were emergent, honed via trial and error, adapted to climate and context. These structures have much to teach us about how we can build better today.
I’m focusing today on what the Field Guide to American Houses author, Virginia Savage McAlester, calls “folk” architecture. These are the early buildings, the ones that lacked formal plans, building permits, “skilled” labor.
This begins, of course, with the ways that Native people built here, the rich legacy of structures built by the many cultures of indigenous inhabitants who lived here for millennia.
Some still stand to this day: there are the Anasazi cliff dwellings in the canyons of Colorado, hand-carved adobe villages built centuries ago. In the Columbia River Gorge in the Pacific Northwest, archeologists have found the remains of Chinookan plankhouses, buildings with gabled roofs, made from planks of red cedar.
Indigenous architecture is highly varied, context specific. There are the domed huts made from saplings, bark, grass, and rushes by the Great Lakes, the woven, arch-roofed longhouses of the tribes of the East Coast, the portable tipis of the plains, made from stitched-together animal skins, the subterranean earth lodges, made via wattle and daub with gently bent tree trunks.
What stands out to me, across these diverse forms, is the way that what was built was shaped by—and complemented—the land and the respective culture. A tipi could keep a family warm in the blistering winds of the plains, while also assisting with a nomadic lifestyle. The pueblos of New Mexico—some of which are still occupied to this day—with their many stories and chambers, their earthen roofs, their gathering spaces, facilitated community life in that hot, arid climate. The form aids the community’s function. The buildings themselves become part and parcel with the culture.
And the Europeans, when they started to arrive, were flummoxed by the context of the New World, forced to adapt their medieval ways of thinking and building by the weather, using whatever was available.
This included the subjugation and violent dispossession of America’s indigenous inhabitants. They were made to assist with the building of these new settlements, too. In Texas, they built the Missions, quarrying and laying limestone bricks. In New Mexico, the Spanish forced them to use new tools, new techniques for making adobe bricks. There was catastrophic rupture, the outside imposition of foreign values on this land.
This was, in many ways, was the first degree of separation—at least here on our continent—the first ratcheting of a gap here between people, the land, and the buildings they leave behind.
But because commerce and transportation had not yet achieved hyperspeed, because one was still, in a sense, forced to make do with what one had, there were still some core similarities in what was built.
I think of the traditional Cape Cod cottage, a modest, stout icon that Puritans developed in order to handle the “severe and confining New England winters.” An early Cape was no more than two rooms and a chimney, fashioned with nearby oak and pine. A handmade shoebox crafted out of the elements.
And they were built, it must be noted, by their inhabitants—by the people who would use them to assist with their daily lives, with the local economy: fishing, farming, etc. That utility, like the tipis or pueblos, was still there. That relationship—codified in a structure—between function and form, between people and the land, had not yet been utterly broken. It was all still somewhat held together.
This persisted into the 1800’s. I recall seeing the log cabins in fields off the highway near where I grew up, two-room dogtrots made by German settlers, relics of that early wave of settlement. They built their homes using designs they remembered from their home country, the Hessian or Saxon traditions of building.
These cabins, half-timbered in a land with limited wood, were born of out of necessity, using old rules of thumb (patterns) that were adapted to fit the conditions of Central Texas. It was still people building with what they knew, with what they had—the same elegant, modest solution we’ve seen across other cultures and traditions.
The professionalized archetypes of the “architect” and “developer” were not yet set in stone. As Christopher Alexander, author of The Timeless Way of Building, points out, fewer than five percent of buildings in the world were designed by architects. The rest were made by us—by skilled craftsmen, farmers, laborers, peasants, people.
I’d like to mark this departure, between the folk forms of building, to something less context-specific, less relational, less communal. As the who, what, and where of building have shifted, so have our reactions and relations to our buildings.
The art of building has become a foreign thing, hidden behind a curtain, considered in most communities a pestilence, transformed into the catch-all that is development.
The old structures—and the cultural ferment they developed from—have much to teach us about how to make our buildings today more interesting, more edifying, more human. It begins, I think, by building ties with our community, our context, by reforging those connections that modernity has made us to leave behind.
Further Reading