Any city's architecture can usually be summed up by a mix of its dominant styles, the standouts, and all there is in the middle. Like soup recipes, some only feature a couple of ingredients, when others are peppered with multitudes of aesthetic impressions and influences. Some are more blended, homogeneous—others are full of seemingly incompatible chunks. In any case, though, it's mostly water.
And what the city mainly consists of is usually the hardest thing to taste. It's the buildings we grow up in, the buildings we pass on our way to school or work. It's common. It's seemingly unremarkable, sometimes cute, sometimes ugly. When we think of it, we think of its use to us—a place to shop, a place to eat, yet its face so often blurs among its similarly forgettable neighbors and slips from our minds.
How do you describe it? What do you call it?
Non-pedigreed, not Architecture. Its form doesn't follow any clear ideological objectives or pure artistic guidelines. It's full of mixed messages, of idiosyncratic imperfections, antennas sticking out of awkwardly proportioned roofs. Those houses are cooked up as haphazardly as they are consumed. They are patched up, painted over, partially demolished, slapped with additions. They disappear, fall apart or assume a new character before we ever digest them. Some cities have more of this in-between architecture than others.
But again, what do you call it?
One might say 'vernacular,' meaning common to a particular place and time, built without an architect's supervision. That term, however, carries many loaded associations.
Bernard Rudofsky's 1968 MoMA exhibition, followed by Architecture Without Architects' publication, played a significant role in its subsequent popularization. The book cataloged the inventive structures of prodigious builders—from ancient caves and cottages to temples and castles, whose design was inseparable from local building techniques, the available materials, and climate demands. Rudofsky's writing brought a spotlight to the intrinsic and inherited knowledge of architecture, previously overlooked (especially in the West) for its seeming lack of academic or professional 'expertise.'
In today's industrialized world, vernacular architecture's qualities are mostly way less ingenious than, say, Tunisian storehouses. It's laughable to compare the stucco boxes we inhabit with the communal fortresses of Transylvania. Our vernacular dwellings don't match the complexity of the craft of their precedents. However, water is water. Its quiet dominance and ubiquity—no matter the quality—expose an essential sameness in architecture's function throughout history. The sameness has to do with the constantly evolving particularity of human needs. There's no certain explanation for the emergence of Trullo houses in 19th century Italy. Still, the dominant theory speculates that their charming dry stone roofscapes resulted from high property taxation in the region. It's thought that Apulia's people built their cone-shaped homes the way they did so that they could quickly disassemble them at the arrival of tax inspectors. Trulli might be objectively superior to illegal garage conversions of LA, however, they are similarly desperate in their need to accommodate the puzzles of our social, cultural, and political environments.
Around the same time as Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architects, Robert Venturi published Learning From Las Vegas as a survey of 20th-century typical American architecture. Venturi's research focused on the rapidly industrializing landscapes of 60s America. He examined the suburbs, the strip malls, the factories, and other dominant elements of "commercial/industrial vernacular" architecture previously disregarded by academia.
Many architects and architectural historians would disagree with Venturi's broad definition of 'vernacular,' including the mass-produced and the standardized. Many would argue that the term should only describe the site-specific, the crafty, the old. That stance stresses the importance of integrity and quality over commonality. While positive, it's impractical in that it leaves us with no word to name the dominant architecture of our surroundings. Without a general term like 'vernacular' that covers the obvious, it's hard to begin describing buildings more specifically.
More so than art's, architecture's existence in the world is predicated by functionality, affordability, and necessity. That necessity doesn't always produce the most beautiful and exciting things. But it tells us candid stories about space, our place in it, the laws that guide it, and us, in general, as humans. It's only by genuinely observing the mundane environments that we can understand our present conditions and imagine how they might change. So let's stick to it—the vernacular—generously, playfully, critically. Let's acknowledge the existence of water in our soup. And maybe then we can figure out why it might be oversalted, overpriced, contaminated, or sometimes just good enough. And what do you call it then?
…Pt II: Developer Vernacular & LA Fantasy