Vernacular Architecture, Vol.
41 (2010) 1014
CROSSING BOUNDARIES: REVISITING THE THRESHOLDS
OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
Daniel Maudlin
This paper discusses and questions the boundaries of vernacular architecture as conceived, interpreted and reinter-
preted since the late eighteenth century. The activities and boundaries of the Vernacular Architecture Group are con-
sidered in the context of work in other fields also concerned with architecture and the vernacular. The paper argues
for a broad understanding of vernacular architecture as an inclusive social study that is not necessarily restricted by
boundaries of time and place.
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Vernacular Architecture Group
Since the foundation of the Vernacular Architecture
Group in 1952, the groups activities have focused
upon recording and documenting Britains regional
building traditions: establishing patterns, chronolo-
gies and typologies. Five decades of detailed fieldwork,
rigorous documentation and the presentation of find-
ings through Vernacular Architecture have produced
an enviable record of a nations traditional buildings
in all their typological, chronological and geographi-
cal variety and richness. It appears to me that these
archaeological research activities are underpinned by
some broadly understood conceptual boundaries of
what is and what is not vernacular architecture. First,
that the vernacular is defined by social status not
only of buildings but also of builders and that the
term vernacular defines those buildings as being
in opposition to what is considered polite. Second,
that vernacular architecture is defined as the study of
traditional buildings. And third, that those traditional
structures are best understood regionally. The aim of
this paper is to revisit these boundaries and to consider
other approaches to vernacular architecture and to the
understanding of the term vernacular. It is my view
that the social duality of the vernacular and the polite
provides the definition of vernacular architecture and
that, while continuing to study regional building tradi-
tions, we can expand our study to include ordinary
modern buildings and building processes, drawing
upon recent discourses of the everyday. Such an
expansion still brings the challenge of the polite
threshold: where do you draw the line between what
is vernacular and what is polite? It is my argument that
the boundary is inherently porous, and that we need
to be less territorial and to accept that buildings are
ambiguous and hybrid and cannot always be defined
easily as vernacular or polite. A shift in emphasis from
the abstract study of form in both vernacular studies
and architectural history towards cultural production
assists our ability to accept these ambiguities.
The Vernacular Architecture Group 2010
FIELD BOUNDARIES
The primacy of physical structures is inevitable when
the physical evidence of vernacular architecture is
often the only evidence available to us. As the histori-
an transcribes the words of archival documents as
a first stage of research and interpretation, so the
fieldworker must record and document the fabric of
anonymous undocumented buildings. But this rigor-
ous archaeological approach to research also suggests
a deeper conviction that vernacular architecture is
best understood in terms of structures because
those structures are, or were, functionally determined.
Functional determinism, the preoccupation with the
relationship between site, structure and materials, has
been central to the formulation of vernacular architec-
ture studies as an academic field since the post-war
period. This approach was conceptually linked to the
prevalence of Modernism and Modernist thinking
in the mid-twentieth century, especially in schools of
architecture where traditional buildings were appro-
priated and re-presented as vernacular architecture.
In this period Bernard Rudofskys 1964 MOMA exhi-
bition and bestselling catalogue, Architecture Without
Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed
Architecture, was highly influential in raising architec-
tural awareness of vernacular architecture but it was
also very selective in its choice of examples. The stark,
deeply shadowed buildings of Rudofskys unpopulat-
ed black-and-white photographs emphasised formal
purity in order to promote a functionalist agenda
related to the Primitivist strand within Modernism.1
This search for the original, authentic Primitive Hut
within Modernism introduced traditional buildings to
a generation of architects, but it also redirected the
study of vernacular architecture away from a cultur-
ally sensitive, folkloric approach, towards a pre-
occupation with structures and materials.2 Within the
academic field of vernacular architecture studies that
DOI: 10.1179/174962910X12838716153682
 CROSSING BOUNDARIES
has emerged, the value of traditional buildings has
been based upon the narrow criteria of purity of
form, truth to materials, and economy of means, all ture is other. Whether contemporary or historic, the
of which are employed to establish the worth of a
building.3 As Paul Oliver has argued, underlying such
judgments is an inclination to disregard those aspects
of vernacular traditions that do not satisfy the[se]
criteria.4
Functional determinism led to the exclusion of the
human element from the study of vernacular architec-
ture as it emerged as a field of study in the post-war
period. While some subsequent students of vernacular
architecture certainly took the wider social and
economic context into account (one thinks of J. T.
Smith or Eric Mercer) they remained the exception to
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Vernacular Architecture Group
the rule. However, since the establishment of Folklore
Studies in the early twentieth century, traditional
buildings have also been studied within the fields of
ethnography, cultural geography and material culture
where they have been interpreted as artefacts of
human culture. Influenced by these wider fields of cul-
tural study, in the latter part of the twentieth century
architectural writers such as Amos Rapoport and Paul
Oliver extended our understanding of the elements
that contribute towards the production and evolution
of traditional buildings to include cultural practices
and social rituals, or the study of cultural impact.5
According to Oliver, the cultural impact of a building
is the totality of human values, activities and artefacts
which affect the formation of the building and which
give meaning and direction to the lives that occupy it.
By this interpretation, vernacular architectures
indeed, all architectures whether built of stone,
timber, mud or tin, are not simply exemplars of the
Modernist tenet that form follows function, but are
complex social and cultural relations spatially con-
stituted.6 Since the publication of Shelter and Society
in 1969, Paul Oliver has repeatedly demonstrated
that traditional buildings are a rich cultural resource,
highly complex objects that can express multiple
meanings through form and decoration, that enclose
habitable space and that frame human ritual and
the performances of daily life. Published in the same
year, Amos Rapoports House Form and Culture has
been highly influential in establishing the study of
traditional dwellings within the field of cultural geo-
graphy. However, in vernacular architecture studies,
functionalism has tended towards an empirical, and
at times an exclusively archaeological, approach to
research and publication that has removed the impor-
tance of people, and of the lives that they lived, from
the buildings that they built.
BOUNDARIES OF STATUS
I would argue that, over and above the discourses
of regionalism and tradition, vernacular architecture
11
is first and foremost concerned with those buildings
considered outside architecture. Vernacular architec-
vernacular is defined in opposition to architecture.
It lies between low culture and high culture and may
include the layman and the professional, the anony-
mous and the authored, as well as the spontaneous
and the planned, the circumstantial and the concep-
tual, and the passed down and the designed. Architec-
ture is viewed not only as different from the vernacular
but also as superior: socio-economic and aesthetic
hierarchical distinctions are both implied and explicit.
As such, vernacular architecture is a catch-all other, in
part defined by what architectural writers concerned
with aesthetics and authorship think architecture is
not.7 Vernacular architecture is ordinary, often small-
scale and mostly anonymous. However, despite being
seen as the other, both marginal and subordinate,
in relation to authorship and aesthetics, vernacular
architecture can claim people (the users, occupiers
and dwellers) as its field of study and can therefore be
seen as the architectural language of the people.8 The
etymological root of the word vernacular comes from
the Latin verna or slave.
From this fundamental social dichotomy the
vernacular and the polite comes the problem of
the polite threshold; where do we draw the boundary
of what is vernacular and what is not? Ronald Brunskill
defined the threshold as the point at which universal
intellectual design took over from evolved regional
building traditions.9 The threshold is framed in terms
of the differing social status between buildings and
also by the implied assumption that lower social status
equates with tradition and that tradition equates with
the local as opposed to the universal (in terms of
design and building production). The term threshold
implies a boundary to be crossed, a stepping from one
exclusive territory into another. Brunskills presenta-
tion of the polite threshold in the influential Illustrated
Handbook of Vernacular Architecture carries the impli-
cation that it represents decline, leading to the end of
pure vernacular architecture region by region.
The terms architecture and vernacular represent
notional purity at either extremity of a sliding scale:
the pure, universal, art object at one extreme and the
pure, regionally evolved dwelling at the other. How-
ever, within the physical built environment, buildings
and building production are more complex than this
and the vast majority sit at the centre of the scale where
ambiguity and hybridity is not only typical but charac-
teristic. For example, rural Scotland is today domi-
nated by a late-eighteenth-century domestic building
stock characterised by tenant farmhouses white
Georgian boxes in an improved landscape. The typical
eighteenth-century tenant farmhouse was the home of
the middling sort. It is relatively modest in size and
anonymous, built by forgotten migrant masons. These
 12 DANIEL MAUDLIN
Scottish farmhouses typify the middle ground and
they highlight the need to recognise the ambiguity
between the polite and the vernacular in order to
articulate many historic architectures. This ambiguity
emerges as central to our understanding of buildings,
and we begin to recognise the interdependence of
products and processes across the built environment.
As Paul Oliver insists in Shelter and Society, vernacu-
lar building and monumental architecture must be
considered together as part of an interdependent total-
ity.10 Similarly, Kingston Heath argues in Vernacular
Architecture: Cultural Process and Environmental
Response that vernacular architecture and architecture
are not just technical or aesthetic exercises but are
inextricably linked to the same social and environ-
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Vernacular Architecture Group
mental processes.11 The concept of process provides turn of the twentieth century, while championing
a means by which we can begin to explore a typologi-
cally ambiguous and hybrid built environment such as
that of the Scottish Highlands. From country house to
tenant farmhouse to cottage we can look to traditional
processes within Scottish building production that are
not fixed to building status, such as the persistence
of memory within craft training, or the application
and the dissemination of skills, labour, tools, materials
and components. The concept of vernacular process
is gaining currency among historians of early-modern
buildings; Peter Guillery in his study of eighteenth-
century London, and James Ayres in his study of
Georgian Bath, both identify the significance of
process in the adaptability of masons and in the
consistency of materials across the social spectrum of
buildings.12
BOUNDARIES OF PLACE
Brunskill saw vernacular architecture and the polite
threshold in terms of region: vernacular architecture
is a product of place and its decline is linked to the
tipping point at which different British regions reached
the polite threshold. The notion of the threshold is
underpinned by a concept of pure vernacular architec-
ture that reflects a similarly purist understanding of
the relationship between social status and place: differ-
ent places have a different geology and a different
environment, so different materials are available; ordi-
nary people with limited resources and limited cultural
networks can act only within their local geographical
limits. This thinking reveals the influence of post-war
functional determinism. However, the primacy of
place in vernacular architecture has much deeper
cultural roots that, despite the empirical objectivity of
researchers, connect to our post-Romantic reverence
of place as the location of identity; as Nezar AlSayadd
has observed, for anything to be considered vernacu-
lar, it has always been assumed that it must be native
or unique to a specific place.13 The long-standing role
of traditional buildings (often defined as and, at times,
defining vernacular architecture) in Western culture as
significant artefacts of people and place was estab-
lished in the late eighteenth century when the study
of folk cultures and the things they made first gained
validity as a field of intellectual enquiry and aesthetic
pleasure. Emerging out of the picturesque tradition of
the cottage orne (most famously Marie Antoinettes
pastoral-fantasy hameaux at Versailles), the Romantic
Movement celebrated regional traditional buildings as
being representative of place and place-specific folk
culture. Like Goethe in Germany, English theorists of
the Picturesque, such as Uvedale Price in his Essay
on the Picturesque, sought to emphasise the specific
aesthetics of place, including local building traditions,
over universal European standards of taste.14 At the
the hand-produced against the mass-produced and the
emerging machine aesthetic, the Arts and Crafts Move-
ment, in parallel with the development of folk studies,
was a celebration of the local in opposition to the uni-
versal. In the twentieth century, as mentioned above,
the Primitivist trend within Modernism in the 1940s
prompted another conflict, this time between regional
construction and materials and the universalism of the
International Style. This primacy of place excludes the
articulation of traditional architectures that are not
the clear products of place.
In his paper, Confining the Vernacular, Adrian
Green argues that since its emergence in the early
modern period the term vernacular has been, and
remains, so implicitly linked to social status that it is
a hindrance to the study of historic housing and dis-
guises the very social relations and patterning of
regional and national culture which ought to be our
subject.15 Changing this argument around slightly,
I would argue that an exclusive focus upon historic
regional patterning is a hindrance to the study of
social status as a cultural process within the produc-
tion of architecture (both vernacular and polite),
irrespective of place. Demonstrably, in some areas of
Britain the significance of place and the use of local
materials and forms declined prior to the decline
of building traditions (as passed on through craft
and trade practices). To return to the example of the
eighteenth-century Scottish tenant farmhouse, these
are neo-classical buildings built to universal standards
of design associated with progressive, modern intellec-
tual thought rather than regional practices. Yet they
were built by masons using traditional skills and tools;
Simon Bronner has identified tradition bearers in this
process and the importance of apprenticeships, in
rituals and events, in family and [in] institutions in
which tradition is invoked.16
BOUNDARIES OF TIME
Brunskills concept of the polite threshold, which
underpins his approach to vernacular architecture,
 CROSSING BOUNDARIES
is concerned with the relationship between status and
place, but it also places tradition in opposition to
modernity: once a regions traditional buildings had
been influenced by the universalising progress of
modernity, its vernacular purity was compromised.
This draws a further boundary in this case, a bound-
ary of time around vernacular architecture. In Brit-
ain, this boundary appears to be located somewhere in
the late eighteenth century. But, as we have seen, the
boundaries between architecture and the vernacular
are more porous. We can consider the generic, anony-
mous building stock of Georgian Britain within
the discourse of vernacular architecture, despite its
demonstrably placeless universal modernity, through
the identification of traditional processes in eighteenth-
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Vernacular Architecture Group
century building production. But is tradition itself
a prerequisite of vernacular status in architecture?
If vernacular architecture is simply defined as the
anonymous and ordinary and as the architectural
language of the people, then the term can be applied
to Victorian terrace houses examined by Stefan
Muthesius in the English Terrace House, to twentieth-
century modern vernaculars such as mass-produced
static-caravan parks and kit-houses, and to contempo-
rary evolved dwellings such as the slums of Mumbai or
the favelas of Brazil.17 Tradition and traditional build-
ings are just one aspect of a larger field. In 2007 the
American Vernacular Architecture Forum changed
the title of its journal from Perspectives in Vernacular
Architecture to Buildings and Landscapes. By renam-
ing its journal, the Forum has extended its boundaries
beyond traditional buildings to embrace the contex-
tual cultural analyses of contemporary everyday
buildings and places.
The study of contemporary vernacular architectures
as a language of the people is supported by recent
discourses of the everyday. The practices and places
of everyday, discussed by cultural theorists such as
Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, or by com-
mentators like Umberto Eco, an enthusiastic explorer
of the world of kitsch, are presented as a way to under-
stand the activities and values of ordinary people.18
It is what Robert Venturi described in Learning from
Las Vegas as the study of the ugly and the ordinary,
ranging from the mass-produced domesticity of trail-
ers and the suburban executive home development to
the decorated sheds of the edge-of-town strip mall.19
As with Oliver and Rapoports contextual cultural
approach to traditional buildings, Venturis 1970 Yale
studio project Learning from Levittown examined
the post-war houses of Levittown, Pennsylvania, as
cultural artefacts that provided signs by which we
can understand the post-industrial consumer.20 The
everyday may also include buildings that are personal
gestures of individuality: the attention-grabbing kitsch
of Venturis favourite duck-shaped roadside diner, the
idiosyncratic American motels enjoyed by Umberto
13
Eco, or the outsider art of the hand-made eco-home.21
Ideas such as de Certeaus notion of bricolage have
filtered into architectural thinking and have provided
a cultural framework within which we can consider
the evolved, non-designed conflation of structures
and spaces which continue to create places such as the
village and the city neighbourhood. The everyday may
therefore also include ordinary anonymous places,
non-places and exiled space, such as alleyways,
vacant lots, backs of buildings, undersides of bridges
and verges of motorways.22 In extending the field to
include modern and contemporary buildings the fun-
damental dichotomy of polite and vernacular remains,
with the vernacular still positioned as other to archi-
tecture. But the location of the boundary or threshold
is not fixed in time or place, and buildings continue to
be defined by hybridity.
CONCLUSION
I am in interested in eighteenth-century neo-classical
Scottish tenant farmhouses, seventeenth-century
cob-and-thatch cottages in Devon, nineteenth-century
labourers cottages and twentieth-century post-war
suburbs. I consider all of these to be vernacular archi-
tecture. For me, there is an established distinction
between architecture and all other buildings that is
based upon the perceived status of art, of aesthetics
and of authorship (often as recognised or defined by
architects and art historians). This is the single funda-
mental, if fluid, boundary of vernacular architecture.
A social definition of vernacular architecture is
important to me because above all I am interested
in ordinary buildings as artefacts of everyday human
culture. Vernacular architecture is the architectural
language of the people. Vernacular architecture stud-
ies can be an inclusive and continuous field of study
that can incorporate any number of methodologies
and perspectives and which may include such build-
ings as traditional, regional, anonymous, everyday,
modern and contemporary.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank James Ayres, Bob Brown, Jane Campbell,
Martin Cherry, C. Greig Crysler, Jeremy Gould, Peter Guillery,
Kingston Heath, Hilde Heynen, David Jones and David Moffat
for moving my thinking along through many discussions and
exchanges.
REFERENCES
1 Felicity Scott, Bernard Rudofsky: allegories of nomadism
and dwelling, in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rjean
Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in
Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, Mass, 2001).
 14 DANIEL MAUDLIN
2 Joseph Rykwert, On Adams House in Paradise (Cambridge,
Mass, 1981); Adam Sharr, Primitive: Original Matters in
Architecture (London, 2006).
3 Marcel Vellinga, Engaging the future: vernacular studies in
the 21st century, in Lindsay Asquith and Marcel Vellinga
(eds), Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First Century
Theory, Education and Practice (Abingdon, 2006), 8194.
4 Paul Oliver, Built to Meet Needs Cultural Issues in Vernacu-
lar Architecture (Oxford, 2006).
5 Paul Oliver, Shelter and Society (New York, 1969); Amos
Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Studies in Cultural
Geography) (Englewood Cliffs, 1969).
6 Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London, 1989).
7 Dell Upton, Architecture and everyday life, New Literary
History 33 (4) (2002), 70723.
8 Oliver, 2006.
9 Ronald W. Brunskill, An Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Vernacular Architecture Group
Architecture (London, 1971), 267.
10 Oliver, cited in C. Greig Crysler, Writing Spaces: Discourses of
Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment, 19602000
(London, 2003), 92.
11 Kingston Heath, Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design:
Cultural Process and Environmental Response (Oxford,
2009), i.
12 Peter Guillery introduced the notion of vernacular process
in his plenary address to the Vernacular Architecture Group
and Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britains
symposium on British Architecture and the Vernacular in 2007.
James Ayres returned to the theme of process in his paper
on Vernacular Building and the Polite Threshold delivered
to the VAG conference on the theme of the Polite Threshold
in 2009. The papers from the first of these conferences are
Daniel Maudlin is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory in the School of Architecture,
Design and Environment at the University of Plymouth Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK
Daniel.maudlin@plymouth.ac.uk
published in Peter Guillery (ed.), Built From Below: British
Architecture and the Vernacular (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
13 Nezar AlSayyad, The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of
Endings?, in Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), The End of Tradition?
(London, 2004), 129.
14 Sir Udevale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque (London,
1794).
15 Adrian Green, Confining the Vernacular, VA 38 (2007), 15.
16 Simon Bronner, Building tradition: control and authority
in vernacular architecture, in Asquith and Vellinga, 2006,
2345.
17 See Stefan Muthesius, The English Terrace House (London,
1982). Whether the Victorian terrace house could be consid-
ered as vernacular architecture was raised by Nicholas Cooper
at the VAG 2009 conference on the Polite Threshold.
18 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley,
1984); Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London,
1991).
19 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour,
Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of
Architectural Form (Cambridge, Mass, 1972).
20 Ibid. Learning from Levittown was a Yale student studio
project run by Venturi and Brown included in Learning from
Las Vegas.
21 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (London, 1986).
22 Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995); Iain
Borden and Jane Rendell, InterSections: Architectural
Histories and Critical Theories (London, 2000); John Chase,
Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism
(Monacelli Press, 1999); Diane Glancey, In-Between Places
(Tuscon, 2005).