Domestic Architecture

The analysis of space, meaning, and use

Vernacular Domestic Architecture in 18th century Virginia

Dell Upton

Dell Upton

Professor and Chair of Art History at UCLAB.A., Colgate University, 1970M.A., Brown University, 1975Ph.D., Brown University, 1980

"Board Roofing in Tidewater Virginia." APT VIII:4(1976), pp. 22-43.

"Architectural Change in Colonial Rhode Island: The Mott House as a Case Study." Old-Time New England 69, Nos. 3-4 (1979): 18-33.

"Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia." Ph.d. Brown University, 1980.

"Vernacular Architecture in Virginia: A Bibliography." Folklore and Folklife in Virginia: Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society 1 (1979): 73-94.

"Toward a Performance Theory of Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia." Folklore Forum 12, Nos. 2/3 (1979): 173-196.

and John B. Jackson. "Forum on The Architectural Historian and Public History." The Forum: Bulletin of the Committee on Architectural Preservation 2, No. 2 (1980): 1-2.

Carson, Cary, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Gary Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton. "Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies." Winterthur Portfolio 16 (1981): 135-196.

"Ordinary Buildings: A Bibliographical Essay on American Vernacular Architecture." American Studies International 19, No. 2 (1981): 57-75.

"Traditional Timber Framing." Material Culture of the Wooden Age. Brooke Hindle, ed. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1981.

"Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." Winterthur Portfolio 17, Nos. 2-3 (1982): 95-119.

"Slave Housing in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." A report to the Department of Social Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Manuscript, Smithsonian Institution, 1982.

"The Origins of Chesapeake Architecture." Three Centuries of Maryland Architecture: A Selection of Presentations Made at the 11th Annual Conference of the Maryland Historic Trust. Annapolis, MD: Maryland Historic Trust, 1982.

"The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture." American Quarterly 35, No. 3 (1983): 262-279.

"Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in America, 1800-1860." Winterthur Portfolio 19, Nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn, 1984): 107-150.

"White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." Places 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1985): 59-72.

with John Michael Vlach, eds. Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

"Anglican Parish Churches in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, II. Camille Wells, ed. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press for the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 1986. Pp. 90-101.

Incomplete bibliography of Dell Upton’s writings

Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia. New York, NY: Architectural History Foundation/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

ed. America's Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America. Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1986.

"New Views of the Virginia Landscape." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 96, No. 4 (October, 1988): 403-470.

"Imagining the Early Virginia Landscape." Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology. William M. Kelso and Rachel Most, eds. Papers of the 1986 Conference on Landscape Archaeology, University of Virginia and Monticello. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Charlottesville, 1990. Pp. 71-86.

"Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890-1990." The Architectural Historian in America. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, ed. Studies in the History of Art, 35. Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XIX. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Distributed by the University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1990. Pp. 199-213.

"Architectural History or Landscape History?" Journal of Architectural Education 44, No. 4 (August, 1991): 195-199.

"Form and User: Style, Mode, Fashion, and the Artifact." Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture. Gerald L. Pocius, ed. Social and Economic Papers No. 19.Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1991. Pp. 156-169.

"The Traditional House and its Enemies." Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1990): 71-84.

"The City as Material Culture." The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz. Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. Boca Raton, LA: CRC Press, 1992. Pp. 51-74.

ed. Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans; The Private Writings of a Kept Woman . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

"Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions." Historical Archaeology 30, No. 2 (1996): 1-7.

"Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, No. 3 (September, 1996): 238-253.

"The Urban Cemetery and the Urban Community: The Origin of the New Orleans Cemetery." Exploring Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VII. Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, eds., Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Pp. 131-148

Architecture in the United States. Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

"Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New York." in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. ed. John K. Howat and Catherine Voorsanger. New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 2-45.

"Remembering the Civil Rights Movement." Design Book Review 40 (Fall 2000): 22-33.

"'Authentic' Anxieties". Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism . Nezar AlSayyad, ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. Pp. 298-306.

"Architecture in Everyday Life." New Literary History 33, No. 5 (Autumn 2002): 707-723.

"Church Building in an Urban Age." In Sacred Spaces: Building and Remembering Sites of Worship in the Nineteenth Century. ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Mary Ann Powers, Worchester: College of the Holy Cross and American Antiquarian Society, 2002. 47-58.

"Inventing New York." Eretz (Israel), (June 2001): 44-48. [in Hebrew]

"Just Architectural Business as Usual." Places 13, No. 2 (2002): 64-66.

"Architectural History's Debt to Historic Preservation." Blueprints 21 (Summer 2003): 4-7.

"Signs Taken for Wonders." Visible Language 37, No. 3 (2003): 332-351.

"What the Mormon Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us." Journal of Mormon History 31, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 1-29.

"The Sound as Landscape." Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 24-35.

"The VAF at 25: What Now?" Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Special 25th Anniversary Issue, edited by Warren Hofstra and Camille Wells. 13, no. 2 (2006-2007): 7-13.

“Noah, Solomon, Saladin and the Fluidity of Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 68 no. 4 (December, 2009):  457-65.

“Grid as Design Method:  The Spatial Imagination in Early New Orleans,” in Architecture – Design Methods – Inca Structures:  Festschrift for Jean-Pierre Protzen, ed. Hans Dehlinger and Johanna Dehlinger (Kassel:  Kassel University Press), pp. 174-81

“Architecture 170,” in Design on the Edge:  A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903-2003, ed. Waverly Lowell, Elizabeth Byrne, and Betsy Frederick-Rothwell.  Berkeley:  College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley.  2009. Pp. 136-37.

“Foreword” to Second Suburb:  Levittown, Pennsylvania, ed. Dianne Harris (Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. vii-xi

“Commercial Architecture in Philadelphia Lithographs,” in Philadelphia on Stone (Philadelphia:  Library Company of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)

“The Political Iconography of Sacred Ground:  History and Redevelopment in Birmingham’s Civil Rights District,” in Portrait of the City, ed. Gillian O’Brien and Finola O’Kane (Dublin:  Four Courts Press, 2012), pp. 191-208. 

“Before 1860:  Defining the Profession,” in Architecture School:  Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, ed. Joan Ockman with Rebecca Williamson.  Washington, D.C.:  Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and Cambridge, Mass.:  MIT Press, 2012.  Pp. 36-65

“African-American Monuments and Memorials,” Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/upton, 2012.

Setting the Stage

PropositionsVernacular Architecture is regional

architectureArchitectural changes are a result of economic

changes.Restructuring of authority. Architecture became

the province of experts who could claim their position on the basis of knowledge and proved success, rather than ascribed social status

The progress of new ideas was rational, regular, even inevitable. Assumed that 18th century was a time of political and social consensus--conflicts were less the result of differences of opinion than of personal interests.

[unstated] only consider white, gentry]

Point of article

My argument is that the use of international models in Virginia was closely controlled by local intention.Georgian or "detached" house form in Virginia.

18th century planning was a painstaking operation that involved the careful correlation of space and social function. “To describe the relationship adequately it is necessary to see Virginia houses in their own terms: as solutions that local buildings formulated to solve planning problems of their own.”

Upton thesis

Rather than perceiving the Georgian house as a fixed and unalterable model to be imitated or ignored, Virginia's vernacular builders considered each of the elements of the detached house discretely, as a possible architectural response to a specific social requirement." It is best understand the process by looking first at the new social forms.. and finally, at how the new architectural forms were used (design).

Theory

Uses theory of names: what people call things. (from Cognitive Anthropology)

– “assumption: to have a name for a space indicates that it fits into a conceptual pattern and that to use it regularly is a clue to local practice. (p. 320)

Uses room-by-room inventories to find the names: hall, passage, dining room, chamber, parlor.

Conclusion of room development

The developed social structure of the mid 18th-century house, consisted of

– A hall, a formal, public room set off from direct access to any other room of the house.

– A dining room, a semi-public space that mediated between outside and inside.

– The chamber, most private first floor room.

– Central passage, or entry controlled circulation.

Social Molecule: adjacency and access

Rules of architectural composition

Different from social rules.Social core of Virginia house was hall (not passage)Geometrical core was the square.Skill was to translate the squares into the ideas of propriety, relative privacy, convenience, and tradition.Easiest to use a ready package, like the four room Georgian plan.Four room plan left one room un-named.