My research is concerned with discourses on ‘vernacular architecture’ in western architectural history. The term ‘vernacular architecture’ is generally understood to mean buildings built using local knowledge with local materials by people without formal professional training. From its earliest coinage, it was associated with the architecture of the ‘Other’, constructed as a category to define those outside of the mainstream architectural culture. The value of ‘vernacular’ architecture lay in its perceived timelessness and its availability for architects to claim, and its association with sustainability has contributed to a renewed relevance in the age of climate crisis. My research takes three key moments in the history of ‘vernacular’ architecture, starting with writings by Maxwell Fry (1946, 1982) [1] and Bernard Rudofsky (1947, 1964) [2], and concluding with contemporary publications on ‘Vernacular Architecture’.[3] My analysis charts the uncanny proximity of racialised bodies within representations of the ‘vernacular’, while tracing categorical slippages surrounding ‘vernacular’ architecture, including associations with the non-western (geographic), the tropical (geo-climatic), the racialised (bodily), the primitive or timeless (temporal), closer to/utilising natural resource (natural), growing naturally (organic), of indigenous peoples (anthropological). 

Interest in the mythic Primitive hut

Discussions of ‘origins’ and the mythic ‘primitive hut’ are familiar in architectural history.[4] For Gottfried Semper, clothing and architecture developed alongside one-another through the tectonics of weaving; architecture becomes an extension of clothing in his principle of ‘bekleidung’. Semper saw confirmation of his theories in a Caribbean hut presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The importance of the Caribbean hut was in its availability for representation, in confirmation of his own preconceived ideas, and not in its concrete reality. [5] Laying out a genealogy of ‘primitive’ in architecture, Forty outlines its influence on Modernism and describing the prevailing interest amongst architects in uncovering the essential character of things.[6] As early as Vitruvius’ writings on the ‘primitive hut,’ ideas of the ‘vernacular’ were being invoked as articulation of difference and the search for authenticity. [7]  Caught precariously within this nexus, but seldom discussed, is the ‘native’ body. Often presented alongside the Adamic hut is the question of nudity and clothing.[8] The colonial study of anthropology, exemplified by L’Habitation humaine exhibition at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris[9] (Fig. 1) underpinned many influential works, including Charles Darwin’s.[10] The ‘native’ body appears in the significant, racist architecture treatises of Adolf Loos and Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet le Duc. Philippa Levine’s writes that the colonial obsession with the native body surrounded its nakedness as indication of either savagery or childlike innocence, as well as its erotic potential [11]. The ‘native’ architecture of the colonies was placed upon display within ‘native villages’, [12] which included colonised subject dressed in ‘native costume’. To quote Anne A Cheng, relies on the notion of ‘Western modern personhood as inherited from the Enlightenment […] generally understood to be organic, individualistic, masculine, and white. […] that ideal has always been deeply embroiled with, not just opposed to, a history of nonpersons.’[13]

Maxwell Fry and ‘Mankind's Early Dwellings’

The Modernist cultural milieu in which Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry worked absorbs and perpetuates many colonial-era positions including its underlying racialism.[14]  While their built work drew superficial inspiration from local craft cultures, their oeuvre is firmly Modernist, with Fry noting there was little architecture to be found in West Africa where they were working.[15]  They attained authority to write about the tropics through their reputation as Empire architects, and their work at the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA in the 1950s.[16] Fry wrote a paper on Vernacular Architecture at the 1982 Passive and Low Energy Conference in Bermuda, laying out a racialised development timeline with European ideas at the leading edge, consigning tropical and desert regions to developmental stagnation. [17] Jiat-Hwee Chang notes that notions of climatic design in the tropics in this period were based on a ‘mechanistic and reductive understanding of thermal comfort’, which contributed to the belief that thermal stress hindered socio-economic development[18]. Standing apart from Jane Drew’s writing, Fry’s written oeuvre demonstrates an unchanging position from the beginning of his career, when he wrote Architecture for Children, and the end. Recent interest in Tropical Modernism, including the 2024 exhibition at the V+A museum, focuses upon techniques of passive ventilation in Fry and Drew’s architecture, and asks what lessons can be applied today.[19]

Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects

Bernard Rudofsky’s career, while ostensibly reacting against the culture of Modernism as he saw it, continued to operate through key mainstream practices, while seeking to re-invigorate it through invocations of ‘other’. His first exhibition at MOMA, entitled Are Clothes Modern? (1944-45),[20] came after an unsuccessful proposal for an exhibition on Vernacular Architecture. When Architecture without Architects opened in 1964, Aldo van Eyck and Team 10 had been exploring similar themes for years[21]. Architecture without Architects[22] continues to influence the world of architecture, particularly within early years of architectural training.[23] The anthropological and ethnographic content of the earlier Are Clothes Modern? forms an integral subtext to Architecture without Architects. He draws heavily upon colonial tropes of the racialised other to illustrate his points, finding notable precedent in the writings of Adolf Loos. Rudofsky’s obsession with pre-industrial, ‘unmodern’ cultures involved continual essentialisation and ‘othering,’ stripping them – often literally through visual imagery – of any veneer of modernity. The native in ‘vernacular’ for Rudofsky, are not allowed to be modern and definitely not their own terms, representing through colonialist imagery on ‘native’, ‘primitive’ cultures. 

‘Vernacular’ architecture and a changing planet

‘Vernacular’ architecture is invoked with renewed relevance in recent publications as a solution to Anthropocenic climate change.[24] Following logics of the development industry and the business of Global aid-funded knowledge economy,[25] highly charged details from the intertwined histories Anthropocene and colonialism are omitted. Appropriating ‘indigenous’ knowledge into the structures of Global aid-funded knowledge economy, the white western expert is positioned as an authority in humanity’s need to work together against climate change. Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes draws close attention to collective amnesia in accounts of the Anthropocene, a weaponised innocence and ignorance to the influence of the past.[26] Through the impetus of a ‘growing demand for resources’, the urgency of climate change and the moral authority of sustainability, cultural difference and critical histories are flattened and denied. Through the editorial framing and organising structure, which follows the Köppen-Geiger climate classification, a division is created between the global North and South. This is reinforced by choice of visual content, which reveals an underlying pattern of racialisation. Reflecting a broader cultural trend, the familiar racialised development timeline, with European ideas at the leading edge, has become absorbed into an ostensibly post-race and post-colonial world. In the early examples presented, the racialised logics underlying the author’s position are apparent: ‘primitive’ people are compared directly against modernity, which invariably is seen as the domain of the West. In recent publications, the legacy of these logics remain through subtle and uncanny associations. ‘Vernacular’ architecture retains an association with ‘primitive’, and the non-West, only now it is not made explicit, but instead is indexed through the uncanny presence of racialised bodies in photographs, the logics of Development and a humanistic view on climate change. These notions build upon the historic conflation between the non-West and civilisational backwardness, well as a flawed socio-technical notion of thermal comfort, dating from the mid-twentieth century,[27] in which climate is held as key determinant of development. These positions fail to account for the history colonisation, neo-colonial development schemes which placed newly independent countries under loans designed to be extractive, or the ongoing operations of cultural hegemony which privilege the white metropolitan expert. Such ambivalence to global histories normalises and legitimise the logics and violences of colonialism. 

I suggest vernacular architecture is invoked in two differing but concomitant ways – that of being an available technological resource for the purpose of environmental regulation and control, while simultaneously being presented as belonging to an atavistic other. It is presented on one hand as the living, timeless tradition of the un-enlightened masses, and on the other, as a historic, originary stage of the evolution of European architecture. With the continuation of the easy association between indigeneity and vernacular, the term ‘vernacular’ remains charged with historic racialisation, reinforced by its opposition with the white, masculine products of modernism. Of course, these impacts are greatly increased by a relative lack of up-to-date, critical scholarship on non-Western architecture, when compared with the West. Through this, it becomes clear that ‘vernacular architecture’ cannot be analysed without an intersectional framework which critically engages with the assumptions and the epistemic violences taking place. Without sufficient acknowledgement of the potential for violence and the historic violences of this position, it is all too possible for it to be interpreted and appropriated for this end.