Exploring America's material culture, Common Places reveals the history, culture, and social and class relationships that are the backdrop of the everyday structures and environments of ordinary people. Examining America's houses and cityscapes, its rural outbuildings and landscapes from perspectives including cultural geography, decorative arts, architectural history, and folklore, these articles reflect the variety and vibrancy of the growing field of vernacular architecture. In essays that focus on buildings and spaces unique to the U.S. landscape, Clay Lancaster, Edward T. Price, John Michael Vlach, and Warren E. Roberts reconstruct the social and cultural contexts of the modern bungalow, the small-town courthouse square, the shotgun house of the South, and the log buildings of the Midwest. Surveying the buildings of America's settlement, scholars including Henry Glassie, Norman Morrison Isham, Edward A. Chappell, and Theodore H. M. Prudon trace European ethnic influences in the folk structures of Delaware and the houses of Rhode Island, in Virginia's Renish homes, and in the Dutch barn widely repeated in rural America. Ethnic, regional, and class differences have flavored the nation's vernacular architecture. Fraser D. Neiman reveals overt changes in houses and outbuildings indicative of the growing social separation and increasingly rigid relations between seventeenth-century Virginia planters and their servants. Fred B. Kniffen and Fred W. Peterson show how, following the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the structures of the eastern elite were repeated and often rejected by frontier builders. Moving into the twentieth century, James Borchert tracks the transformation of the alley from an urban home for Washington's blacks in the first half of the century to its new status in the gentrified neighborhoods of the last decade, while Barbara Rubin's discussion of the evolution of the commercial strip counterpoints the goals of city planners and more spontaneous forms of urban expression. The illustrations that accompany each article present the artifacts of America's material past. Photographs of individual buildings, historic maps of the nation's agricultural expanse, and descriptions of the household furnishings of the Victorian middle class, the urban immigrant population, and the rural farmer's homestead complete the volume, rooting vernacular architecture to the American people, their lives, and their everyday creations.

A comprehensive examination of American vernacular buildings.

"Hubka argues that even "vernacular architecture" scholars tend to embrace a model for understanding home forms that relies on iconic architects and theories about how ideas proceed downward from aesthetic ideals to home construction, even though this model fails to adequately characterize the vast majority actual homes that people live in, particularly in recent times after the widespread growth of suburban America. This controversial book proposes new ways to categorize houses"--

Houses and schools, Ferris wheels and carousels, stores and factories, temples and theatres, gas stations and bridges, banks and garages, an ice rink and a bowling alley, Grant's Tomb and the Chicago Water Tower, the early structures of Queens NY, and churches in beautiful great number - the buildings of real or envisioned communities were rendered by largely anonymous persons from the late 19th century until about 1950. A remarkably unexplored area of our material culture, American folk art buildings reveal much about history, architecture, imagination, and clever craftsmanship. Hundreds of examples from the nation's largest collection show a remarkably rich range of structures. A first-ever explication of this American artifact conveys reasons, provenance, actual building referents, and apparent delight over decades of making even small a place of one's own.

The authors approach the popular folk art genre of the house thematically through its depiction in various craft media--quilts, paintings, drawings, samplers, rugs, furnishing and more. 150 photos.

Visual presentation of the many types of houses built in America from the earliest Indian dwellings to designs for futuristic homes.