Home-grown Architecture… Towards a new Vernacular
The Northwest Branch Day Conference took place on 15
th
October 2015 at the Friends
Meeting House, in Manchester. Delegates were welcomed by Paul Hartley, the IHBC NW
branch Chair. Hartley began the conference with a tribute to Ron Brunskill, the architectural
historian whose many studies into vernacular buildings had stimulated interest in their
conservation. Brunskill had died on 9
th
October - a few days before the conference. So it was
fitting that a day conference was taking place in Manchester, looking at vernacular
architecture. The conference was chaired by Marion Barter, from the Architectural heritage
Practice (AHP).
The Day Conference began with a keynote speaker: Dr Marcel Vellinga, Director of the Place,
Culture and Identity research group at Oxford Brookes University. His presentation was
entitled:
Re-imagining vernacularity
.
Vellinga explained that the definition of vernacular architecture was contested and disputed.
Ideas and terms were used like, indigenous and traditional, but there was no commonly
accepted definition. Despite this difficulty, the phrase was widely used and had various
associations. For example, it was associated with rural buildings and the notion of regional
folk tradition. The latter association was linked to fears or to negative feelings towards:
industrialisation, urbanisation and modernism; effectively, it was associated with the rural
idyll rather than modern living.
After the 19
th
century ideas of rural and self-sufficiency became linked. So what is described
as vernacular does change. This is part of the nature of living in a more dynamic and political
environment. Dichotomies like rural versus urban, or modern versus traditional, represent
limited views of the world whereas in reality often the distinctions can be blurred.
20
th
century conceptions of vernacular tend to depict such buildings as being: rural, historic,
pre-industrial, agricultural. Such buildings would include barns and one that had been built
in the local tradition of a given location. So in this common conception the idea of the rural
idyll was represented by a homogeneous rural vernacular as distinct from the modern/urban
situation.
Vellinga thought such conceptions were influenced by anthropological concepts such as
culturalism and structuralism. The conception of vernacular, as described above, was
influenced by the concept of one place – one culture - one vernacular. He thought this
conception was framed by the context of growing globalism and urbanism and the perception
this was leading to the loss of traditional vernacular.
At the end of the 20
th
century this meant vernacular studies faced a predicament: authentic
vernacular examples were hard to find. The studies were conservative in nature: they
lamented the loss of materials and skills; and they focussed on pre-industrial buildings. It was
similar in other parts of the world.