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 UCLA
B.A., Colgate University, 1970
M.A., Brown University, 1975
Ph.D., Brown University, 1980
Incomplete bibliography of Dell Upton’s writings
"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.
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, 18251861. 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, 19032003, 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
Propositions
Vernacular Architecture is regional architecture
Architectural 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 18thcentury 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.