83RDACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORY/THEORYICRITIClSM 1995 121 The Cathedral and the Bicycle Shed HOWARD DAVIS University of Oregon I believe that the call for papers to this session is intended to tion is not only hard to make, but in fact may prevent the help bring the understanding of vernacular architecture into development of important understandings about the nature the mainstream of architectural thought. The need to do this ofthe built world, understandings about how it gets built, and arises because of an attitude that is exemplified by Pevsner's what the implications of such understandings might be for famous statement at the beginning ofAn Outline ofEuropean practice. Architecture. This sentence-"A bicycle shed is a building; These overlaps and continuities happen in various ways. Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture" - is representa- There are continuities of type, in which buildings share tive of an intellectual tradition that until very recently has characteristics of organization, style or construction. These divided the world of building into two quite separate parts. come about because there are also continuities ofprocess, in which buildings that are architecture, and buildings that are "Architecture" has included buildings that have been just buildings, are all done within a building world that is built by ruling elites, important civic and institutional itself continuous, in which most of the various players - buildings, buildings that have been built to last, and craftsmen, building inspectors, architects, masons-do not primarily, buildings built for explicitly religious or themselves make the same distinction that Pevsner did. spiritual reasons. It also includes buildings that have And buildings are complex enough that different parts of been able to demonstrate a good deal of architectural them may have come about in different ways, or that innovation, that can usually be attributed to particular different aspects of them are understood in different ways. A people or particular periods. building's plan might have one origin; some of its construc- By and large, domestic buildings have not been included in tion details another; other of its construction details yet this category, especially houses built before the Renaissance another. when architects who are now well-known began to design large houses and palaces for wealthy patrons and clients. The SANTORINI vast bulk of building in the world--the ordinary building fabric of cities and towns, houses and workshops and farms Take a rather simple example: a village on the island of and minor civic buildings-has not been considered fit subject Santorini, the kind of example we use to define for students for study, and is barely covered in the most well-known what vernacular architecture is. Here are buildings that have books about architectural history. been built in similar ways for thousands of years, with the What I want to do, with just a few simple examples, is to plastered stone walls that are so typical ofthe Greek Aegean, discuss what contemporary research is recognizing: that this and the vaulted roofs that are typical of volcanic and forest- distinction has very little meaning in scholarship, and that the less Santorini. House plans consist of one major room, with boundary between "building" and "architecture" is not a smaller rooms and alcoves adjacent, all behind an entrance clear one at all. courtyard. The buildings are so clearly "of their place," One might downplay the importance of this recognition. "indigenous," even "timeless." Of course the worlds of architecture and of building are not Now given this, what are we to make of the buildings at separate, since every building, vernacular or not, has to be the top ofthe hill? Here are classical facades in this extremely built. Architecture is just that aspect of a building that causes "vernacular" place. The facades are on houses built for it to rise above the ordinary, that allows it to cross the line out shipowners after the middle of the nineteenth century, and of the realm of mere building. But what I am hoping to show include aspects of the neo-classical planning that was re- is that because there are so many overlaps and continuities introduced to Greece, from Europe, following the indepen- between architecture and "mere building," such a classifica- dence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. (Ron Walkey 122 83RD ACSA ANNUAL MEETING HlSTORYfrHEORY/CRITICISM 1995 makes a similar point regarding buildings ofnorthern Greece.) ment was there, the precise shape could be elaborated and Here is professional influence on the buildings, and what was differentiated to conform to a particular stylistic requirement. essentially a stylistic import (which is indeed an odd thing to say regarding classical architecture in Greece). HOUSES, PALACES AND MOSQUES OF But at the same time, they are built in the same way as CAIRO AND TUNIS buildings lower down the hill, with the same materials and The courtyard buildings of north Africa and the middle East techniques. Architects may not have been directly involved, have had continuous development over several thousand but the tools of architects-plans and elevations- may very years. These buildings predated classical civilization, were well have been (and certainly were for larger buildings of fundamental to urban domestic architecture during the civi- similar style). Are these vernacular buildings or not? The lizations of Greece and Rome, were maintained in modified more salient question is, Does that question matter? form through the various Islamic dynasties and caliphates, and survive to the present day in communities all around the WOODEN BUILDINGS OF UKRAINE AND edge of the Mediterranean. These buildings therefore offer EASTERN EUROPE us a very large, and in some cases very well documented In a large geographical swath that extends from Scandinavia sample, to learn from. east and south through Russia, eastern Europe and Ukraine, Here is a big courtyard house built for well-to-do mer- there is a long history of domestic buildings with walls made chants in Cairo in the 17thI18th centuries. It has an overall of wooden logs. The most basic building is made up of a plan that is asymmetrical, because it is on an irregular site, single room roughly square in shape, with sides equal in but like many Parisian hotels, is organized around a court- length to that of available logs. More complex buildings and yard that has considerably more symmetry than the house as building groups are based on repetitions of this unit. Many a whole. Off this courtyard is a main reception room called traditional Norwegian farms, for example, are made up of a the qa 'a, three stories tall, that is very "architectural" in its collection of such one-roomed buildings, each serving a organization, proportions, and symmetries. It does not ex- different function. Many traditional Ukrainian houses are actly fit what we usually think of as the vernacular: there was made up of a linear sequence of square rooms. a high degree of specialized craft involved, for example, and One kind of typical, traditional Ukrainian farmhouse, the symmetries seem very carefully planned. In addition to built up to this century, has three rooms arranged in a line: the qa 'a, the courtyard has two outdoor rooms adjacent to it a central entrancelpassage, with a multi-purpose living room that are typical of houses of this type: one is called the on each side of it. In some cases the house is extended to four taktaboosh, and is in between the courtyard and the garden, or five rooms, with storerooms at the extremities. Although and the other is a porch on the second floor, above the construction techniques may vary from region to region-with entrance and opposite the taktaboosh. all log buildings in the uplands, frame-and-mud buildings in This house is somewhere in between the very simple the lowlands, composite systems in regions in between-the houses that are clearly of purely vernacular origin - shown for basic plan configuration tends to be the same, occasionally example in these plans of ancient Fustat, in what is now modified by porches or galleries that protect walls and modern Cairo- and much more elaborate and "architectural" foundations from the rain. There are similar traditional buildings. Now if we look at larger religious buildings in building types in Hungary. Cairo, like the Madrasa of Kalaoun or the Mosque of Sultan Now, there are simple, wooden Ukrainian churches that Hassan, they are clearly much more significant in the eyes of are very similar in plan and construction to the houses. For architectural historians. But they have very similar typologi- one of these churches, David Buxton points out "Were it not cal features. They are organized around courtyards that have for the miniature stalked dome perched on the principal roof bilateral symmetry. Their main rooms are on the axis of the it might almost be mistaken for a house." In the plans ofthese courtyard. The iwan of the mosque or madrasa- that is the buildings, the three main parts-narthex, nave, sanctuary covered porch at the center of the sides of the courtyard - (with the iconostasis separating the nave from the sanctu- corresponds to the taktaboosh of the large house. There are ary)- indeed seem to correspond to the three rooms of the many correspondences, in plan and construction, between basic house. the buildings that are clearly "vernacular," the ones that are The wooden church of modest size is related typologi- clearly "architectural" and the ones that stand somewhere in cally both to smaller domestic buildings as well as to larger the middle. religious buildings, which are often of masonry and often We can be more systematic about this hnd of observation influenced by foreign styles.