![]() Vernacular architecture examples in the U.K. and Lesotho (with solar panel additions). Photos by Annie Spratt and hbieser, respectively. Townscaper takes its cues from a more European vernacular, of largely unadorned stone and wood buildings, dense courtyards, open plazas and the rounded towers of Scandinavia and Ireland. I don’t really want to get into the weeds of architectural criticism. It’s conducted in an entirely different language that only architects understand. But I feel there’s something about vernacular architecture that just hits us very deeply. Part of that is because of concept two: vernacular architecture is usually built to human scale - that is, buildings are constructed specifically to be experienced by people, on their own feet, moving around. Streets, homes, stairways, arches, towers, signs, bridges, all of this was built with the scale of a human person in mind. This is not the way we build things today. Today, we often build things that are intended to be seen from the scale of a moving automobile. Giant signs on poles, huge, wide, barren streets, homes that are 45 percent blank garage door. Our larger buildings (and even whole campuses) are built as giant, master-planned, built-from-scratch-to-a-finished-and-permanent-state monstrosities. These take either cost economies or the architect’s ego as the priority, and the human users are kicked way down the list. In traditional vernacular architecture and city design, people built things this way because it felt good, because it made sense, and because it worked. They understood generally how proportions worked, because people innately seek to build things proportionately. They positioned buildings near each other, because there were no cars and you had to walk. Here he is in his first book, “The Timeless Way of Building”: This is the simple way of human living.Ĭhristopher Alexander has been writing about this for decades. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.” The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. Some cities have actively tried to orient themselves toward a more traditional layout and design, most of them in the New Urbanist and Neo-traditional camps. ![]() Seaside and Serenbe are probably the most popular examples in the United States, but look at things like Poundbury in the U.K. And there’s no shortage of valid, serious criticism of a lot of these new (old) towns.īut over and over again, when we look at the types of places people say they are attracted to and want to spend time, what do we see? as well.Ī lot of architects hate this kind of thing, because they are told they must be ? whose mission is to utterly destroy the folksy, lowbrow past and blaze a creative and ingenious road into the future. ![]()
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