A View of the Ordinary

Q: Does the forum endorse any particular methods of documentation?

A: The method speaks to the need for a lot of fieldwork. I often say to my students, “We’re studying buildings that haven’t been studied before. We can’t do that in a library.” The technique is almost archeological. That means going into the field. That’s easy for some and hard for others.

Obviously, you can get to architecture in a lot of ways. I stress fieldwork in my program, but it’s mostly because in the West so little is known, there are all these buildings that no one’s studied. Buildings are interesting and we’re drawn to them. But they’re engines of culture too. Our main concern is using buildings to get to ideas, to get to the intentions of the people who produced them. For me, that’s the essence of the field. We’re interested in common people, the people who left few records accessible through statistics and the census and things like that. We’re interested in what buildings tell us about ordinary, everyday life.

Of course, there’s always the danger of connoisseurship, where you document well, but all you do is differentiate between the authentic and the non-authentic, the real and the remodeled. Your investigation ends there. We go beyond that. I probably didn’t answer your question.

Q: It answers the question in part. But it’s a good segue. What prompted the creation of the forum 25 years ago?

A: The forum grew out of the populist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which was pervasive in American studies, a reaction to the fact that traditional history had left most people out. Where are the women? Where are the African Americans? You saw a groundswell of interest in ordinary life and it dribbled over into architecture.

A second impetus was the publicly funded preservation surveys, which truly opened up the world of vernacular architecture.

Q: Financial support was a big issue. You’ve got to pay the rent, right?

A: That was the thing. It’s astounding how many of the early forum members were working in preservation jobs. Across the country, survey money from the federal Historic Preservation Fund was channeled into state historic preservation offices. A lot of young architectural historians, or folklorists pretending to be architectural historians like myself, got hired for survey work. Really, that’s how most of the fieldwork was done. I think many people are still writing from that research, their careers still based on it. In 1980, of course, the survey money disappeared.

For awhile, though, there was a wonderful synergy between this interest in common things and all of a sudden people getting paid to go out and look at them. What I find amazing is that when we got out there nobody knew what to do. We looked at the survey handbooks and none of the buildings were in it. So we formed our own typologies. Ultimately, many of the surveyors went into the academy. As soon as they did that, they got stuck in their office grading papers.

Today, something is missing. Preservation surveys have largely been taken over by cultural resource management companies. Now it’s just a job. There’s not the engagement with the academic part that there once was.

Q: It’s a factor of outsourcing. It’s become production work.

A: Yeah, the spirit is just not there. It’s been institutionalized.