Houses without Names: Architectural Nomenclature and the Classification of America’s Common Houses by Thomas C. Hubka (review)

Is there a more quintessential subject in vernacular architecture than the house? “First Comes the House”—the title of a 1959 J. B. Jackson essay—could well serve as an axiom of vernacular studies. The house is not only the oldest and most numerous of building types but also the most frequent topic in the literature of vernacular architecture.

And yet, argues Thomas Hubka in his excellent new book Houses without Names, common houses are often overlooked and undervalued; the scholarly literature on housing is fragmentary and sometimes superficial; and our nomenclature for such houses has yet to be standardized on a national scale.

The vocabulary of architectural style—traditionally employed by architectural historians and preservationists—is visually accessible and easily learned yet emphasizes elite status hierarchies. “Unfortunately,” Hubka adds, “this professional vocabulary of stylistic terminology can seldom be stretched to apply to most common housing, and it is a major impediment to awarding names and meaningful classifications to houses without names” (11). The preservationist’s preference for unaltered buildings (the test of “historic integrity”) likewise favors elite houses built of permanent materials, structures that satisfy all of a family’s needs from the start and require fewer alterations over the years. By contrast, the limited resources of most vernacular and speculative builders cause them to build more modestly, often starting with a basic core that subsequent residents adapt and expand as family resources and needs change.

Even studies of vernacular houses can perpetuate a trickle-down narrative when they privilege the earliest, largest, and most expensive houses—those most likely to have survived. Hubka urges us to study house floor plans, in combination with style, as the best route to understanding the full range of houses and thereby the broad currents of American domestic history. House plans have of course been central to such regional studies as Henry Glassie’s Folk Housing in Middle Virginia and Tom Carter and Peter Goss’s Utah’s Historic Architecture; meanwhile, useful contributions to a national classification system include Christine Hunter’s Ranches, Rowhouses, and Railroad Flats, Daniel Reiff’s Houses from Books, and John Jakle, Robert Bastian, and Douglas Meyer’s Common Houses in America’s Small Towns.¹

Building on this literature, Hubka sets out to accomplish nothing less than creating a national taxonomy of single-family house plan types. Over ten years he conducted case-study fieldwork in twenty-four metropolitan and rural areas across the country. He recommends the methodology that emerged in his research to anyone taking on a regional or neighborhood housing survey—the sort that will be necessary to refine his preliminary taxonomy.

First, he tells us, do your homework in the national, regional, and local housing literature. Consult local authorities on the subject—not only historians but also developers, builders, and real estate agents. Then drive around to identify the most common house types in your survey area. Guard against being distracted by unique or idiosyncratic houses and instead focus on compiling a comprehensive census of the most frequently occurring house plans. “This lack of demographic comprehensiveness” in the existing literature, argues Hubka, “has contributed to our current haphazard traditions of popular-housing identification” (11).

But how is it possible to accomplish a comprehensive census of interior floor plans? The reliance of traditional historic resource surveys on what is visible from the public right-of-way and the time required to visit large numbers of houses, not to mention an aversion to entering private residences, would seem to preclude such a census. Indeed, these impediments have favored a focus on architectural style, sometimes augmented by house massing and façade composition. Yet as Hubka demonstrates in a series of easy steps, it is possible to read the floor plan of the vast majority of houses from the outside: “You will soon amaze...