Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design: Cultural Process and Environmental Response by Kingston Wm. Heath (review)

In Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design, Kingston Heath presents a framework for architects and urban designers to pursue more distinctive and socially responsive architectural design through engagement with regionalism and cultural processes. The goal, Heath states, is to help designers move beyond the position of outsider, work within ongoing vernacular processes, and create “ecocentric” design projects that ultimately improve the human condition. Combining previously published work with new material and illustrative case studies, the book offers a model and methods for what Heath terms “situated regionalism”—a way of designing rooted in the point of view of local people and reflecting an awareness of the natural and social environments (xiii, xv).

The book covers theoretical and practical aspects of the concept of situated regionalism in two major sections. The first introduces contemporary notions of regionalism and vernacular architecture, drawing from changing understandings of both concepts in the era of globalization and rapid information exchange. Regionalism here is not strictly a matter of place but a social process—a way of place making that combines multiple cultural identities and consistent social change with more constant environmental factors (xiii). Heath’s definition of vernacular architecture sheds the isolation and relative constancy once inherent in the term, characterizing it as a dynamic process of development and change over time that is brought about through the collective actions of individuals (xiv). The term vernacular often describes something considered closely tied to a particular place; however, Heath notes that today’s “places” are often the product of convergence among increasingly diverse and sometimes divergent cultural and geographic influences. Vernacular buildings present a localized response to these systems and events, and Heath argues that reading such responses—the ever-evolving vernacular—is critical to meaningful intervention in these environments (xiii, 14).

Heath illustrates the structure of place-based design dynamics with a model analyzing regional vernacular processes and design expression. In the model regional expression results from local adaptations of preexisting and imported elements put through regional filters: climate, materials, memory, and social class, for example. The results are an altered set of conventions based on cultural response, or a vernacular architecture. Heath follows up this model with a basic interpretation of the dynamics of regional adaptation in the form of alterations and additions to manufactured mobile homes in southwestern Montana and southwestern North Carolina. Heath points to “cultural weathering” as useful evidence for assessing regional program priorities, material preferences and availability, social practices, and environmental strategies (22, 26). His process model is noteworthy for the way it positions design and building professionals within vernacular processes, pointing to architects and builders as common conveyors of new ideas and perpetuators of existing models within locales. Vernacular design may ultimately conform to a “system of shared rules” specific to culture and place, but architects, contractors, and builders play a key role in cycles of change and adaptation (40).

One of the most compelling points Heath makes in this section is that limiting examinations of local or regional building fabric to original design intent undercuts the local relevance of design intervention. This approach, Heath argues, ignores the evolving history and questions of regional identity that are critical to lasting, consequential design. Change and hybrid forms, Heath holds, offer important insights on political, social, and environmental change (3, 5, 12). In this analysis change rather than constancy is the most relevant dynamic in analyzing place.

This emphasis on change aligns with widening discussions in historic preservation that have questioned the relevance of the aesthetic, material, and temporal constraints of American preservation policy. Heath, who directs the historic preservation program at the University of Oregon, rightly notes that current policies tend to appreciate products over process and expressly exclude elements of the ever-changing story of place. While preservation looks to the past, it is also inescapably about the present, and Heath pushes preservationists...