Non-vernacular architecture
Non-vernacular architecture
Hans Ibelings
Whereas an estimated 95% of what is built worldwide can be regarded as vernacular, Europe has an exceptionally high percentage of architecture made by professionals. In Europe the proportion of non-vernacular is certainly higher than the global average of 5%, even though Europe, too, has its share of architecture without architects, to borrow the title of Bernard Rudofsky's book. That the proportion of architecture with architects, which might also be called professional, academic or representational, is much greater in Europe than elsewhere is a raison d’être for magazines like A10. Even so, the architecture that reaches the editorial pages of magazines such as this is more often the exception than the rule, in both quantity and quality.
Vernacular architecture is found everywhere, but everywhere it is different, depending on culture, climate and the available materials and techniques. For professional architecture the reverse is true: it does not appear all over the place in large quantities, but at any one moment in time it can be more or less the same everywhere. This may well be one of the clearest distinctions between vernacular and what for simplicity's sake is called architecture with architects – that the first is tied primarily to a particular location and the second primarily to a particular time. As such, these two kinds of building find themselves in different universes, the one a fairly static universe in which place is invariably the most important dimension, the other a mobile universe in which time is the determining factor. The first scarcely changes at all over the course of time, or only very gradually, the second is characterized by simultaneity.
Almost anywhere in Europe it is possible, given a little background knowledge of architectural history, to date architecture within a margin of a few years, even architecture with the most contextualist intentions. But for most architecture critics – for this one at least – the same is not so easy to do with vernacular architecture. Despite all the genuine efforts to take account of place and context, architecture is almost by definition more strongly linked to time than to place.
4 May | 2010 | Netherlands
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