45 Vernacular

Vernacular

The Vernacular & Technology.  The Same & Form.

The vernacular holds gross reckoning over and beyond, tactile vestigial building.  The vernacular is after all a protagonist of old; functioning, yet outdated, reasonable, but outmoded, and untouchable.

Technology plays a part in modern bo-ho traditional attire.  But technology marries the contemporary building much better; time for time.  If it were not for the television opening a Pandora's box on why someone has the lot, when all they really have is a cardboard cut-out, and nothing worthwhile; while there are a great deal of programmes on architectural practical ergonomics.  

There is without doubt something to be said for a decent set of windows, and I would recommend 'Keller' or 'Hojum' for neatly detailed profiles, under a current zeitgeist of floor to ceiling glazing and efficiency, not overly engineered.

There holds a dream of housing for the masses, but why would a developer believe a lack of form making would be sufficient in abundance, when every man and woman really wants to invent their impression on the landscape.  Technologically it is available, to receive a breath-taking building not one quenched in acid-rain, to leave it spun in contempt for its wabi-sabi ageing process has aged before opening to the public.

The same form has no hold on timeless making for the architect has invented a number of new immutably designated styles for the taking, these include the following:

A. The fragment

B. The pitch with straight sides. (No guttering).

C. The pitch with straight sides and a flat top or lantern.

D. The flat box.

E. A combination of the above.

F. Curves on the interior of a cuboid.

They are all good archetypal forms, making headway into modernist form.  The agreement to perpetually repeat the same form allows a rubber stamp on the vessel, a seamless skin. The vernacular and technology on the flipside is a predominantly unchanging realm, with slight changes to bring colloquy to the mammal, into subordinate boredom over a broken gutter or dodgy remote control. There is no life in life, until one takes the plunge into design.

The same form means they become archetypal? Or because they are based on past forms?  Both since the antiquated established a mound of material to put a roof over ones head.  To think of your ideal building it does not take much to designate an elegy for threnode living, where by dead materials create an inanimate form coming alive through its design, vision, execution and form, evolution and in terms of the vernacular: detriment to the cause.

The vernacular is clearly a by-gone era, until the modernist same and form becomes a vernacular itself. To re-build this country sees ingenuity abound, only it must be done incrementally: renovating, knocking down and re-building anew,  Therefore the importance of getting it right first time is ever more prevalent.  For architecture is a language, and so we turn to Saussure the famous semiologist, in Jonathan Cullers, Ferdinand de Saussure, revised edition, Cornell University Press, New York, 1976, p.107, it explains this on symbology:

'Linguistics may serve as a model for semiology, Saussure argued, because in the case of language the arbitrary and conventional nature of the sign is especially clear.  Non-linguistic signs may often seem natural to those who use them, and it may require to see the politeness or impoliteness of an action is not a necessary and intrinsic property of that action but a conventional meaning . . . It is difficult to imagine a culture where a punch in the mouth might be a friendly greeting . . . Within this realm of available possibilities one can speak of signs as conventional and arbitrary.'

The capacious arbitrariness of the existing past vernacular leaves us with an invisible punch to the mind when repeated by copying and not intrinsically inspired.  When all we need is a convention to bring forward and assert the new in building.  It is inanimate without living in it but to remember someone will live in it makes the spatial characteristics all the more important, in a world dictated by money not craft. Once upon a time the vernacular was new, but to reinvent today could be too ergonomic, that is not to say we could not enjoy a purely invented load bearing structure; this leads to the infinitum of tensile structures  in opposition.

Forces of a new nature will hold the key to new ways of building beyond load-bearing structures, but until we are prepared to all use the five archetypes 'A-E', then and only then will we grow like a plant into a healthy organism prepared for the most extreme climate change known to man in this era.  For it is not hard to look in an architecture magazine for visual stimulation in order to search for a detail on how architecture ought to be done in the future. 

The vernacular and technology have died, but technology is being re-invented for a new paradigm in living.  The same form of a new archetypal nature will dictate how that technology develops, after all it is still the visceral of the drystone wall that holds us up as a society of shelter until the sun comes out permanently for our naked outdoor lives.