Architecture and Geography

Folk Architecture and the Vernacular Landscape

Architecture emerged as an important concern of scholars associated with the Berkeley School of cultural geography, most notably Fred Kniffen, in his studies of the distribution and diffusion of folk housing types from the 1930s to the 1960s. Kniffen approached folk houses as important cultural artifacts that could reveal a great deal about settlement and migration patterns in the United States, and he mapped the geographies of particular categories of house and barn in an attempt to identify regional differences in architectural styles and reconstruct historical changes in settlement patterns. Folk housing was approached as one component of the “vernacular” or “everyday” landscape of North America, but this work was not limited to the study of rural buildings or the rural landscape. The prolific landscape writer and editor J. B. Jackson documented diverse, everyday landscapes, including suburban, urban, and roadside architectures and landscapes, and his magazine Landscape (first published in 1951) contained contributions from historians, architects, landscape architects, planners, geographers, and others who had a significant influence on geographical writings on architecture and landscape in North America and farther afield.

Architecture, Power, and Cultural Symbolism

Architecture and the built environment have emerged as topics of concern for a broad array of geographers since the 1960s. At times, the planning and political decision making behind the production of the built environment have been of primary interest, but geographers have also shown how architectural environments reflect and refract political aspirations, contexts, and symbolisms in a range of ways. David Harvey famously showed how the Basilica de Sacré-Coeur emerged as a highly contested building project, dividing the Catholic Church, Republicans, politicians, and the Communards in late-19th-century Paris, while in later writings, he examined how shifts from modernism to postmodernism were reflected in changing attitudes and aesthetics in architectural [Page 107]and urban design. In these and other studies, architectural geographies are much more than the geographical distribution of building types, and in a wide array of studies influenced by the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s, geographers have examined the complex meanings and cultural-political symbolism of buildings and architectural environments.

A luxurious hotel lobby interior. Geographers have examined the complex meanings and cultural-political symbolism of buildings and architectural environments.

Source: iStockphoto/Nikolai Okhitin.

Important studies have emerged of the cultural and political symbolism of colonial architecture and imperial cities, skyscrapers, shopping malls, zoos, war memorials, and other structures. Studies have focused on the broader discourses surrounding particular architectural aesthetics and movements, as well as the geographies of individual buildings such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the Red Road flats in Glasgow, the Mall of America in Minnesota, the New York World Building, and the Vancouver Public Library.

Geographers have often focused their attention on monumental and spectacular architectural structures, and less attention has been paid to the architectural geographies of more modest, mundane, or “ordinary” buildings, or the work of landscape architects and designers who knit structures into their broader surroundings. Architectural geographies are clearly closely entwined with the geographies of planning, engineering, and landscaping structures, while the start of the 21st century has seen an increasing number of academics calling for a focus on the inhabitation and use of architectural structures.

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