Guillery, P; (2017) Vernacular Revival and Ideology - What's Left? Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society , 61

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Abstract

This essay derives from a lecture first given at a Vernacular Architecture Group conference on vernacular revivals in 2015, reprised to generally younger audiences at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Westminster. Its retrospection about vernacular architecture, anonymity, revival and left-wing ideologies was prompted primarily by a bemused awareness of recent advances in self-building. It seemed timely to try to get at how and why certain ideas retain traction. Then, coincidentally, young and old were recombining behind Jeremy Corbyn to reinvigorate Labour, and the self-styled design ‘collective’ Assemble won the Turner Prize. John Ruskin, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Romanticism arise (how could they not?), but only in passing, for a revisionist view of what has come since. It is taken as read that a strong commitment to architectural design as being rooted in labour and everyday or subaltern agency tallied with the emergence of socialism and was an important part of architectural thinking and history in late-19th-century England. This is an attempt to relate that history to the present in a new overview for a new framework. It adopts an unconventional or purist definition of what vernacular means that will clash with many preconceptions.

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