EVOLUTION OF THE ARCHITECTURAL

Evolution of the Architectural

Evolution of the Architecture

Introduction

Geographers have had a long-standing interest in architecture, extending from early studies of the distribution and diffusion of folk-architectural styles in the 1930s to more recent analyses of the cultural and political symbolism, meanings, and uses of buildings and architectural environments. 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 significant cultural artifacts that could reveal a fantastic deal about settlement and migration patterns in the United States, and he mapped the geographies of specific categories of the 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. Which included 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.

Discussion

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 ...