FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 1:2 - Winter 2001

Vernacular

The easiest definition of this term is that it refers to the language that actually is spoken. The vernacular is to be distinguished from the language of the elite. For example, in the late middle ages and the renaissance, an intellectual had to choose between writing in his local vernacular dialect or in Latin, the language of scholars and the church. This choice had social and political overtones. The great renaissance intellectual Leon Battista Alberti wrote his book on painting in the dialect of his native Florence because he wanted it to be available to painters (many of whom came from the lower orders). In contrast, his treatise on architecture, directed at the nobles and clerics who could afford splendid buildings, is written in a highly erudite Latin.

And here’s where "vernacular" comes into the vocabulary of architecture and urban design. Traditionally, architecture with a capital "A" has been a language of elites. How building got done for the more menial orders, or for prosaic purposes, was not a concern. Certainly that’s how Alberti saw it.

But somewhere in the last two centuries, architects and critics began to realize that there was something else, a "language" of design in the built environment that seemed to be the product of an "unconscious" or natural process. This "vernacular" seemed to belong where it was much more than the efforts of many highly schooled architects, so they tried to imitate it. Logical enough, but somehow the marriage between vernacular forms and high art designers has never been an easy one. It turns out that a cultivated speaker of a homespun language almost always betrays his real background in some way.

In our own time, the meaning of the term has become even more clouded. Our vernaculars are not the product of some timeless folk culture but of a very contemporary commercial construction industry. Architects often are torn between imitating the commercial success of the vernacular and trying to stake out their own territory as purveyors of a signature, high-art style. Architects and urban designers can’t quite work with the vernacular. At the same time, having discovered it, they can’t quite resist it.