PILE 04: In Praise of the Vernacular
An energetic quality that weaves its way through all of the best things
This is another long one which has broken Substack’s email-length-limit. Oops! Make yourself some tea and then click on “read more.” Read one section at a time!
You might love today’s letter if you’re the kind of person who takes all day to drive four Google Map hours because you stop at every single roadside attraction: an old building, a weird sign, a small museum, an estate sale, an honor-system tie-dye stand (yes really), a used bookstore, a non-chain convenience store with taxidermy on the walls and local honey for sale on the counter. You might also love it if you’ve dug your heels in deep to a place, for any length of time, and worked to build something—physical or spiritual—that reflects your values.
As I made lists of ideas to guide future PILES, I realied I toss around the word vernacular a lot. I should probably define it—at least the way I see it. Honestly, I could write a whole book about different manifestations of the vernacular. (Should I?!) For me, it’s one of those “you know it when you see it” things, but it also has clear roots, qualities, and scholarship that I will take you through in this letter.
I suppose if PILES were a class, the first lesson on the syllabus could be an introduction to the vernacular. I’m pulling my teacher hat out of storage today.
Definition(s)
What is vernacular? What is the vernacular? What is a vernacular?
As a concept, vernacular overlaps with words like local, special, and distinct. It is similar to words like folk, amateur, home-grown. It has an even longer list of antonyms, opposites, things it is not: official, professional, academic, sophisticated, perfect.
Most dictionaries define vernacular in relation to language and architecture. I’m also interested in vernacular landscapes. I’ll take you through those three definitions below. (I will save my deep-dive into vernacular graphic design for an entirely different letter, which will also be too long.)
Dictionaries and precedents aside, I’ve come to understand and love the idea of vernacular as a layer of meaning or an energetic quality infused with the spirit of a place, community, or context.
Language
In language, vernacular is a word used to describe what is spoken by “ordinary people” in a specific area. Regular people. You and me! A dialect is a vernacular. An accent is a related concept. Vernacular is conversational. Vernacular incorporates slang and colloquialisms. It is not literary. It is not the language taught in schools, it is not proper grammar, and it is not expected to be the same across a vast region. It comes from a specific place and a community of people. It is localized.
Hella is a slang word that is part of the Northern California vernacular, a word that sounds oddly out of place when used on the East Coast (I know this from experience). UC Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg traces the origins of hella to Oakland in the late 1970’s.1 Like the word cool (and many other cultural signals), hella likely originated within AAVE and was adopted/co-opted by non-Black people, over time.
Boontling is another great example. It’s the linguistic vernacular of Boonville, California, a village nestled into the beautiful Anderson Valley, now home to winemakers and apple growers and back-to-the-land Boomers and Millennials alike. Boontling is described as a linguistic phenomenon, a regional jargon, or an argot (a secret code language). Boontling is a series of seemingly nonsense vocabulary words, coined from anecdotal moments in the town’s history. Bill Nun is the word for syrup, named after a man who put syrup on everything. Brightlighter refers to an outsider, someone not from Boonville (I assume it has to do with headlights coming over the hill? But I don’t know. I should look it up.)
There are words for cow, the coast, handcuffs, and a desolate area. There are many words for fighting, drinking, cheating, gambling, and sex.2 The words for pregnant (kaishbook), and potato (boo), reputedly come from Pomo words, the region’s Indigenous peoples. The list of words is revealing of the time (late 19th century) and the place it originated (an isolated rural California town). A place’s vernacular language can teach you about it, if you’re willing to listen carefully.
Architecture
In architecture, vernacular refers to buildings made with methods and materials local to a place, which emerge from the context (ecological, geographic) and a continuity of building practices. Vernacular buildings can be markers of cultural and regional identity, and usually exist in the domestic and functional realm: houses, barns, and community structures for gathering. Not “Big Official Buildings.”
Vernacular structures are typically designed and built by non-professionals:3 hand-made, improvised and intuitive, iterated and added to over time. If you look carefully enough maybe you can sense the culture and values of a place or a people reflected in its vernacular architecture.
Vernacular architecture has been studied across the globe, a scholarship emerging from an overlap between architecture and anthropology.4 Paul Oliver’s 1986 book Dwellings: The Vernacular House Worldwide is a compendium of the values, symbolism, and cultural truths embedded in “primitive” and “traditional” domestic architectures in nomadic and stationery cultures across the globe, past and present. He argued that neither anthropologists nor architects alone had the skills or perspective to successfully approach the heady layers of domestic space, and pushed for an interdisciplinary approach to studying dwellings of the world. Seems right; dwellings hold so much.
Lloyd Kahn, epic chronicler of vernacular architecture and lifelong Bay Area resident, began assembling and disseminating documentation of hand-built structures in 1970, with the publishing of Dome Book 1. In the decades since, he has shunned the dome and turned towards rectangular houses, which are more easily built piece by piece, as budget and time allows. His imprint Shelter Publications has gifted us Shelter, Tiny Homes on the Move, Small Homes, Builders of the Pacific Coast, and many more publications chronicling hand-built structures and the people who built them. Kahn is tireless in his documentation and taxonomy of vernacular cultural phenomena.5 He’s a great builder, too.
There *is* a difference between vernacular the adjective (“vernacular architecture”) and vernacular the noun (“the region’s architectural vernacular”). They’re related, but not exactly the same. I may be splitting hairs here, but I think the distinction is useful. Here’s an example.
Homes designed and built early-20th-century California by the architect Bernard Maybeck aren’t quite vernacular architecture—they’re not typically humble, improvised, or iterated upon. They’re grand, for their time. Maybeck was a trained professional who worked for well-to-do clients. But, as part of the First Tradition of the Bay Region Style, they ARE part of the Bay Area’s architectural vernacular, because their style developed in response to the region’s unique environmental and cultural context (many were uninsulated, because, whatever! California!), and they utilized the region’s unique materials (so much redwood). They’ve also become visually and culturally associated with the Bay Area.
Landscape
Now let us step into the vernacular landscape.
A vernacular landscape is one that has evolved over time, as a result of the uses of those who occupy it. The physical characteristics of the vernacular landscape are reflective of the culture, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the people whose presence have shaped it.
Unlike language or architecture, this dimension hasn’t quite made it into the dictionaries yet. The scholar and geographer John Brinkerhoff (J.B.) Jackson, founder of Landscape magazine6, popularized the idea that everyday domestic landscapes are deserving of careful consideration and yes, academic study. (Just because the vernacular isn’t academic doesn’t mean academics aren’t interested!)
To see a vernacular landscape, Jackson looked for evidence of time and humanity. If we look at the ways human-altered landscapes evolved over time through everyday use, he suggested that we might see the values of a culture or community reflected in its built environment .
Jackson looked at the everyday (fence posts, mailboxes, cemeteries) rather than the monumental. He looked at the humble and domestic (mobile homes, tract houses) rather than the massive and commercial. He focused on rural, agrarian places (the farmhouse, the dirt road) which is counter to academia’s urban bias.7
Jackson looked at a type of landscape generated by assembled, adaptive response by individuals in communities—additions on homes, customization of shared streetscapes, multi-use spaces within humble, low-income communities—rather than top-down planning by governments or developers. He challenged the formal study of landscape in countless ways: adjusting the scale, widening the berth, and giving voice to the undervalued. He respected and studied the living landscapes inhabited by communities at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum.8
Here in the Bay Area lies Druid Heights, perched on the side of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Druid Heights is a nearly-defunct alternative living experiment slowly and quietly returning to the earth. (“Not a commune” I was told, by one of its original builders.) There are so many layers of the vernacular here: it’s a collection of vernacular buildings that together form a vernacular landscape, with much evidence of cultural values and attitudes embedded in the landscape. (There is a lot written about this place if you’d like to know more!9)
Though the stories about the poets and builders who created this place are quite interesting, for me the more compelling cultural story revealed by Druid Heights is the narrative of the present—about the values and priorities of the National Park Service, who now owns the land. I think the place reveals really interesting intersectional complexities about historic preservation, queer legacies, eminent domain, habitat restoration, and the politics of land ownership. Druid Heights continues to change over time, at the hands of the people and entities who inhabit and steward it, and with each iteration it asks questions about how a landscape can be held in common.
The Sense, the Energy, the Quality Without a Name
What connects vernacular language, architecture, and landscape? Why is the vernacular so appealing? I turn these questions over and over, all the time, like fidgeting with a smooth rock in my pocket. That smooth rock is the curiosity I take with me everywhere. For me, the vernacular offers a sense of humanity, connection, and aliveness.
In 1977, the architect Christopher Alexander10 and his colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Structure published A Pattern Language, capturing their extensive fieldwork and research into the making of vernacular spaces. To document the forms they witnessed, they developed a taxonomy of “patterns.” They started small, in corners of the home, and zoomed out to neighborhoods, towns, and regional planning. The big idea of this book is that people should build their own spaces for living, over time, according to their needs. The individual patterns are intended to be used in combination, dependent on circumstance—like words and phrases within a language. In a true 1970s Berkeley attitude, the authors hoped their ideas could radically transform the architecture profession and change the way things were built. Many would say they succeeded.
You’ve likely heard of this book. In my world, I can’t swing a screen-printed tote bag without hitting a DIY-builder-superfreak-fan of A Pattern Language, eager to evangelize about sleeping nooks or internal courtyards or rattle off the proper minimum depth of a front porch. (I love, laugh, and live with one of these people.)
I appreciate A Pattern Language, and recognize its cultural impact, which ripples far beyond architecture. But my favorite Christopher Alexander piece is a single chapter in another book called The Timeless Way of Building.11
In a chapter called “The Quality Without a Name,” he embraces the futile process of trying to name the defining characteristic of “timeless” buildings. I love his methodology: he’s searching, yearning, and admitting that the most important things might evade language completely. Words like alive, whole, comfortable, and free come close, but none of them *really* captures the quality that living spaces should aspire to. When I say “living spaces,” yes, I mean spaces for doing your life: kitchen, hallway, bedroom, backyard. But I also mean spaces that are alive, activated, and vibrating with energy. Spaces that are living.
Similar to the Quality Without a Name, I think vernacular is a quality that things have when they’re alive, vibrating with human energy, and porous to an infinite and connected web of people, place, and time.
I love Alexander’s designed-to-fail strategy for trying to name the quality without a name. It’s a beautiful process: its point is not to find a definition, but to illustrate how this quality is so rich, complex, nuanced, and important that it defies language. It’s more of a feeling. Can’t you think of so many crucial, yet unnameable feelings?
My own futile suggestions, to add to his list, are: imperfect, DIY, homey, humble, slow, human, analog, amateur, assembled, and patchwork.
Why Vernacular?
I suspect that my attraction to the vernacular is that it’s a refreshing, human-scale antidote to the globalized, connected, modernized world I find myself in. As a graphic designer for hire in the Bay Area, I sometimes work for technology corporations. I have one foot in the world of rapidly-iterated user design: one-size-fits-all, pre-fabricated technology solutions. I’ve seen behind the curtain and know that there’s a team of well-paid, intelligent people trying to solve all of my software pain points, optimize my use, ease my churn, and keep me plugged in until I die. It’s dizzying.
Through the portal of my pocket computer and its social networks I’m connected at any given time to a global web of friends, colleagues, distant cousins, and images of places far, far away. As incredible as it may be, I find this swirling, fragmented experience of the fast and connected world to be exhausting.
And so with one foot in that world, I try to keep my other foot in some other, slower world: the world of the hand-made, spontaneously assembled, messily customized, and delightfully make-do. I find myself craving a rootedness to place, to the dirt beneath my bones-and-blood body, to the patch of earth that holds my earthly human form. The vernacular is grounding. I can see my self, my human self, reflected in the humanity of the vernacular. In the vernacular I find a sense of history and belonging. Holding something made by another human hand can feel like holding that human hand.12 Sitting in a chair or a house made by a human can feel like being cradled, held, embraced by a sense of intention and care—even if the chair isn’t factually comfortable (tell me you’ve sat in a homemade chair without telling me you’ve sat in a homemade chair). The Quality Without a Name may evade language, but it sure feels good.
A parallel word to vernacular—not quite a synonym but something close—is folk. We know about folk music and folk art: forms of expression and culture that originate with the people, the mass, the wage-earners, the proletariats. Popular expressions that emerge from within a community and pass between generations with more regard for meaning and narrative than for authorship or ego. Folk is shared. It’s co-owned. It’s located.
I read somewhere a nice description of the difference between mainstream and folk culture. In mainstream culture—often manifesting as mass media—things change very quickly over time, while very little changes across geographic space. A meme pops up on the internet in both Lagos and Brooklyn, but is outdated tomorrow. A TV show is streamed in Tokyo, Mexico City, Ottowa, and as soon as it’s aired, global fans await the next installment.
But folk culture—often emergent as traditional craft, spoken narrative, traditional music, dance styles, visual motifs—doesn’t change much over time, but changes dramatically from place to place. The folk culture of a town in the Swiss Alps will be different than the folk culture on an island in the South Pacific, but within that mountain town or beach island, the folk culture may not change dramatically year to year, or even decade to decade. It is tied to geography, to material, to climate, to tradition, and to repetition.
I wish I remembered where I read this! There’s plenty of folklore scholarship out there that I haven’t touched, and I’m obviously no anthropologist or ethnographer. Maybe I’m a “folk scholar” in a different way—a real amateur, an independent, a stubborn non-professional, cobbling together understanding here and there, bit by bit.
A Growing Understanding
My attraction to the vernacular is emotional. I am seeing now that it is also a mark of my privilege. It does not escape my critical attention that I’m able to embrace rootedness and find pleasure in a soft sense of humanity, at a time when the nastiest and most unfathomably evil shit is taking place daily across the world. Please don’t skip this part.
I’ve been drafting this piece of writing since 2018. I am slow to build understanding around big ideas. Now we’re here, I don’t know how to write in 2024 about connecting with place—about culture reflected in the built environment, or about the assembling of shared meaning and values over time within a landscape—without writing about Israel’s violent destruction of Gaza. Seventeen square miles, destroyed in 150 days. 30,000 people dead and countless others starving, injured, displaced, and still under attack. Twelve universities, at least twenty hospitals, at least 378 schools, 1,000 mosques, and at least nine cultural heritage sites: destroyed. I can’t look up the number of parks, street corners, neighborhood squares, notable trees, benches, backyards, favorite cafes, front stoops, or neighborhood libraries that are gone. Places made special by first kisses, homebirths, dancing, singing, and being together—I don’t know how to quantify or articulate this loss. The most important things defy language.
Genocide is unacceptable and the loss of human life weighs heavy, heavy on me. Ethnocide—the deliberate and systematic destruction of a culture—is unbearable. Domicide—the widespread and systematic destruction of homes—breaks my heart. Israel, with funding and weapons from my government, has destroyed so much.
If the essence of the vernacular is connection to place and humanity, then what Israel is doing now to Gaza is vernacular’s antithesis. These are fresh ideas, be patient with me: in the same way the vernacular is positioned as being NOT professional, perfect, efficient, or official, I want to argue that it is also NOT capitalism, NOT imperialism, NOT a gross imbalance of power, and NOT a deeply individualistic society that disassociates from the systems of oppression that harm. us all. Vernacular is the opposite of those things.
My sense of what true liberation means is growing and evolving as I witness and condemn Israel’s genocide against Palestine, and as I witness and support the return of Indigenous land closer to home. From the Nisenan people’s Homeland Return campaign language, I’m understanding that freedom, health, and aliveness for a people means the ability to connect to the land. To connect to place. It means the ability to build meaning together, over time, within a landscape. To create and honor and share traditions. Today I read a quote that suggested this distinction: settler colonialism says “this land belongs to us,” while Indigeneity says “we belong to this land.”
In the last few months I’ve looked around and wondered: What if I was torn from the Bay Area against my will? Pushed, bombed, driven out? Honestly, I would feel like a part of me had died. I would dream from afar about the hills in spring, electric green sprinkled with California poppies, wild mustard growing beside the highway, purple and white lupine dancing on the seaside cliffs in the wild onshore winds. In my sleep I’d hear the creeks rushing whitewater down the canyon. I’d taste the wet redwood and Bay Laurel air. I’d even miss the hot dry Septembers spent waiting for rain.
As I witness an entire population slaughtered and driven from their homeland, I do not take for granted my ability to be rooted in place.
And you?
What vernacular do you speak? What qualities emerge from your spaces and places? Where does the Quality Without a Name show up for you? What are you building, over time, with your community, that will resonate with your values? How do places speak to you, and how do you speak back?
I’d really love to know.
Thanks for being here! Let me know what you’re thinking about. Leave a comment, reply to this email! Help me understand how you’re understanding! Big, sincere thanks.
📣 📣 📣 📣 📣 📣 Ceasefire NOW and FOREVER! Send eSims to Gaza! Use your iPhone’s shortcuts app to send automatic emails to your representatives demanding permanet ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid! Stay soft, stay focused! Please donate to Land Back for the Nisenan People! Order your free COVID tests from the stupid government, today is the last day, every household gets two shipments. Blessings to you all, near and far, especially the mamas and especially the tender hearts. I feel ya.
KQED has a great Bay Curious story about the origins of “hella.”
I enjoyed flipping through this book: Boontling: An American Lingo. For a quicker primer, the Paris Review offers a cute little glossary.
I do think it’s possible for people with formalized training or higher education to build in the vernacular, according to the spirit of the place and existing lineages of materials, choices, and forms. I also think it sounds like an uphill battle to try and manage those two wolves inside of yourself and forget the “proper” way to do things in favor of improvisation and making-do. I know a friend learning to build in a New Mexico vernacular, integrating regional knowledge with new, earth-sensitive materials. I know plenty of skilled, trained, educated carpenters building in coastal California vernacular.
I have plenty of misgivings over the extractive ethnographic study of “other” cultures, and this is something I’d like to understand better in relation to vernacular study.
Lloyd Kahn’s books are ABOUT vernacular buildings, but I think they also have a very distinct design vernacular of their own: extreme maximalism, that highlighter-yellow basic-serif font with the thin black outline, all different sizes and shapes of everything. No grid. Lloyd does layout himself by hand, with paper and scissors, and then he sends his paste-up pages to a friend to translate them into digital layout. That’s a very particular design language, which yields very particular publications. Shelter Publications: vernacular, any way you cut it. He recently sold the company, and I wonder that will do to the vibe moving forward. Did they simply buy an archive? Are they going to publish more Shelter books? Will they, too, use scissors and glue? Time will tell.
Tremendous gratitude to Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick Prelinger at the Prelinger Library for teaching me about JB and Landscape.
Regarding academia’s urban bias: I know plenty of urban planners and departments of urban studies, but not many rural planners or departments of rural studies.
Though they are very “mid-century” and written by a white guy, I still love JB Jackson’s essays. I recommend starting with A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time.
Save Druid Heights is fighting for preservation. The BBC has a nice write-up that captures the relevance of the place as a site of queer history. I like this very chill Mill Valley Historical Society page. Grounds for Democracy is an interesting online exhibit from the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
“Architect“ doesn’t capture it all; Alexander was a thinker whose work had tremendous ripple effects beyond architecture. The inventor of the wiki credited him as a direct influence. The wiki!
These books are part of a trilogy. Book 1 is A Pattern Language. Book 2 is Timeless Way of Building. Book 3 is The Oregon Experiment, which I will also talk about another time because it too has some deep personal threads for me.
I know that human hands are assembling the computer phones, clicking the keyboards to write the code, and piecing together the prefabricated parts of all the things, but the traces are not as evident. I’m sorry but an iPhone is not a vernacular object and you can’t convince me otherwise. Cragislist? Maybe.
Wow Nicole, as you already know, so much of this resonates with me and what I think about surrounding Another Place and the area's vernacular. I recently discovered the area's newspaper - the "Benzie Banner" - is fully digitized and archived at the local library, so I've been diving into that as far back as early white settlers started documenting their lives in the area. I wish I knew more about the local tribes' vernacular, so I am actively seeking that out. For me, understanding a place's vernacular means physically being there and listening, and over time lettings that permeate me and change me. It looks like beginning (for instance, now as I'm designing a little house) and letting the place be shaped over time, rather than trying to shape the place through the house I build.
As you write, the beauty of unnameable qualities, and of vernacular, is that it requires time (directly challenging the urgency our society tries to require). Thanks for the writing and the thoughts.
💜💜💜💜 "I turn these questions over and over, all the time, like fidgeting with a smooth rock in my pocket. That smooth rock is the curiosity I take with me everywhere." I appreciate the vernacular of you wading through the vernacular. The openness of definition is what allows for more interesting connections to be made, like including A Pattern Language and community bulletin boards and Gaza in the same conversation and your feelings connections to them all. thank you for showing us your open wondering and naming in real time.