abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico played an important role as a transit route facilitated by the construction of an interoceanic railway that enabled the transport of goods primarily from the United States. At that time, the area’s population inhabited two types of housing differentiated by materiality and associated with social class. Palm-thatched houses were common for ordinary people, while adobe and brick houses were built for local elites. Abrupt sociocultural changes in this period led to the emergence of a new type of dwelling that quickly spread throughout the region. This new housing type— locally known as casa de barro , or “house of mud”— featured a wooden structure, wattle-and-daub walls, and a wooden and tiled roof. Following the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the region’s economic boom came to an end and regional development diminished. Some of these houses still exist today; a few remain inhabited, others have been altered, and some have been repurposed as household storage spaces. Through explication of the casa de barro, this article examines how global economic forces and national political agendas drive territorial changes that, in turn, reshape the vernacular landscape.
This article explores the role of domestic workers and domestic labor in the administration, preservation, and interpretation of historic house museums in New England in the twentieth century. Whereas previous scholarship has framed house museums as a new kind of institution, this article argues instead that the material and spatial conditions of historic house museums enabled early museum administrators to adapt preexisting systems of domestic labor to historic site administration. Domestic workers thus emerged as some of the earliest frontline staff at house museums responsible for the care, display, and interpretation of material culture at these sites. To explore this phenomenon, this article examines the work ofthe Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and its founder, William Sumner Appleton, who made the employment of domestic workers a matter of administrative policy for the organization in the early twentieth century. The article concludes at the end of the twentieth century, when professionalization in public history and historic preservation encouraged many museum administrators to transition house museums back into private homes where homeowners assumed domestic housekeeping responsibilities. Ultimately, this article traces an alternative origin story for the labor systems underpinning the public history workplace by fore-grounding the material and architectural conditions of house museums.
This Research Note examines the construction of a single-family house in Madison, Wisconsin, to understand the role of self-building in the American suburbs after World War II. Drawing on evidence from oral interviews and a private family archive, it explores Eunice and Louis Bethke's decision to purchase a precut house package from local merchant builder Marshall Erdman in 1954. Building the home themselves saved the Bethkes nearly half the cost of comparable contractor-built houses while also giving them a degree of creative license and a sense of pride and ownership. The Bethkes' home is an example of the collaborative nature of self-building, where homeowners contributed their own labor while using factory-produced components, expanding the way we think about postwar suburban housing and DIY (do-it-yourself) trends. Eunice's recollections some seventy years later also underscore the value of oral histories in understanding the building of America's postwar suburbs, which in this case show how this couple's "American dream" was tied not just to homeownership but to the satisfaction that came with doing some of the work themselves.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American cities experienced a golden age of roof gardens which has largely been forgotten. Women-or "roof garden girls," in the parlance of Gilded Age New York-were prominent creators and users of these spaces. Above townhomes and tenements, factories and theaters, women of different social backgrounds drew health and happiness from elevated green spaces, even as critics acknowledged that the price of entry was sometimes moral danger or strenuous labor. Many women took the initiative in roof garden culture, designing and constructing private spaces for their own use as well as public civic gardens for the use of others. Print media blurred the distinction between the private and the public, broadly presenting roof gardens as an exemplary spatial type that might help liberate women from some of the hardest aspects of modern American urban life. Roof garden girls were city dwellers, workers, reformers, and designers who rolled up their sleeves to claim the promises that elevated green spaces made in these years.
This Object Lesson examines the ways in which the design of the shophouse-a vernacular dwelling that served both commercial (shop) and residential (house) functions-evolved in southern China and western North America through transpacific cultural exchange initiated and sustained by the Chinese diasporas. Drawing upon fieldwork and archival research, this article focuses on selected shophouses in four port cities across the Pacific, including Zhangzhou (Fujian Province), Hekou ( Jiangxi Province), and Chikan (Guangdong Province) in southern China as well as Seattle in the United States. The development of the shophouse reveals not only how architectural form evolves and adapts in response to the exchange of people, capital, cultures, and ideas, but also how these forms embody a dialectical, dynamic, and fluid process of cultural exchange, negotiating identity, tradition, and new ideas. This study contributes to the scholarship on ordinary buildings in China, the United States, and other locations where the built environment has been shaped through cultural exchange. It also offers a fresh perspective on the study of racial history and ethnic diversity in western North America by situating historic and ethnographic analysis within physical and social settings.
In 1954 Ethel Percy Andrus, founder of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), established a retirement community in Ojai, California, named Grey Gables. Conceived as an architectural and social alternative to traditional institutional eldercare facilities, Grey Gables was designed to challenge prevailing midcentury assumptions that equated old age with frailty, dependence, and withdrawal from public life. Through intentional architectural strategies including permeable community boundaries, a centrally positioned parking lot that emphasized continued mobility, and design elements that promoted independence, Grey Gables fostered a new identity for older adults, later articulated as the "third age." By centering continued productivity and personal autonomy, this stage of life actively redefined long-standing narratives of aging. As the concept of the third age became more widely known, it simultaneously marginalized those older individuals who experienced greater frailty or dependency, effectively relegating them to the stigmatized "fourth age." Using Grey Gables as a case study, this article illustrates the complex interplay between architecture, identity, and social practices of care in shaping twentieth-century perceptions of aging.
This Research Note explores the cluttered interiors of the hackerspaces Noisebridge and Double Union in San Francisco, California, and i3Detroit and OmniCorpDetroit in the Detroit, Michigan, metropolitan area. Drawing on spatial ethnography conducted between 2018 and 2023, I explore how hackerspaces demarcate community and relate to the public. Emerging in the United States in 2008 and spreading during the financial crisis, hackerspaces are educational nonprofits and flexible coworking spaces where anarchist and libertarian hacker cultures converge in brick and mortar. Inspired by twentieth-century European hackerspaces, US hackerspaces utilize the nonprofit model to create open technology spaces where theoretically anyone can work, reskill, and create in a collectively governed environment. Converging with the contemporaneous DIY (do-it-yourself)-focused maker movement, which popularized the term "making" as a more inclusive version of "hacking," hacker-spaces expanded their user bases from coders and engineers to anyone looking to craft, learn, and retrain. Catering to users with broad skillsets and needs, hackerspaces accumulate tools, materials, and craft projects in progress. Their spectacular clutter invokes the landscapes of the garage, workshop, laboratory, artist studio, and messy classroom. Meanwhile, the inscrutability and countercultural coding of their interiors paint hackerspaces as exceptional zones where the rules of the surrounding city are suspended. However, this Research Note argues that hackerspace clutter is structured by countless negotiations over how to balance individual and collective freedom and safety. What I call "collective clutter" records the ways the ideals of openness, organizational horizontality, and freedom in digital hacker culture collapse in the physical collective settings of hackerspaces as their members shape and steward their rented buildings and spaces.
In the second half of the twentieth century, automation and other modern technologies displaced traditional aids to navigation across the shorelines of the United States, leaving historic light stations imperiled as obsolete. Hundreds of those light stations faced ruin until local initiatives, working in partnership with the US Coast Guard and state and federal agencies, found innovative ways to preserve the light towers and their supporting structures as heritage sites and museums. The American lighthouse preservation movement ranks among historic preservationists' greatest success stories. The restoration of the St. Augustine Lighthouse on the northeastern coast of Florida, spearheaded by an area women's organization in the 198os, provides a noteworthy example of such a reorientation. Built in 1874 as one of the tallest lighthouse towers in the nation, St. Augustine's beacon today welcomes hundreds of thousands ofvisitors each year to climb its tower and view exhibits in its maritime museum. Drawing upon spiritual associations with lighthouses and the marketability of the towers' iconic imagery, the lighthouse reclamation effort offers wider civic lessons in government partnership and problem-solving. Even so, the limits of those successes are also apparent, given the challenges facing less-romanticized historic sites as well as the urgent threats of climate change and sea level rise pressing upon these same communities.
The archetypal "starchitect," Frank Lloyd Wright portrayed himself as a genius producing his architectural designs outside of time and history. Architectural historians have challenged this myth as they have demonstrated many historical antecedents of Wright's work and also integrated Wright's buildings into a broader history of modern architecture. One question, however, that has not been sufficiently explored is how ordinary architecture—specifically the Welsh American buildings of his maternal relatives in Wisconsin—contributed to the making of Wright's architecture in the first place. Wright's uncle, Thomas Lloyd Jones, was a builder, and several of his buildings remain in the valley south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the Lloyd Joneses settled after emigrating from Wales. The extant Lloyd Jones buildings show similarities with nineteenth-century American buildings while also exhibiting characteristics consistent with Welsh vernacular architecture. Firsthand analysis of these buildings combined with an examination of Thomas Lloyd Jones's diaries demonstrate that Wright was exposed to his uncle's building activities, worked under the mentorship of his uncle, and ultimately collaborated on a Lloyd Jones family house with him. This study examines Wright's integration into the building culture of his extended Welsh American family in southwestern Wisconsin, demonstrating channels of communication between their vernacular building culture and Wright's early house designs. In demonstrating how ordinary building forms and methods contributed to the history of Wright's work, this article blunts the edge between the theoretical concepts of "the canon" and the vernacular "built environment."
Today's window boxes in Philadelphia are a result of successive window-gardening campaigns undertaken by female reformers and activists between the 1870s and 1970s. In the late nineteenth century, window gardening became an integral component of Progressive reform and social charity. In the mid-twentieth century, window gardening received renewed attention as a means of grassroots activism to counter urban decay resulting from racism and public disinvestment. Philadelphia's window-box activism became a model for the nation and beyond, believed to help relieve tensions between White and Black Americans. Laying out this history, this article shows how window-box charity and activism conflated ideas of femaleness, morality, naturalness, and beauty. Plants and window boxes were both central and incidental in female urban reform and renewal efforts, and they were relational. They forged ties between people as well as between people and plants, creating relationships between indoor and outdoor space, the domestic and public realms, urban centers and their hinterland. Although window boxes and their plants were catalysts of neighborhood change, they also helped to camouflage, and quite literally naturalize, larger social problems whose causes could only be addressed through the political process.
The conversation about the (formerly nomadic) Bedouin population in Israel has centered around land: the land they lost, the land they were moved to. This article shifts the focus to the buildings they build and inhabit. It explores how the Bedouin have been building statement houses that draw their design inspiration, labor, and building materials from the Palestinian Authority territories and Jordan. These houses first appeared in Bedouin towns but later followed the Bedouin to Jewishdominated suburbs. Drawing upon archival material as well as interviews, this article makes two main arguments. First, these houses reflect deep transformations that Bedouin society is undergoing in the Negev. These transformations include, on the one hand, ongoing integration into the Israeli middle class, and on the other, a growing sense of solidarity with the Palestinians. Second, I argue that these houses subtly undermine the cultural borders of Israel. In doing so, they illustrate how domestic architecture—in its design and use—can function as an active participant in a claim for inclusion that goes beyond the stark narratives of resistance and subjugation.
This essay explores the relationship between urban spatial production and collective memory in the Pedregal de Santo Domingo, a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City. Founded in 1971 during a large-scale land occupation, the neighborhood took shape incrementally over the course of five decades. Today it features a vibrant street life and dense collection of residential and commercial buildings, schools, markets, and churches similar to other neighborhoods across the metropolis. But this appearance of normalcy obscures the history of a neighborhood built through intense collective organization, immense expenditures of labor and time, and constant vigilance against dislocation. Rather than couching this process in conventional terms such as "informal" or "unplanned," this study frames the Pedregal de Santo Domingo in terms of planning by other means—a deliberative, at times agonistic approach to creating a neighborhood and making a home in the city. This process produced new urban space distinct from neighborhoods planned by a single governing authority. It also forged a community with a strong collective memory rooted in the land itself and the laborious process of its transformation. As this article demonstrates, this collective memory has been crucial in efforts by residents to resist government planning and development schemes that would adversely affect their community.
