Looking Around: The Curious Case of Minimal Traditional
In the world of vernacular (aka “everyday”) architecture, oftentimes architectural styles do not provide enough information when studying most of the houses built in any given neighborhood at any given time.
A good exercise in proving this point is the number of Real Estate listings that label a given house as being simply “Colonial.”
This is by no means the fault of misinformed realtors - it’s a result of a strange truth of talking about everyday houses: there really isn’t an commonly established or well-known stylistic vocabulary used to describe them. How can realtors or anyone else describe everyday houses when, for most new single family housing under a certain square-footage, architectural coinage exists as not much more than “Traditional,” “Contemporary,” or “Modern.”
We know that there are stylistic tendencies within these categories, but why don’t we meticulously articulate or analyze these tendencies like we did in the past?
The answers are not clear, though the elitist distaste for “mass housing” may play a part in it. What we now call “mass housing” (read: single family working class housing) was a mere blip on the academic (non-vernacular) architecture radar, studied in passing before moving on to other things.
That blip was still a blip, however, and it was called Minimal Traditional
Minimal Traditional
Ultimately, the architectural styling of a large chunk of everyday houses can be described as Minimal Traditional. This term was originally devised to describe the small, sparse houses built from around the end of the Great Depression to after WWII (roughly between 1935 and 1950.)
(the houses in color and the one in the bottom left all borrow from the Tudor Revival style that was popular with the elites from the 1890s-1940s)
The original Minimal Traditional homes were small enough to be built during times of economic hardship and wartime scarcity; but after the war, the Federal Housing Administration quickly adopted the style in its Principles for Planning Small Houses, aka houses that were eligible for FHA and GI Bill home loans.
Minimal Traditional houses were kept sparse in order for them to be built inexpensively and rapidly. Between 1946 and 1949, 5.1 million of these homes were built. They were exercises in efficiency and utility, not far from the factory housing built by Sears, Aladdin and other mail order home companies in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Minimal Traditional FHA-Insured Home, 1941. Library of Congress
As many prospered in the 1950s, the Minimal Traditional style was gradually overtaken by the more spacious Split-Level and the rambling Ranch, though these are two terms that denote floor plan layout rather than explicit architectural style.
Here we reach the crux of the problem: for most common houses after 1940, architectural identification ends at Minimal Traditional. Certain terms, such as ranch and split-level, are employed to denote floor plan layout for a significant number of houses, but even the best field guides have not risen to the challenge of style and everyday housing after 1940.
We’re All Minimal Traditional Now
Minimal Traditional denotes a certain type of historic house, but, other than its small size, its other characteristics (including borrowing architectural details from other popular styles) are easily be transferred up to this current day:
This is why, when talking about everyday houses style is so problematic. Most styles are borrowed from both history and the current “high” architectural trends. The high-profile architectural trends of the last 30 years aren’t exactly transferrable to the average homebuyer (looking at you, Frank Gehry) - so, in their place, we’ve been borrowing more and more from the 19th and early 20th century.
But here’s the sitch:
Building a house with features belonging to a style from the past does not make it that style. A new house with Craftsman details does not make it a Craftsman house or part of a Craftsman Revival (a serious academic and professional undertaking in reviving authentic Craftsman architecture). A house that borrows details from the Craftsman style but none of the other aspects (period materials, interior organization, proportions, massing, etc.) can only be called Craftsman-influenced.
Our houses are not mere imitations of the past. Our borrowings of historical elements are executed in a way that reflects our current housing needs (e.g. attached garages) and scientific advancement (such as using new materials e.g. fiber cement siding or low-E windows).
How then, do we describe our common houses if they drift so nebulously within the realm of architectural style and influence?
Fortunately there are answers to this question – answers that will come next Saturday in the next installment of Looking Around! (Also be sure to stay tuned for next week’s Mississippi McMansion of the Week!)
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