The Discourse of the Vernacular in Modern and Contemporary Architecture

• Applicant: Dr. Vera Simone Bader
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology ; Art History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516481082

This year's Pritzker Prize goes to Francis Kéré, an architect from Burkina Faso. He received the highly endowed award also because "his work demonstrates the power of site-specific materiality". Once again, the vernacular thus played a decisive role in the public discussion that focused on the question of "best practice" in architecture. For years, museums and foundations, with the help of the media, have been celebrating a way of building that is oriented towards traditional building technologies, local materials, and a context-bound formal language. In their designs, architects refer to local buildings realized by non-professionally trained, so-called anonymous architects who pass on their knowledge from generation to generation. Their results are what is commonly called vernacular in the Accademia. This is building that is often understood as free of political, economic, and social ideas and based on tradition, which becomes ideologically charged with content and values primarily in the professional debate. Scholars have so far presented the methods of individual architects* such as those of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruno Taut, Balkrishna Doshi, Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, Otto Koenigsberger, Lina Bo Bardi, Anna Heringer, and Marina Tabassum without analyzing the vernacular as a discourse conducted in architecture that has developed from the 19th century to the present day, supported by institutions that instrumentalized it for their cultural-political agendas. This research now aims to fill this major gap by tracing lines of development in terms of content as well as the ongoing history of the concept, which also shed light on the current canonization in architecture.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants