"This book encourages readers to think creatively about buildings in terms of their function and how these functions have changed over time in American history. The work presents material culture as lived experience and is designed to expand the encounter with material culture to look beyond house styles to how various household spaces (kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, etc.) have been seen and felt in American life. This volume is the third in a series, Vernacular Architecture Studies, focused on introductory texts on aspects of material culture, often aimed at non-specialists"--

A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today's experience. Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation--the ways that we move through a house--analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings. This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.

"This book encourages readers to think creatively about buildings in terms of their function and how these functions have changed over time in American history. The work presents material culture as lived experience and is designed to expand the encounter with material culture to look beyond house styles to how various household spaces (kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, etc.) have been seen and felt in American life. This volume is the third in a series, Vernacular Architecture Studies, focused on introductory texts on aspects of material culture, often aimed at non-specialists"--

The fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses. This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.

The guide that enables you to identify, and place in their historic and architectural contexts, the houses you see in your neighborhood or in your travels across America. 17th century to the present.

America has an abundance of fascinating and varied house styles, as fascinating and diverse as its people. This unique book will allow readers to recognize the architectural features and style of virtually any house they encounter.

"Hubka argues that even "vernacular architecture" scholars tend to embrace a model for understanding home forms that relies on iconic architects and theories about how ideas proceed downward from aesthetic ideals to home construction, even though this model fails to adequately characterize the vast majority actual homes that people live in, particularly in recent times after the widespread growth of suburban America. This controversial book proposes new ways to categorize houses"--