Producing Sacred Space in Secular Kitchens: South Asian Immigrant Women’s Hindu Shrines in American Domestic Architecture

This paper demonstrates the processes of spatial production achieved through the setup of a home shrine by newly arrived Hindu immigrant women inside American houses, particularly the kitchens. By focusing on the home shrine, the paper uses a gendered lens through which to understand vernacular architecture, since women often garner greater control over domestic objects and interiors than they do over construction of buildings. I propose that production of sacred space, achieved through domestic objects like home shrines, is a fluid process. Its location in the house can be more easily changed from one place to another. Compared to the permanent construction of buildings, this compliancy of form may appear less concrete for providing objective architectural analysis. However, I suggest that it is the opposite. The flexibility involved in women’s production process makes room for greater spatial negotiation and demonstrates the diversity of ways concrete domestic architecture is maneuvered to satisfy women’s religious needs over time. Further, the paper demonstrates the wide array of complex decisions that women have to make regarding body movements in the house and worship practices, achieved through material intervention, that speak of domestic architecture in less static and more dynamic ways. By tracing women’s experiences with domestic architecture as new arrivals in the country, and later, as permanent residents, the paper foregrounds women’s strong architectural contributions through the use of domestic objects that enable a gendered and consequently a more inclusive approach to the study of architectural space.

Everything but the Car: The Carport as Social Space in Puerto Rican Domestic Architecture

The carport, a nondescript functional space within a majority of Puerto Rican houses, often accommodates different social practices throughout the year. Daily household activities such as laundry and childcare often take place in the carport, but it is also a site for landmark events such as birthdays, social gatherings, and Christmas parties. Designed exclusively for car storage, the carport is often used for everything but the car. In order to understand how this space came to be repurposed, this article focuses on the history of the introduction of the car and carport in Puerto Rico. The transformation of a single-use space into an all-purpose space with distinct cultural signifiers happened soon after the spread of the carport. The history of the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico is tied to the story of changes to the North American house form, particularly the most utilitarian spaces within the domestic sphere. The carport reflects the dreams and illusions of upward mobility and how that came crashing down in a seemingly economic free fall that began roughly in 2007 and has continued spiraling out of control.

Work, Play, and Performance in the Southern Tobacco Warehouse

This paper examines tobacco warehouses in the southern United States as sites of both work and play. Using a performative approach in the study of architecture that is rooted in folklife methodology, the essay claims these quotidian working structures as places of celebratory potential amid the strictures of Jim Crow spatial segregation. In particular, it focuses on a series of massive dances held in the elaborately decorated warehouses during the early-to-mid-20th century. During these dances, Black celebrants turned the restrictive social and economic working spaces of the tobacco warehouse into places of radical potential and pleasure. The claims of this essay are supported by both conventional architectural documentation and the oral testimonies of a variety of tobacco workers, musicians, and dancers, who made use of the warehouses for a variety of often conflicting purposes. Told together, their narratives emphasize both spatialized resistance to segregation, and the importance of the ephemeral archives of individual stories and memories to the study of vernacular architectural history.

An Architecture of Closeness: The Ross Family Double Farmhouse in St. Mary’s, Nova Scotia

This paper analyzes an early 20th-century double or duplex farmhouse in the St. Mary’s River valley of northeastern Nova Scotia built by brothers Thomas and George Ross. Although double houses are common in urban and industrial contexts where an economy of space is required, such forms are atypical across the agricultural built landscape. In exploring the shared architecture of the Ross family farm, this paper seeks to understand the Ross family and their idiosyncratic architectural choice in the context of a rapidly changing rural landscape where economic underdevelopment and outmigration threatened the stability of established social structures. While partition may seemingly create a division between those living in double or duplex houses, in the case of the Ross family, the farmhouse reproduced and strengthened kinship.

The Crab House on Oyster Creek: Folkloristic Response to Vernacular Landscape and its Environmental Moorings

The Andersen crab house on Oyster Creek is located on a waterway that is part of the wider estuarine environment consisting of New Jersey’s Great Bay and the Mullica River. It is a building type that has long served oystermen, clammers, crabbers, finfishers, and waterfowlers along New Jersey’s Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay coastlines. Having survived for almost ninety years, the building’s siting allows Phil Andersen to effectively tend the adjacent crabbing grounds and prepare the catch for market. The building, along with his boat and harvesting gear organizes the contours of his working landscape, tools that do not simply define the occupation’s environmental fit, but, as an assemblage, continually advance Andersen’s acquisition of traditional ecological knowledge. While its stark presence on the salt marsh punctuates its environmental fit and role as the axis of Andersen’s occupational map, its enduring function as a working landscape resonates widely throughout the community. The work and social life of the building speak to its capacity to be broadly affiliative, its features, use, and siting laden with aesthetic and performative depth that make it a touchstone of environmental experience and sense of place. These attributes—specifically their role in curating memory and affirming a community’s environmental moorings—show how the Andersen crab house, and similar buildings that preceded it, have engendered folkloristic response for over one hundred and fifty years.