Seeing the Invisible: Reexamining Race and Vernacular Architecture

Scholars of vernacular architecture need to reimagine the terrain they occupy everyday as scholars working in a world of white privilege. As a group that is still mostly identified as white, scholars of the built environment must know themselves, question the world they take as given, and examine their own and others’ positions within it. If their mission and definition continue to progress from method rather than distinctions of type, from active engagement with the political and the experiential as well as with the material, these scholars will be able to interrogate the conditions that shape their perspectives, such that they start to question and ultimately disassemble the parameters that have resulted in a world of spaces regarded as historically and normatively white, unless labeled otherwise.

Harris, Dianne. “Seeing the Invisible: Reexamining Race and Vernacular Architecture.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13, no. 2 (2006): 96–105. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20355386.