A present-day example of architectural exclusion comes in the form of decisions about where to place transit stops. Throughout the United States, many moderate- and high-income individuals travel—to their jobs, to events, to see friends, and to shop—in a private vehicle.120 In contrast, although people of all socioeconomic groups use public transit—buses, subways, and light rail—in larger metropolitan areas, low-income people and people of color often rely more heavily on public transportation than people from other groups.121 Those individuals therefore have a hard time reaching areas that are underserved by transit.

Another divider was an approximately ten-foot-high, 1,500-foot-long fence that separated the racially diverse (though predominantly white) suburb of Hamden, Connecticut, from the primarily black public housing projects in New Haven.97 Although the fence was finally removed in May 2014, while it was in place, residents in the public housing were extremely isolated from the surrounding community.98 In order “to buy groceries at a Hamden shopping center three miles away,” the public housing residents would “have to travel into New Haven to get around the fence, a 7.7-mile trip that takes two buses and up to two hours to complete.”99 The fence was originally erected by the city of Hamden in the 1950s to keep crime in the New Haven projects out of Hamden.100 As recently as 2012, calls to remove the fence were met with resistance from Hamden residents who “described the robberies and traffic overflow they said would result from opening the fence.”101 Hamden agreed to remove the fence only after the New Haven Housing Authority threatened to “sue Hamden on civil rights grounds.”102 A similar eight-foot-tall spiked fence was installed in 1998 around a public housing project in Hollander Ridge in Baltimore.103 This fence, which was constructed by the local housing authority with funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), blocked access to and through Rosedale, a contiguous, mostly white neighborhood.104 The Rosedale residents wanted the fence to keep out crime and keep their property values up, and “there was a not insubstantial vocal segment of the Rosedale whose racist views were made readily apparent.”105

A municipality that lacks sufficient connections between different parts of the community is often exclusionary because residents are deterred from traveling. For example, sidewalks make walking easier and safer, in large part by reducing the risk of pedestrian and vehicle collisions.85 However, many communities lack sidewalks and crosswalks, making it difficult to cross the street or walk through a neighborhood. Sometimes this is intentional.86 For example, in his book detailing continuing racism and intentionally white communities in the United States, James Loewen describes architectural exclusion in some towns where “[s]idewalks and bike paths are rare and do not connect to those in other communities inhabited by residents of lower social and racial status.”87 If someone wanted to walk or bike to another area, then, it might have to be along the shoulder of a busy road or on the road itself.

The architecture of the built environment directs both physical movement through and access to places. This Part details a number of ways that states and municipalities—through actions by their residents, police force, planning staff, engineers, or local elected officials—have created infrastructure and designed their built environs to restrict passage through and access to other areas of the community. A number of specific exclusionary techniques have been used to keep people out, including physical barriers to access, the siting of transit and transportation infrastructure, and the organization of residential neighborhoods. While some of these designs expressly serve to exclude those who are unwanted, others have that effect indirectly. This Part will examine a number of these methods of exclusion. A. Physical Barriers to Access

Although regulation through architecture is just as powerful as law, it is less identifiable and less visible to courts, legislators, and potential plaintiffs.77 While this observation suggests that decision makers should be even more diligent in analyzing the impact of architecture, research demonstrates that they often fail to take it seriously.78 To be clear, officials may understand that an architectural decision could have an exclusionary effect—they might even intend that result—but they generally do not see their decisions as a form of regulation that should be analyzed and patrolled in the same way that a law with the same effect would be. Exclusion through architecture should be subject to scrutiny that is equal to that afforded to other methods of exclusion by law.79

they understand that traditional architects of the built environment influence our experience of the built environment.55 Traditional architecture is not just a useful metaphor for exposing hidden regulatory systems. It is regulation. Consequently, it makes even more sense to apply the concept of regulation through architecture to the built environment than it does to apply it to the Internet or structuring decisions.56 Although this may appear to be a banal observation, few in the legal community have discussed architecture itself as a regulatory tool.

For example, a cafeteria manager who places healthier food items in a more visible and accessible location than junk food in order to nudge people toward healthier choices is guiding actions through architectural decisions. These architectural decisions create architectural constraints: features of the built environment that function to control human behavior or hinder access—the embodiment of architectural exclusion.

That a highway divides two neighborhoods limits the extent to which the neighborhoods integrate. That a town has a square, easily accessible with a diversity of shops, increases the integration of residents in that town. That Paris has large boulevards limits the ability of revolutionaries to protest. That the Constitutional Court in Germany is in Karlsruhe, while the capital is in Berlin, limits the influence of one branch of government over the other. These constraints function in a way that shapes behavior. In this way, they too regulate.50

We often experience our physical environment without giving its features much thought. For example, one might think it a simple aesthetic design decision to create a park bench that is divided into three individual seats with armrests separating those seats. Yet the bench may have been created this way to prevent people—often homeless people—from lying down and taking naps.27 Similarly, upon seeing a bridge, or a one-way street, or a street sign, many people tend to think that these are just features of a place—innocuous and normal.

Throughout history, people have used varied methods to exclude undesirable individuals from places where they were not wanted. People used the law by passing ordinances saying that certain individuals could not access certain locations.24 Social norms encouraged some to threaten undesirable persons with violence if they were to enter or remain in certain spaces.25 And cities were constructed in ways—including by erecting physical barriers—that made it very difficult for people from one side of town to access the other side.26 The first two methods of discrimination have received sustained attention from legal scholars; the third form, which I refer to as architecture, has not. This Part departs from tradition by focusing on architecture instead of ordinances and social norms.

IntroductionxxiA third reason for concentrating on architectural evidence is that buildings often reveal aspects of behavior such as the mundane or the forbidden rarely spoken of in conventional texts. Structures have a way of showing us things about ourselves that we may feel are too mundane to mention but which nevertheless articulate routines essential for our survival. And certainly there are skeletons in the closet— things we do not want to talk about— for example, slavery or the suppression of women’s rights. These features are part of what the geographer Pierce Lewis has called our “unwitting autobiography.” In the way we create and use architectural space, we say things we would never say in our journals or diaries. There are many taboo topics, such as class differences— rarely talked about in the United States— that becom e evident in the architectural landscape. The distribution of buildings mirrors the distribution of the population according to economic class and makes such divisions visible not only in the sizes of houses, but also in the way the buildings of the rich and powerful physi­cally dominate the landscape by their location and presence (fig. 6 ).1'*Fourth, objects are essential in the study and understanding of the artfulness of a culture. To understand how people bring beauty to their lives, one must study the buildings themselves rather than literature about them. For example, one can learn much about a culture’s aesthetic preferences by simply looking at the way construc­tion materials are treated. Wooden surfaces left in a natural state, which appeared in nineteenth-century romantic designs and again in the arts and crafts era, suggest a self- conscious attempt to express a cultural affinity for nature, while a cultural value for the

Introductionxxvstantly evolving and changing. It incorporates many perspectives, and there are many ideas about what it is. The study of vernacular architecture has been around long enough, however, to have achieved some stability, patterns, and conventions, and our interest here is to highlight some of these commonalities in a way that presents a fairly unified, declarative statement of what the field is all about.In large part this book contains explanations of research methods, techniques, and theories. The method is not ours, but rather one worked out over the past thirty years by a variety of archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, cultural geographers, folklorists, social historians, and preservationists, to name a few of the disciplines represented in this truly interdisciplinary field. Our focus is the buildings and landscapes of North America from colonial times to the present, although the approaches presented here could be applied to any region or time period. As a crash course in vernacular architecture studies, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture should be useful to a wid

IntroductionFig. 8. This Urge center-chimney, hull-parlor house in W ethersfield, Connecticut, is typical of those buildings that have survived all over New England from the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. Photo by Thom as Carter.Take, for example, a typical classroom (figs. 10 and 11). In both its formal organ­ization and its use, the room reflects a normative approach to the education process. The teacher’s space is to the front, facing out toward the students who sit in neat rows of chairs/desks, all bolted to the floor. Everyone has his (Dr her own desk— his or her own space—-reflecting the American value of individuality. There is no danger of one student violating another’s territory. The whole room is ordered by tripartite symme­try. There are three rows of overhead lights. The blackboard is divided into threes, with the center panel being the most prominent. Only the teacher's podium is off-center, a decision necessitated by the need to use the retractable screen in the center for show­ing slides. In its form, then, the room adheres to all the conventions proper to educa­tional space in the United States.1'1

This book is intended as a beginner’s guide to vernacular architecture studies. The idea for it came from the classroom. As teachers, we wanted an introductory text for students that would both open their eyes to the world of ordi­nary buildings and outline a basic method for studying them. It had to be affordable, so it had to be short. And if not simple, the coverage had to be straightforward enough so that students and others encountering this material for the first time could easily use it. Luckily we had a model. When we were talking about what our research guide might look like, Jam es Deetz’s pocket-sized Invitation to Archaeology immediately came to mind. The book cost $1.45 in the late 1960s and presented readers with a con­cise but detailed description of how to go about putting archaeology into practice. We honor both book and author in recycling its title and basic approach here. There was nothing we could do about the price.1The study of vernacu

IntroductionxxiA third reason for concentrating on architectural evidence is that buildings often reveal aspects of behavior such as the mundane or the forbidden rarely spoken of in conventional texts. Structures have a way of showing us things about ourselves that we may feel are too mundane to mention but which nevertheless articulate routines essential for our survival. And certainly there are skeletons in the closet— things we do not want to talk about— for example, slavery or the suppression of women’s rights. These features are part of what the geographer Pierce Lewis has called our “unwitting autobiography.” In the way we create and use architectural space, we say things we would never say in our journals or diaries. There are many taboo topics, such as class differences— rarely talked about in the United States— that becom e evident in the architectural landscape. The distribution of buildings mirrors the distribution of the population according to economic class and makes such divisions visible not only in the sizes of houses, but also in the way the buildings of the rich and powerful physi­cally dominate the landscape by their location and presence (fig. 6 ).1'*Fourth, objects are essential in the study and understanding of the artfulness of a culture. To understand h

At this point, studying buildings is starting to sound like a lot of trouble. It the point of our research is to understand human culture, why not just stick to the usual documents? It is a legitimate conc ern. We would not suggest that the study of buildings is some kind of academic panacea. Vernacular architecture research is not going to replac e other kinds of humanistic inquiry. In the right situations, however, it can con­tribute greatly in addressing many kinds of questions concerning human behavior. Cary Carson, director of research at Co

ionIntroductionxvTake, for instance, the two-family house pictured in figure 2. Built in 1906 on Richmond n Avenue in Buffalo, New York, the structure is a typical example of lower-middle-classdomestic architecture found in urban areas around the country during the early years of the twentieth century. The Richmond Avenue house is an object that has both sub­stance— it is a material reality— and content— it evokes images, ideas, and meanings for its users. But while there can be little doubt that such a building has the potential l_ to communicate critical information about the social and cultural world of its various,r inhabitants, it nevertheless remains unclear how exactly we might go about decipher-, ing its meaning.7Analyzing and explaining the cultural content of a building is not something you can justr/o, after all, for the Buffalo house is not like a city history book, a building per­mit, a diary from the Banks family (one of many residents of the property), a letter from a grandparent, or even the federal census. Such documents, because they con­tain written messages, communicate in a language we readily (if variously) understand. The history might say something about the development of the Richmond Avenue sec­tion of Buffalo; the building permit might reveal the date when the house was con­structed and even give the name of its builder; the diary might talk about specific events that occurred in the house; the letter might describe how one of the rooms in:e>f>rr-y>fes1sFig. 2. A two-family or double house at 299 Richmond Avenue, Buffalo, New York. Photo by Elizabeth Crnmlev

This book is intended as a beginner’s guide to vernacular architecture studies. The idea for it came from the classroom. As teachers, we wanted an introductory text for students that would both open their eyes to the world of ordi­nary buildings and outline a basic method for studying them. It had to be affordable, so it had to be short. And if not simple, the coverage had to be straightforward enough so that students and others encountering this material for the first time could easily use it. Luckily we had a model. When we were talking about what our research guide might look like, Jam es Deetz’s pocket-sized Invitation to Archaeology immediately came to mind. The book cost $1.45 in the late 1960s and presented readers with a con­cise but detailed description of how to go about putting archaeology into practice. We honor both book and author in recycling its title and basic approach here. There was nothing we could do about the price.1The study of vernacular architectu

IntroductionThis book is intended as a beginner’s guide to vernacular architecture studies. The idea for it came from the classroom. As teachers, we wanted an introductory text for students that would both open their eyes to the world of ordi­nary buildings and outline a basic method for studying them. It had to be affordable, so it had to be short. And if not simple, the coverage had to be straightforward enough so that students and others encountering this material for the first time could easily use it. Luckily we had a model. When we were talking about what our research guide might look like, Jam es Deetz’s pocket-sized Invitation to Archaeology immediately came to mind. The book cost $1.45 in the late 1960s and presented readers with a con­cise but detailed description of how to go about putting archaeology into practice. We honor both book and author in recycling its title and basic approach here. There was nothing we could do about the price.1The study of vernacular architecture is part of a larger scholarly undertaking known as material culture studies." Material culture m aybe defined, following Deetz, as “that segment of [the human] physical environment which is purposely shaped . . . according to culturally dictated plans.”' Unlike other mammals, humans cannot simply live in nature; rather, we must devise ways of finding and making shelter, clothing and feeding ourselves, and producing the tools needed for survival. In short, people need things— objects, artifacts, however they are referred to— to live in the world, and we make those things, not randomly or by chance, but systematically and intentionally through our culture. Culture is unseen and immaterial, consisting of the ideas, values, and beliefs of a particular social group or society; but it is everywhere within us, shap­ing our behavior, helping us to choose the right things to say, providing rules for social interaction, and giving us mental blueprints for making the things we need, from bread pans to buildings. Among Americans, for example, people for whom private space is a highly valued commodity, any number of devices— from having your own plate from which to eat, your own drawers for your clothes, your own special chair on which to sit, to even having your own bathroom can help achieve the goal of privacy. Building separate, detached houses that are spaced far apart in the countryside or separated by just a few feet in urban neighborhoods (fig. 1) would be another way this spirit of indi­viduation is advanced through architecture.1 We need to remember that the everyday objects we see all around us are indicators of our cultural values. The material world we construct around us is the world that the study of material culture reveals.If culture determines behavior, and we can see such behavior in the things people make, it is logical that we can also move in the opposite direction, working back from the object in an attempt to explain the ideas, values, and beliefs— the culture— that caused that object to com e into being.1 Archaeologists take this as the central axiom of their discipline since objects are all they have to work w

ound 1820 the Henry Dubois family built a new house in New Paltz, New York. The housewas curious in that the front elevation was constructed of red brick and the less visible remaining , walls— those to the sides and back— o f roughly laid lim estone. No family mem bers wrote downthe reasons for this particular design solution, nor can an explanation be found in local histories.^ The fact o f the house, however, remains as evidence o f human behavior that is directly available totis for interpretation. By looking at the house we might surmise that the Dubois family’s finances prohibited building the entire house of brick, which was a prestigious but expensive material. Rather than foregoing the status that brick afforded, they put their m oney where it would do the I most good, on the front, w here their good taste and apparent affluence could be seen by all.i Photo by Thomas Carter

xivIntroductionFig. 1. The preference For detached houses in America is visible in these rows o f houses from St. Louis, Missouri. While in densely devel­oped cities the older British practice o f build­ing continuous rows or terraces of houses was often followed, in less densely developed urban areas and suburbs American builders left gaps between the indi vidual houses, clearly articulating the bound aries of each house­hold's space. Photo by Thomas Carter.history, Folklife studies, historic preservation, cultural landscape studies, industrial arch­aeology, and vernacular architecture studies— the field we are concerned with here— all revolve in their own ways around the study of objects for cultural meaning.Vernacular architecture studies may in this way be defined as the study o f thosehuman actions and behaviors that are manifest in commonplace architecture. In the category of commonplace architecture we include individual buildings, assemblages of such buildings, and entire architectural landscapes that serve as primary evidence for our research. The investigative techniques and interpretive theories employed by ver­nacular architecture scholars are those of material culture studies generally, for they center on the ability to find meaning in artifacts. As an academic exercise, the study of material culture is grounded in the physical and material presence of objects -in the case of vernacular architecture, buildings— and relies on the analysis of particular sets of forms and the patterns they make to tell us about human behavior both past and present. Written documents such as books, journals, and court records are used when and where they are available to augment the architectural record. Oral history and ethnographic observation are at times also important to the vernacular architecture researcher. It should he stressed, however, that the field of material culture studies remains artifact-driven, and the investigation and interpretation of buildings and land­scapes play leading roles in the research process."This book is about architectural interpretation, the ability to find meaning in buildings. This is a skill, like most others, that requires both time and effort

This book is intended as a beginner’s guide to vernacular architecture studies. The idea for it came from the classroom. As teachers, we wanted an introductory text for students that would both open their eyes to the world of ordi­nary buildings and outline a basic method for studying them. It had to be affordable, so it had to be short. And if not simple, the coverage had to be straightforward enough so that students and others encountering this material for the first time could easily use it. Luckily we had a model. When we were talking about what our research guide might look like, Jam es Deetz’s pocket-sized Invitation to Archaeology immediately came to mind. The book cost $1.45 in the late 1960s and presented readers with a con­cise but detailed description of how to go about putting archaeology into practice. We honor both book and author in recycling its title and basic approach here. There was nothing we could do about the price.