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Volume 3.1

MEN AND WOMEN IN PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE
Ruth Tringham
Illustrations by Catherine Chang
Many aspects of the use and significance of space that are considered vital to the study of traditional architecture, such as gender relations in domestic space, have been minimized in the treatments of architectural remains in archaeology. This paper examines the rationale for restricting the facts of prehistoric architecture to building techniques and stylistic variability. It then attempts to overcome these limitations by an experimental interpretation of prehistoric architectural remains from Neolithic villages in Yugoslavia that addresses the social actions of men and women in domestic space. The experiment involves a different standpoint on the construction of knowledge about prehistory, the creative use of graphic representation, and a critical examination of the archaeologist as mediator between past and present.

ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS OF MUSLIM DOMESTIC SPACE IN EGYPT
Juan Eduardo Campo
This article examines the history of European Orientalist representations of the domestic space of Egyptian Muslims. It identifies these representations as promulgated in two of the foundational works of European Orientalism: the French Description de l’Egypte and Edward W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. These texts depict Muslim houses in three different ways: as virtually uninhabited material objects in Cartesian space, as “monuments,” and as exotic places imbued with meaning by the imaginations of European outsiders. Seldom does Orientalist scholarship take up the question of the varieties of significance Muslims themselves might attach to their dwellings. The article concludes with an account of the emergence of antithetical, post-Orientalist studies of domestic space in Islamic cultures.

NEW TOWNS IN FRANCE AND THAILAND IN THE MIDDLE AGES, A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Sophie Clement-Charpentier
Striking formal similarities exist between the plans of bastides, ancient new towns of southwestern France, and the plans of certain towns of northern Thailand. In remote cultural areas, both groups of settlements arose during a specific period, the late Middle Ages, and their geographic situation away from industrial regions enabled them to retain much of their traditional identity until recent times. This article stresses what is culturally specific to each group, but also attempts to explore similarities in their creation and perpetuation. It first looks at the foundation of the two groups of towns. Then, from an environmental and architectural point of view, it examines their plans, their ramparts, their systems of roads, and the apportionment of land within them. Afterwards, it compares their building traditions, investigating both common dwellings and specific structures such as palaces, temples, altars, churches, and market halls. Finally, the article considers the further development of the towns and how the problems of physical growth outside their ramparts have been solved.

THE CHALET AS ARCHETYPE: THE BUNGALOW, THE PICTURESQUE TRADITION AND VERNACULAR FORM
Bruno Giberti
The history of the Swiss chalet is a history of recycled form. This paper considers the nature of the chalet as a vernacular building type, its appropriation beginning in the eighteenth century within picturesque theory and high-style architecture in England and America, and its eventual return to the vernacular in the form of the early-twentieth-century bungalow. The goal of the paper is to explore the process by which specific vernacular forms may become integrated into more generalized styles of building. Special attention is paid to identifying the archetypal chalet elements in the high-style work of architects Charles and Henry Greene, which architectural historians have normally identified with Asian rather than European influences. Finally, an appeal is made for a better understanding of the concept of style as it pertains to architecture in the modern period.

CONTINUITY AND CONSISTENCY OF THE TRADITIONAL COURTYARD HOUSE PLAN IN MODERN KOREAN DWELLINGS
Sang Hae Lee
The courtyard plan provides the basis for a traditional house type that is deeply associated with the Korean way of life. The first part of this paper discusses concepts and characteristics intrinsic to traditional Korean house plans and introduces various examples of courtyard house layouts. Thereafter, the paper selects several examples of modern Korean dwellings and compares them from the point of view of plan and layout. The investigation discovers that the idea of the courtyard is still relevant to modern Korean dwellings. Transformed and/or retained, the courtyard idea still provides one of the prototypes of the modern Korean dwelling. The various forms it has taken in the modern house serve to promote the continuity and consistency of traditional Korean architecture. They also lend credence to arguments that architectural tradition involves more than style and technology.

CAMP AND FIELD: NOTES ON THE POLISH LANDSCAPE
Jill Stoner
This article will attempt to outline, through examples from the Polish landscape that bear witness to Nazi occupation, ways of comprehending architecture as a means of political control or, conversely, of cultural expression. It will deal with two very distinct, and even contradictory traditions of building. The first is an ordering of space with the intention of controlling, nay producing, a consequent style of events. The second is an intervening response to events that occur within a preexisting space. The first part of the article defines these two traditions as “camp” and “field” respectively, presenting the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz as a study of the former and the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw as a study of the latter. The second part presents a set of more subjectively perceived transformations that have occurred within the Polish landscape since World War II.