Automobile Vernacular
Automobile Vernacular
Definition
The automobile vernacular names the car-induced building landscape — mobile homes, drive-ins, motels, drive-throughs — that Reyner Banham praised in his 1965 Letter from America as "the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building." Its radicalism is programmatic, not stylistic: the drive-in movie house is "just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill, and god wot else they don't provide at Radio City" (Banham, quoted by Webb). The building dissolves into ground plus services; the occupant arrives carrying the interior. Michael Webb, reporting Banham's "Letter from America" to "the folks back home," took the question "what might a drive-in house look or behave like?" as a design brief — answered by his Drive-in House.
The concept has two faces. As vernacular, it is the American roadside's everyday architecture — "quintessentially American in its seeming response to the needs of the restlessly mobile society" — the sibling of the commercial vernacular Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour canonized. As provocation, it redefines the architectural interior as portable: the occupant brings "seat, heat and shelter" (and even the dance — Banham's couple in their parked convertible "created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor courtesy of the highway department)," which dissolves when the dance floor "turns back into a length of highway … and silence replaces the sound of music").
Key Thinkers
- Reyner Banham — the 1965 Letter from America that reported the automobile vernacular to Britain as "a radical change in the basic programming of a building"; author of A Home is not a House (1965), the train of thought Webb's whole oeuvre derives from (per Two Journeys).
- Michael Webb — the vernacular's design-theoretical developer: the drive-in question "what might a drive-in house look or behave like?" answered with the rotating house; note 4's self-driving car to eliminate the "pressed metal deserts."
- (Related, not yet paged: see log — the drive-in's documenters; the mobile-home vernacular's historians.)
Related Concepts
- Commercial Vernacular — the storefront-and-signage roadside landscape the car produces; the automobile vernacular is its programmatic (rather than sign-based) half.
- The Drive-in House — Webb's answer to the vernacular's implicit question; the car itself received into the dwelling.
- Everyday Architecture — mobile homes and drive-ins as the everyday built environment produced by mobility rather than by architects.
- Domestic Interior — "You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car": the domestic interior as cargo, detached from the house.
- Terrain Vague — the drive-in's "just a flat piece of ground": ground without building, awaiting the event that converts it into interior.
- Dromology — the speed-science of the car system; the automobile vernacular is dromology's building stock.
- Post-Retail Space — the vernacular's after-image: parking lots as "pressed metal deserts" and the big-box stores SITE destabilized.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Inside out (Webb 2018) — Banham's 1965 Letter from America quoted at length ("a flat piece of ground… the rest of the situation comes on wheels"; "You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car"; the "ballroom in the wilderness"); the drive-in as "a radical change in the basic programming of a building"; Webb's drive-in house and the "pressed metal deserts" of note 4.
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Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown & Izenour 1977) — the commercial-strip sibling: the roadside landscape legitimized as architectural meaning (complementary source).
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Hawthorne — Fifty Years of "Learning from Las Vegas" — Banham's position in the Las Vegas story (complementary source).
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Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the domestic continuation of the vernacular: the garage as its "invisible armature of suburbia" and the chapter's reception of the car into the dwelling (the Auto Residence) — the vernacular's programme arriving home. See architectural-purgatory, car-as-inhabitant.
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Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production account of the same vernacular's dominance and cost: the car's house-share ("the average space required for a single car—say 240 sq. ft—is about double the size of an average secondary bedroom"; "the average homeowner pays more to house his or her automobile than they do to house their children. That is correct," p. 88); the garage saga as vernacular evolution — detached rear structure → attached rear → side-loaded → front-loaded, driven by "reducing construction costs" and interior-plan flexibility (p. 88), culminating in "This is a prime reason for why our streetscapes look so bad!" (p. 89); the mitigation apparatus as the vernacular's design vocabulary (side-load, turned, tandem, garage courts, carports, alleys, rear-loaded, lower-level garages, rooms over garages, pp. 89–97); the small-lot extreme — Sunbelt houses "where the entire façade seems to consist of garage doors and driveways" (p. 35); and the multifamily version — the row home "with a garage tacked on in front looks ridiculous, but is among the most common multifamily prototypes" (p. 209). Where Morey & Alkanoglu theorize the garage's purgatory and Banham the road's space, Wentling documents the vernacular's production logic — the car's 240 square feet winning the streetscape because interiors sell houses (see architectural-purgatory, separation-of-uses, typology).
Open Questions
- Is the automobile vernacular a historical episode (car culture, c. 1950–2000) or a template for mobility-induced building types to come (autonomous vehicles, per Webb's note 4 — "eliminating those pressed metal deserts more completely than ever the drive-in could")?
- Banham's drive-in interior exists only while occupied — "the dance floor turns back into a length of highway." Does the vernacular therefore dissolve the building into event, and what theory of the interior survives that dissolution?
- How does the automobile vernacular's programmatic radicalism ("a radical change in the basic programming of a building") relate to the sign-based radicalism of the commercial vernacular — are they one roadside phenomenon seen from two sides?
