Commercial Vernacular
Commercial Vernacular
Definition
The "commercial vernacular" refers to the ordinary, everyday architecture of commercial strips, gas stations, motels, fast-food restaurants, and roadside attractions. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas (1977) argues this vernacular is a legitimate source of architectural meaning, just as industrial vernacular served Modernism. It is characterized by applied signage, conventional construction, responsiveness to speed and movement, and direct communication with users.
Key Thinkers
- Robert Venturi — Championed the commercial vernacular as a source for contemporary architecture
- Denise Scott Brown — Analyzed commercial strips as valid urban form
- Steven Izenour — Documented commercial signage and building types
- Reyner Banham — the automobile-induced half of the same roadside landscape: mobile homes and drive-ins as "a radical change in the basic programming of a building" (1965 Letter from America, via Webb)
- Michael Webb — SITE's Best Products showrooms as the vernacular's destabilized limit-case: "the enclosed volume of the big box store shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open. SITE's work represented the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies."
Related Concepts
- ugly-and-ordinary — Aesthetic stance toward commercial vernacular
- decorated-shed — Building type common in commercial vernacular
- vernacular-architecture — Broader category (often refers to pre-industrial folk building)
- everyday-architecture — Related concept
- consumerism — Economic context of commercial vernacular
- urban-sprawl — Spatial context
- Automobile Vernacular — the car-induced, programmatic half of the roadside landscape (mobile homes, drive-ins), as against this page's sign-based half
- The Drive-in House — Webb's design-theoretical development of the roadside big-box and drive-in condition
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
- source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
- Inside out (Webb 2018) — the vernacular's big-box episode: SITE's Best Products project with the store volume "shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open" — commercial architecture as deliberate destabilization ("the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies"); and Banham's 1965 Letter from America naming the automobile vernacular as "a radical change in the basic programming of a building."
- source-notes/hawthorne-2023-fifty-years-learning-from-las-vegas
Open Questions
- How does the commercial vernacular relate to gentrification and neighborhood change?
- What is the environmental dimension of commercial vernacular (disposability, energy use)?
- How does online commerce affect the commercial vernacular's relevance?
- SITE's destabilized big-box ("architecture for disaster movies") is the commercial vernacular turned against itself — the store demolished as image before it ever fails economically. Is such deliberate ruin a critique of the vernacular or its consummate product?
