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‘House Form and Culture’ revisited: A subaltern critique of Rapoport’s reading

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Estela Duque

HOUSE FORM AND CULTURE REVISITED:

A Subaltern Critique of Rapoport’s Reading of Vernacular

Introduction
Analyses of discourses around Western colonial enterprises in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries have been the focus of great intellectual ferment in the last
four decades. Of particular interest to this paper is the intersection of Subaltern
Studies with South East Asia studies of popular movements and culture.1 The aim is
to bring the insights from these converging studies to create a framework for
critiquing vernacular architecture. The essay will look at an early approach to such a
definition of vernacular architecture in Amos Rapoport’s House Form and Culture.2
Rapoport’s main contribution has been generally acknowledged to be in archaeology
and environment-behaviour studies.3 This study will attempt to locate Rapoport
within a more general theme that permeated the 1960-70s --- a curiosity about
systems of meaning from “below”.4 Rapoport’s contribution was a cultural turn to
the vernacular question in architecture, one of the divergent themes emerging in the
post-WW II critique of modernism.5
Rapoport’s investigation of the vernacular, analyses both pictorial and textual
material in a manner akin to ethnographic studies. His approach to culture entails an
opposition between high style and vernacular. This binary logic organizes agency.
High style is dependent on the agency of genius, whereas Rapoport’s analysis
eliminates agency in the vernacular in the absence of genius. I would argue that the
notion of hegemony from the study of subaltern societies and popular culture
remains useful in explaining the power and tenacity of cultural systems when
questioning this earlier meaning of vernacular.6 The question of agency in
architecture requires that we investigate precisely how objects gain their status as
vernacular.
There is immediacy in the architectural imagery in House Form and Culture. It
reflects the book’s presumption of objectivity in its ethnographic mode of
description. The difficulty with this analysis undertaken without any distance from
the process of observation or study is that there is no “theory of interest” in the
investigation of socio-cultural forces. 7 Rapoport does not speculate on the possible
connection between power, agency and the subject. It is Rapoport’s contribution to
this early formulation of vernacular that this essay examines, since it has yet to be
questioned for its methodological and theoretical assumptions.
The impact of Rapoport’s work can be gleaned from the subsequent translation of
and reactions to House Form and Culture and another book Human Aspects of
Urban Form.8 William Thomson’s review characterizes House Form and Culture as
“difficult, basic and provocative”. 9 Rapoport’s influence in design is acknowledged
by Juan Pablo Bonta because it challenged “the possibility of applying scientific
methods to the design process.”10 Robert Riley’s commendation of Rapoport’s
methodological pluralism in Human Aspects of Urban Form also applies to the first
book.11 He considers Rapoport’s technique of relating architecture and anthropology
in the treatment of the formal and tectonic qualities of architecture through annotated
sketches, captions and photographs. Riley notes the dilemma in environment-
behaviour studies because of the split between “design elitism and populism/mass
culture”, a view echoed even by Rapoport ten years later in 1992. 12

Figure 1. Rapooport’s annotated sketches (from Amos Rapoport’s House Form and Culture ©1969, reproduced
by permission of Pearson Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA)

History, Critical Theory and the Subaltern

Subaltern Studies began as a critique of eighteenth century British politics,13
nineteenth century Indian historiography, and the conventional interpretation of
Marxism in the 1960s-70s.14 Two key figures in this critique are Ranajit Guha and
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Editor of the first six volumes of Subaltern Studies, Guha was
also author of the essay that launched the methodological commitments of the
rewriting of Indian historiography.15 Chakrabarty on the other hand clarifies some
concepts implicit in Guha’s writing, examining the coupling of culture and
consciousness in investigating agency.16 Other authors such as Gayatri Spivak and
Sumit Sarkar have been excluded in this essay because of the complexities they
introduce to the debate which are beyond its scope.
2 Duque
Other responses to orthodox Marxist historiography also appear at the same time in
SEA area studies in American social science circles. The second group of writers
pertinent to this essay are Reynaldo Ileto and Vicente Rafael, whose intellectual links
can be traced to Cornell University and Benedict Anderson.17 Ileto looks at agency in
early twentieth century Philippines colonial society and makes this analysis relevant
to contemporary mass based movements. Rafael on the other hand examines
colonialism prior to the emergence of a nationalist consciousness (1580-1705). Thus
the postcolonial critique emerging from SE Asia studies converges with the analysis
in Subaltern Studies. It is used in this paper as a framework for analysing
assumptions embedded within House Form and Culture. The three main points of
this postcolonial critique to be developed in relation architecture are: the
characterization of subaltern politics, the nature of evidence tied to subaltern agency,
and finally, vernacularization as change situated within the transformative process of
colonization.

Nature and autonomy of subaltern politics: a critique of class

The first point taken is related to Guha’s proposition regarding the elitist biases of the
nationalist historiographies of India.18 Themes of Indian-ness and “consciousness of
a nation” constitute the origin of these historiographies according to Guha and are
maintained in their transformations. This is traced to a “class outlook” emanating
from both native bourgeois and colonial elite, which defines the Indian political
superstructure primarily through British colonial institutions. Ileto makes similar
claims about Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines. Both writers ask
whether it is possible to assert autonomy for the beliefs, social organization and
actions of peasant and labouring classes. This is contrasted with Rapoport’s position
in House Form and Culture regarding socio-cultural forces, which does not
problematise the nature of meanings or subject positions associated with writing on
the vernacular.
It is useful to examine the ways in which consciousness is used here, in order
to pinpoint the ways by which subaltern agency is attributed. Guha defines
consciousness only very loosely, in a way that is invariably attached to “nation” as
used interchangeably with nationalism in his writing. This limits the possibilities of
using consciousness to account for subaltern existence. Ileto examines the traditional
mind through pasyon (passions of Jesus Christ) and anting-anting (amulets or
talisman) using the term perception. I will use consciousness to mean an awareness
of “self” influencing personal behaviour, which then becomes useful in enunciating
collective agency.19 My extension of this definition is linked to Chakrabarty’s
analysis of the coupling of consciousness and culture.20 Culture at the level of
everyday experience is useful when tracing shifts in the social order, prior to the
constitution of the nationalist self. This is because the term subaltern connotes the

Duque 3
uneven transformation of colonial society, where an understanding of power and
authority through a fully developed class consciousness is not possible.
This strategy of examining the various definitions of consciousness is a step
sideways to avoid the associations with nationalism as in Guha’s critique, and to pin
down a mode of agency that is more complex than simply a “lack of agency”.21 This
is productive to architecture in two ways: first, it provides the possibility for
interrogating a more general architectural consciousness laden with its own biases
operating in scholarship such as Rapoport’s; second, it creates an opening for
challenging assumptions about agency and change in the vernacular category.

The question of evidence in non-literate societies

Another common theme is the difficulty of finding coherent traces when the
subaltern has no clear voice in the primary records. Chakrabarty’s reading of agency
from the disjunctions in the records of private and public authorities, overlap with
Ileto’s articulation of agency as a “system of unconscious thought”.22 Traces of the
peasant and labouring class could then include modes of dressing, the syntax and
grammar of language, colloquial speech, body language and, I would add, associated
representational tools such as native syllabary and native script.23 The general
implication for vernacular architecture is twofold. First, that the framework of
vernacular architecture can be scrutinised by investigating the type of evidence
associated with it. For example in Rapoport’s text, the so-called socio-cultural forces
influencing vernacular forms are established following descriptions of myths,
religion, kinship, caste, and national character in anthropological texts. It is not clear
what kind of agents are behind these forces, or how change occurs in these
communities. The second implication which follows from this is that the binary
opposition in agency established by genius in modern architecture and socio-cultural
forces in vernacular, can then be interrogated through an examination of the power
and authority that lends the vernacular a sense of legitimacy.

Vernacularization and change

The third and final point is drawn from Vicente Rafael’s analysis of
‘vernacularization’ as change, in response to external pressures such as colonialism.24
Rafael explores the conversion to Christianity of native society through a process of
translation, by means of grammar books (artes) and dictionaries (vocabularios) of
the vernacular languages, undertaken by Spanish friars. Rafael responds to agency in
two ways. First, he concludes that colonization cannot simply be a one-way process
because the rationale for and order associated with Christianity is tied to the
conversion of Tagalog society in the Philippines. Second, that conversion results in
discrepancies and inequalities that are the product of the difference between, and the
deference of, the Tagalog language to Castilian. The specific questions that can be
posed bearing these in mind are: how does Rapoport’s method of viewing vernacular
4 Duque
architecture ethnographically act as a transformative grid in the production of
architectural discourse? How is change conceptualised within this definition of
vernacular architecture?
The three important points of convergence in the works of Guha, Ileto, Rafael
and Chakrabarty are as follows: the nature and autonomy of subaltern politics
examined through the coupling of consciousness and culture; the nature of evidence
tied to non-literate communities; and the need to examine the transformative
processes of conversion and translation within dominant grids of authority.
Understanding this contributes to the questioning of Rapoport’s approaches to
vernacular architecture, by rupturing the binary opposition in agency which locates
individuals within rigid structures in society. And it provides openings by which to
begin addressing the hidden assumptions in writing on vernacular, and
transformations manifesting within its grid of authority.

Entering the Debate in Architecture

If the study of subaltern societies can be interpreted as histories from below, then
Rapoport’s House Form and Culture can be seen as an attempt to understand
architecture from below. More recent analysis of post-WW II critiques of modernism
identify an anti-modernist strand in works valorising indigenous culture, in defiance
of the “globalizing” tendencies of the modern movement. Among the architects who
stand out in this regard are Bernard Rudofsky, Amos Rapoport and Paul Oliver.
Felicity Scott’s study of Bernard Rudofsky points to the role of the Museum of
Modern Art in the “seduction” of its audience, especially the architectural
profession.25 She analyses Rudofsky’s position as dependent on an “essentializing
logic”, but demonstrates his grasp of its ensuing contradictions in his life
circumstances. This paper will look at a gap that remains with regard to
understanding vernacular. Rapoport’s work represented a moment when architecture
struggled with the very same problematic as that postcolonial the subaltern historians
write on but with very different results. I will use a subaltern critique to examine
Rapoport’s contribution to the meaning of vernacular, and as a methodological tool
for looking at the anti-modern strand of post-WW II architectural discourse more
generally.

The nature of vernacular discourses: a critique of biases

I will begin by looking at the purported forces that shape the forms of vernacular
architecture. According to Rapoport’s logic, the vernacular mould becomes a
backdrop to high style, without which the work of genius described in the dominant
account of architecture becomes inconceivable:

When references to dwellings and settlements occur in the anthropological

literature, for example, they are descriptive rather than analytical; cultural
Duque 5
 geography which has seen the dwelling as important has either used it as a
diagnostic tool or concentrated on morphological classification.

Architectural theory and history have traditionally been concerned with the
study of monuments. They have emphasized the work of men of genius, the
unusual, the rare. Although this is only right, it has meant that we have tended
to forget that the work of the designer, let alone of the designer of genius, has
represented a small, often insignificant, portion of the building activity at any
given period. The physical environment of man, especially the built
environment, has not been, and still is not, controlled by the designer. This
environment is the result of vernacular (or folk, or popular) architecture, and it
has been largely ignored in architectural history and theory. 26

Rapoport argues that socio-cultural forces are the medium of change in vernacular
architecture. It is useful to contrast this with Nikolaus Pevsner’s An Outline of
European Architecture, one of the dominant canons of architectural history Rapoport
refers to:27

A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.

Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being
to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings
designed with a view to aesthetic appeal. … What distinguishes architecture
from painting and sculpture is its spatial quality. In this, and only this, no other
artist can emulate the architect. Thus the history of architecture is primarily a
history of man shaping space, and the historian must keep spatial problems
always in the foreground. That is why no book on architecture, no matter how
popular its presentation may be, can be successful without ground plans. 28

But if Pevsner’s definition of architecture is followed, the cathedral becomes

problematic because of the anonymity of the builders. It is therefore not surprising
that Rapoport’s general disagreement with this account leads him to claim that the
house form cannot be the result of any single causal factor --- of genius giving form
to space. Instead, the most important and defining concerns are socio-cultural. Social
issues are associated with values influencing the decision to build either individually
or communally, permanently or lightly, etc.; whereas cultural factors refer to the
“cosmic image, ritual orientation, symbolic nature of built form”. In the final
analysis, Rapoport describes these pressures as:

… also much more complex, and the links among form, culture, and behaviour
are more tenuous, or possibly just more difficult to trace and establish.
In view of this, the following question remains to be considered: To what
extent does the conceptual framework proposed apply to house form today? If
6 Duque
 this framework can still be applied today, it will not only explain the past but
also illuminate the future. The difference between high style and popular
building still exists, and applies to houses as well as to the roadside
architecture. It is the tract house rather than the architect designed house that
needs to be discussed in order to discover which of the values it represents
might help to explain its success.29

This category of vernacular, however, maintains the binary opposition implicit in the
definition of architecture that it attempts to criticise. This kind of logic has two
implications. First, that the high-low distinction is organized either by the presence
or absence of an agent. Pevsner’s argument is sustained by an aesthetic criteria (high
style) that presupposes a genius behind it; whereas Rapoport’s socio-cultural forces
presuppose an absence of individual or collective authorship. This binary opposition
between individual agency (high style) and social-cultural forces devoid of agency
(vernacular, folk or primitive) is problematic in a subaltern critique. Agency as
examined in the first section is complex, as it could involve misreadings and
misunderstandings of colonial rule, with important consequences for the analysis of
meanings drawn outside the original contexts.
Regarding this initial meaning of vernacular to which Rapoport contributes,
one might ask: who builds, inhabits, uses vernacular buildings? Is it merely
coincidence that they are mostly at the margins of civilized society? If we return to
Pevsner’s argument, what does it mean to insist on the use of plans, facades,
projection drawings and photographs of the built form? An architectural
interpretation requires the ability to read images in relation to the building process,
and awareness of a history, vocabulary and grammar specific to architecture.30 The
demand for architecture to limit itself and express its “uniqueness” through the
definition of its own constitution, has been criticised as characteristic of the
modernist era.31 In that sense therefore, Rapoport’s work remains within the confines
of a modernist strategy. The subaltern implication is that an examination of
architectural meaning can also be made at the level of language, consciousness and
culture. Furthermore, one could begin in terms other than those of form, to argue that
this exclusive mode of attributing meaning in architectural discourse is imbued with
a disciplinary and class bias.

The question of evidence: the complicity of anthropology?

In reiterating the distinction between vernacular on one hand and high style on the
other, Rapoport refers to the work of Robert Redfield and states that:

Lack of differentiation in the forms and construction of buildings is an

expression of the general lack of differentiation typical of primitive and even

Duque 7
 peasant societies. This aspect of these societies affects the types of buildings
and hence the type of evidence which we need to consider.
Almost all observers of primitive and peasant societies have commented on the
typical lack of differentiation in the use of space and labor which also
permeates other areas of life and thought. 32

It is interesting that Ileto analyses this opposition as the “Little Traditions” versus
“Great Tradition” distinction in a “developmental” concept of culture. He traces
these distinctions to Redfield’s studies in anthropology that gain circulation in 1965
through the work of Southeast Asia studies scholar Harry Benda.33 In spite of the
consideration of change and the position of women in the material and socio-cultural
forces described in Chapter 3, Rapoport’s logic nevertheless relies on anthropological
categories without an acknowledgment of the connection to colonialism. And
although this silence in Rapoport’s work is more commonly known, the acceptance
of anthropological classifications is not problematized until much later when
architecture finally takes up a political position regarding colonialism. It is this
crucial distance from anthropology, a distance absent in Rapoport’s theorization of
the vernacular that becomes the impetus for investigating agency in history and
postcolonial theory. To what extent has the mode of analysis represented in
Rapoport’s work with its inherent assumptions and biases, been challenged more
generally in architecture?
I would argue that the vernacular-high style dichotomy in architecture could be
teased out by examining the colonial histories of the vernacular settings. This is in
view of the enormous amount of material subsequently published on vernacular
architecture that accepts the hierarchical structure imposed on the analysis of native
societies. Rafael’s definition of vernacularisation as change induced by external
pressures point to a relationship of dominance and subjugation. Vernacular as a mode
of translation and conversion, enables the production of coffee table books, video
documentaries, empirical studies and essays as “research”, which upholds the
difference perceived in the built form and the native society. Vernacular acts as a grid
of authority in the production of knowledge about the buildings, the people and
processes of building as the objects of analyses. As a two-way transformative
process vernacularisation not only contains this difference but in making the inherent
inequalities appear natural, or as historically inevitable, also domesticates them.34 In
the end, even Rapoport acknowledges that:

There is a danger in applying Western concepts [to developing countries],

which represent only one choice among the many possible, to the problems of
other areas, instead of looking at them in terms of local way of life, specific
needs, and ways of doing things.35

8 Duque
Figure 2. Typical open house in jungle near Iquitos, Peru. Figure 3. House in Iquitos, Peru (native area of Belén).
Note use of solid walls for privacy, the major change from house in figure 2. (Photographs from Amos Rapoport’s
House Form and Culture ©1969, reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey, USA)

Architecture and the Postcolonial

Finally, I will turn to the possibilities presented after architecture takes up the
question of the postcolonial in one of the earliest publications on this. Two essays in
Postcolonial Space(s) deal with architectural representation, agency and
consciousness. The aim is to find out what else might be learned from the critical
historians that is productive to the examination of vernacular architecture. The first
essay by Stephen Cairns inquires into the process of objectification of the pendapa as
traditional Javanese domestic structure, and orthographic projection as architecture’s
representational “equipment”.36 The second essay focuses on the appearance of
carved dwellings in Turkish squatter settlements in the 1930s.37 A point made
regarding the incommensurability of the languages of the peasants and the urban
inhabitants through a recognition of the intentionality behind “nodding”, points to the
idea of consciousness. Nodding in this instance, instigates a moment of resistance not
(yet) necessarily connected to architecture:

The languages of the urban dweller and the peasant are different even if they
use the same words,” [Köymen] stated. “[They are different] to such an extent
that a peasant from a village who had no contact with any city and an urban
dweller who had no previous rural exposure cannot possibly understand each
other … There is no way to cancel this difference.” In the city, he continued,
since there was no possibility of communication, the peasants refused to speak.
They “merely nodded” at whatever they heard. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, Köymen recognized the gesture of nodding as the refusal to
speak rather than as a sign of acceptance or agreement. His interruption of the
silent act of nodding enabled him to recognize the rural other as a subject rather
than a mere object of his analysis.38

I would add that such moments of recognition initiate the dialogue by which
agency and resistance in architecture can be explored by employing the subaltern
Duque 9
critique of class. Nodding could initiate recognition of resisting discourses, pointing
to exclusions made regarding vernacular architecture.

Conclusion
One of the exclusions made in Rapoport’s text is of evidence that might alter
meanings attributed to form, if it does not conform to architecture’s aesthetic,
functional and tectonic criteria. The lack of self-consciousness that Rapoport
perceives in vernacular architecture is explored through ideas on religion, ritual,
mythology and culture borrowed from anthropological texts. But to become
accessible to architecture it is translated into plans, annotated drawings, perspective
sketches and photographs, the instruments mediating between architecture and
anthropology. This is similar to orthographic drawings in Cairns’ analysis of the
pendapa form. The inclusion of such evidence as nodding in Nalbantoglu’s text
might be based on the question of the intentional nature of the human mind. The
processes involved are ephemeral but traces are embedded in archival sources.
Therefore in addition to the incommensurability of rural and urban “cultural
practice”, I would introduce the methodological opening provided by the subaltern
critique of class and disciplinary biases. This is contained in the original proposition
by Guha and Ileto regarding elitist biases in historiographies of nation.

There is therefore a direct link to Rapoport in the pendapa and the Turkish carved
dwelling. Rapoport’s text is generally acknowledged to be silent about the
postcolonial, his engagement of non-western material without reference to a deeper
political position vis-à-vis Europe. What is not commonly acknowledged is the
extent to which Rapoport’s text illustrates a more pervasive acceptance of the
anthropological categorizations of subaltern societies that stabilize architecture.
Vernacular as a category thereby translates to a mode of authorization in architectural
discourse. This is taken up by such writers as Cairns and Nalbatoglu in their
examination of the impact of colonialism on architecture. Further investigation in
this direction would require a framework that can take into account agency through
what I call resisting discourses.

Author’s Details
Estela studied architecture at Victoria University of Wellington and University of the Philippines. She
has worked in architectural firms in the Philippines, Singapore and New Zealand. She started her
postgraduate studies at the University of Adelaide and is now working on a PhD at the University of
Melbourne looking at the relationship between architecture and colonial medicine in the Philippines in
the early twentieth century.

Endnotes

10 Duque
1
My thanks to Dr. Antonia Finnane, Dr. Stephen Cairns and Dr. Paul Walker for sharing their insights in this project.
2
Rapoport, Amos. House, Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1969).
3
Culture-Meaning-Architecture: Critical Reflections on the Work of Amos Rapoport, ed. Keith Diaz Moore (Aldershot:
Ashgate, c2000).
4
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, 7. See also Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (1972); and Paul
Oliver, Shelter and Society (1969).
5
Goldhagen, Sarah Williams and Réjean Legault. “Introduction” in Anxious Modernisms, ed. Sarah Williams
Goldhagen and Réjean Legault. (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 11-24.
6
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, 104-5. The shift in meaning becomes apparent in categories like “pre-industrial
vernacular and ‘industrial vernacular”.
7
Gayatri Spivak already points this out in critique of Foucault: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 273-4.
8
Rapoport, Amos. Pour Une Anthropologie de la Maison (Paris: Bruxelles: Montreal: Dunod, 1972).
9
Architectural Record, vol. 149 (January 1971): 49, 68.
10
AAQ: Architectural Association quarterly. Autumn, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1970): [4]-12.
11
Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 39, no.1 (March 1980): 83.
12
“Entretien aver Amos Rapoport,” Architecture & comportement, vol.8, no.1 (1992): [81]-102.
13
The term “subaltern” in Subaltern Studies is from Antonio Gramsci. Arnold, David. ‘Gramsci and Peasant
Subalternity in India, in The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol 11, no. 4 (July 1984): 155-174.
14
Chatuvedi, Vinayak. “Introduction,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chatuvedi
(London: Verso in association with New Left Review, 2000), vii-xix.
15
Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Colonial Historiography of India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit
Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37-44.
16
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture: The Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1920-50,” in Subaltern
Studies III, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 116-152; Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Difference ---
Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, c1997), 373-405.
17
See the following: (1) Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979); (2)
Rafael, Vicente. Contracting Colonialism (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988). See also Rafael’s
“Regionalism, Area Studies and the Accidents of Agency,” The American Historical Review, vol 104, no 4 (October
1999): 1208-1220; “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text. vol 41, (Winter 1994): 91-111.
18
Guha, 1988: 37-44.
19
Collins English Dictionary, 4th Australian ed., G.A. Wilkes and W. A. Krebs, eds. (Glasgow: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1998).
20
Chakrabarty, ‘Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture,’ 131-2, 151.
21
An anonymous referee points out that consciousness “(is) a thematic paralleled by the Subaltern Studies performance
of agency as lack of agency”. I don’t think native agency can be resolved simply as “lack of agency”, because this
cannot account for any misunderstanding of colonial rule.
22
The term “unconcsious thought” is borrowed from the French Annales historian Marc Bloch. Ileto, Pasyon and
Revolution, 11, 13.
23
Use of dressing and other aspects of material culture as evidence abound in history and cultural studies but have not
filtered into architecture yet.
24
Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: 5-7, 13, 15-16, 20.
25
Scott, Felicity. “Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling” in Anxious Modernisms, ed. Sarah
Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault. (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000),
215-237.
26
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, viii, 1.
27
Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Outline of European Architecture, 6th Jubilee ed. (Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin Books,
c1943). Rapoport also cites: Siegfried Gideon; Lewis Mumford.
28
Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 7.
29
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, 126-27
30
Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
31
Ibid, 20-21.
32
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, 8. A full investigation of the relation of Rapoport’s text to anthropology is
beyond the scope of the essay. But it is useful for future undertakings to note that Rapoport also consults the work of Sir
James Frazer, Claude Levi-Strauss and Margaret Mead.
33
Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: 6-7. See also footnotes (9) and (11) on same page.
34
Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1999).
35
Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, 128-29
36
Carins, Stephen. ‘Re-Surfacing: Architecture, Wayang, and the “Javanese House”’ in Postcolonial Space(s), Gülsüm
Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, c1997), 73-88.
 37
Nalbantoglu, Gülsüm Baydar. ‘Limits of (in)Tolerance: The Carved Dwelling in the Architectural and Urban
Discourse of Modern Turkey’ in Postcolonial Space(s), Nalbantoglu and Wong op. cit., 89-100.
38
Nalbantoglu, ‘Limits of (in)Tolerance,’ 100.

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