Arguing that past scholarship has provided inadequate methodological tools for understanding ordinary housing in Canada, Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth present a new framework for interpreting the dwelling. Canada »s settlement history, with its emphasis on staples exports, produced few early landed elite or houses in the grand style. There was, however, a preponderance of small owner-built »folk » dwellings that reproduced patterns from the immigrants » ancestral homes in western Europe.
As regional economics matured, a prospering population used the house as a material means to display their social achievement. Whereas the elites came to reveal their status and taste through careful connoisseurship of the standard international »high style, » a new emerging middle class accomplished this through a new mode of house building that the authors describe as »vernacular. » The vernacular dwelling selectively mimicked elements of the elite houses while departing from the older folk forms in response to new social aspirations. The vernacular revolution was accelerated by a popular press that produced inexpensive how-to guides and a manufacturing sector that made affordable standardized lumber and trim. Ultimately the triumph of vernacular housing was the »prefab » house marketed by firms such as the T. Eaton Company.
The analysis of these house-making patterns are explored from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Though the emphasis is on the ordinary single-family dwelling, the authors provide an important glimpse of counter-currents such as housing for gang labour, company housing, and the multi-occupant forms associated with urbanization. The analysis is placed in the context of a careful rendering of the historical geographical context of an emerging Canadian space, economy, and society.
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