Can you tell me which city this is? What about the country?

I’m willing to bet most of you can’t. And yet, it’s one of the largest cities of a major European nation.

Give up? It’s Frankfurt, where ~50 more towers are currently going up or about to.

Germany has a unique architectural history, but its modern centers look increasingly like everywhere else. 200 years ago, a German home looked nothing like an American one, which looked nothing like an Indian one. They all had unique shape, materials and character.

You can see at a glance that they’re from somewhere.

That’s because of “vernacular architecture” — let me explain…

What Makes Great Architecture?

Some buildings you never tire of seeing: the Florence Duomo, St. Peter’s Basilica, or Chartres Cathedral. They have a lot in common with one another:

• Aesthetically harmonious

• Designed by trained artists

• Executed by skilled craftsmen

• Designed according to academic styles

• Intentionally expressing philosophical, religious, and moral virtues

In other words, they’re high art.

Of course, not all architecture can be made by super-skilled artists. For most of human history, buildings were designed by everyday people guided only by the wisdom of their own culture and the natural resources around them. 

With those, builders created what’s known as vernacular architecture, which:

• Uses accumulated communal knowledge, not a single artist’s expertise

• Employs local, natural materials and building techniques

• Doesn’t adhere strictly to academic or technical styles

• Expresses its environmental and historical context

This architecture comprises the homes, churches, and gathering places of ordinary citizens. It’s not designed to dazzle, provoke thought, or demonstrate an artist’s skill — but it’s often just as compelling. 

Spotting Vernacular Architecture

You can’t mistake an English cottage for a house in the Chilean countryside.

But what makes each piece of vernacular architecture unique? How can you tell where it’s from, and how do buildings tell the story of their origin?

Norway: Stave Churches

The Viking Age (c.700s-1000s) left northern Europe dotted with palisade-supported wooden homes. When Christianity took hold of Scandinavia, new buildings began to arise: Christian churches with a Viking flavor.

Called stave churches, these buildings used the stone and wood available to Norse builders. Over generations, builders found clever methods to protect wooden pillars from rotting in damp climates (like sill beams and stone foundations) — subtly altering the churches’ appearance over time.

Stave churches have a distinct Viking appearance, with pillared wooden interiors (think Théoden’s hall from The Lord of the Rings adaptations) and doors carved with intricate knots and swirls. 

What makes them truly unique? They’re a fusion of two seemingly opposite styles: the grand Romanesque basilicas of the Mediterranean and humble Norse palisade homes.

This design tells a dramatic story: the Christian conquest of the Norse world. 

When missionaries carried Christianity north, they brought memories of Constantinople’s cathedrals with them. Converted Vikings embraced Christianity, but imprinted it with their own cultural details — giving rise to their own saints, missionaries, and traditions, all with distinctively Norse character. 

Aspects of Christian church architecture were thus added to Norse designs. The resulting stave churches are incredible examples of the collision — yet successful fusion — of two radically different cultures.

Germany: Fachwerk Houses

Picture a town that looks German and you’ll call to mind tall black-and-white townhouses of plaster and wooden beams. 

You’re thinking of fachwerk, or half-timbered houses.

The oldest fachwerk structures come from the 14th century, the High Middle Ages. German architects learned how to construct a wooden skeleton from timber frames. Then, they added filler of whatever material they had — mostly clay and sand. 

Since you could dig clay from just about any riverbed, it was unpopular with nobles. They added white plaster over the clay to disguise the cheap material, giving fachwerk the plaster-and-wood appearance that you recognize from Bavarian travel brochures.

The timber framing made fachwerk houses surprisingly stable. This allowed builders to stack up more storeys than ever before, leading to the high-rising, close-packed townhomes that line cobblestone German streets.

Fachwerk could even bear the weight of turrets and spires, and so these rose from homes and castles, giving a fairytale aura to the architecture of the time.

Of course, this fairytale age didn’t last. The Industrial Revolution reached Germany in the early 19th century, and brought with it easy access to stone, metal, and other materials that supplanted humble wood and clay.

Industrialization also came hand-in-hand with new social movements, which in turn gave rise to new architecture. The architectural style inherent to the Grunderzeit era took fachwerk’s place. This imposing, formal aesthetic reflected Otto von Bismark’s push to establish Germany as a modern nation.

To this day, Chancellor Bismark and Grunderzeit remain linked in the minds of the German people, while fachwerk harkens back to a simpler and more idyllic Germany.

Some more examples:

• Multi-story mud houses built by the Asiri in Saudi Arabia (which regulate heat excellently in a challenging climate):
  
  

  

• Blackhouses in Scotland (using sheets of bog peat as roofing material):
  
  

  

• Clom (mixture of clay, marsh grass and lamb’s wool) houses in Wales, often using timbers from nearby shipwrecks:
  
  

  

Why Does All This Matter?

“Classical” architecture — buildings designed with a sophisticated understanding of mathematics and visual harmony — is a touchstone of advanced culture.

But vernacular architecture has a different kind of value: a form of cultural memory.

Traditional societies create myths, songs, and stories to encapsulate their worldview and pass their collective wisdom on to future generations. They build homes, churches, and meeting places for the same reason.

Vernacular architecture isn’t in conflict with classical architecture, it’s simply a different form of anthropological expression.

Think back to the colossal skyscrapers cloning their way across the world. Or consider how American prefab homes look identical whether you’re in the chilly, sea-soaked Northeast or the desert-covered Southwest.

Modern architecture has lost sight of what a building is supposed to be. Instead of a repository of cultural memory, buildings get reduced to things to be merely used.

The result: dreary buildings with no power to inspire you. 

The good news? Vernacular architecture is making a comeback. An increasing number of architects are designing buildings with local materials and traditional techniques. Fachwerk is even regaining popularity in Germany.

Vernacular architecture can be done anywhere by anyone — it’s the antidote to depressing modern buildings, and it’s well within reach. 

More Than a Machine

Le Corbusier, a leader of the brutalist movement, said a home is “a machine for living in.”

If a building is just something to be used, who cares if it is beautiful or unique? This mode of thinking has done perhaps irrevocable damage to urban centers across the world.

Vernacular architecture, on the other hand, tells a story — of where a culture comes from, what it believes, and what its people have been through. 

Function and beauty don’t have to be enemies. That’s why there’s value in the structures built by people who don’t have degrees in design. 

Artwork of the Week

Let’s switch gears. A digital art group just resurrected a giant.

Long ago, a 43-foot statue of the Roman emperor Constantine (272-337 AD) had crumbled under history’s weight. When its fragments were rediscovered in the 15th century, artists and historians immediately recognized the value of the shattered statue — but there was no hope of restoring it.

Until now. 

Using digital technology to scan the statue’s fragments (the head, a hand, and parts of the torso), artists turned the scans into 3D prints. They filled in the gaps with knowledge of similar historical constructions, and used the findings to cast a new statue, now unveiled on Rome’s Capitoline Hill:

Made with a mixture of acrylic resin and marble powder, the new Constantine is as close to the destroyed original as possible. 

It is technically a colossus (more than twice life-size): a larger-than-life tribute to a great ruler. It’s not the largest colossus of the ancient Roman world, but it’s one of the best-known.

Here’s what’s really interesting though: this might not be the first remake of the Constantine Colossus.

The artists studied the 700-year-old fragments and discovered that the chin may have originally had a beard, which had been chiseled off.

But why?

The beard could imply that the statue was originally an image of the god Jupiter. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, savvy craftsmen may have given the statue a shave, thus transforming it from pagan god to Christian emperor.

This means it’s more than an incredible artifact of the ancient world. It’s a snapshot of the moment of the birth of the Christian West.

Despite the impressive reconstruction, some people seem to be torn as to how to classify it — is the restored colossus a piece of history, or is it “fake” art?

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

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