1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910455474503321

Autore

Ennals Peter

Titolo

Homeplace : the making of the Canadian dwelling over three centuries / / Peter Ennals and Deryck W. Holdsworth

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 1998

©1998

ISBN

1-281-99562-2

9786611995621

1-4426-7583-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (322 p.)

Collana

Heritage

Disciplina

728/.0971

Soggetti

Dwellings - Canada - History

Architecture, Domestic - Canada - History

Architecture and society - Canada

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Maps -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- CHAPTER ONE. Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter -- CHAPTER TWO. The Polite House -- CHAPTER THREE. The Folk House -- CHAPTER FOUR. The Vernacular House -- CHAPTER FIVE. Housing for Labour -- CHAPTER SIX. The Self-Conscious House -- CHAPTER SEVEN. The Enduring Folk Stream -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Pattern Books and an Industrial Vernacular -- CHAPTER NINE. Housing the Industrial Worker -- CHAPTER TEN. Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.