Living in the rural Southeast, as I do now, makes me even more aware of the basic building blocks of American architecture. They are not only the houses that we usually think of as the cores of our communities, or the office buildings and factories, but also the places of intersection and gathering—which is to say, the sites where we shop, eat, or pray. They are the small commercial buildings at crossroads or just along the side of the road that make up so much of the common landscape outside of the urban core. Most of the time we overlook these stores and shops because their functions and their signs overwhelm them. It is only when they are no longer in use, become overgrown, or are burnished by age and use that we begin to see and appreciate them. A new book of photographs by the photographers Steve Gross and Susan Daley, Backroads Buildings: In Search of the Vernacular (Schiffer Books), portrays these everyday structures with love and precision.
The book’s strength is the way it captures the haunting beauty of these buildings. That beauty comes as much from their age and abandonment as it does from the simplicity and clarity of their forms. Yet the same haunting quality is also the book’s weakness, because these buildings can seem like something close to ruin porn: a rural version of the abandoned factories and theaters that photographers such as Camilo Jose Vergara have transformed into fetish objects, and that now inspire high-end interiors as much as they reflect our love of the past.
The book’s geographic ambit makes the nostalgia even more specific: These are buildings you might associate with the old rural South, not as it is embodied in its antebellum mansions or sharecropper shacks, but as you might find it in the buildings that once held together the towns positioned between those two extremes of wealth and poverty. What you see here are the fragments of the agricultural communities that are now disappearing in the face of urbanization and suburbanization, as well as the mechanization and globalization of agriculture.
As such, these buildings remind us of a time before our current age of political polarization and opioid addiction, and before kudzu took over their every available surface. You can imagine these buildings humming with activity and powering American democracy. They also recall the Jeffersonian ideals and the small-scale, spread-out system of workshops and stores at the core of the American industrial revolution.
What remains in these photographs are the forms themselves. Like the houses that we think of as the mainstay of any vernacular, they are composed of materials, shapes, and geometries that are restricted and basic: Rectangular boxes (except for the roofs or an occasional arch or rounded corner) that are covered with either wood siding or plaster, and that are dominated by central symmetries. The buildings are not strictly vernacular, as many exhibit the hallmarks of various styles. Some are distinctly Neo-Georgian, even if the pediments and columns are just hinted at with surface treatment, while others exhibit the smooth curves of Art Deco or streamlined Moderne affectations.
It is what happens with these forms that keeps your attention as you leaf through this book. The variations both within and of the forms show how endless the possibilities are, even if you start with such simple ingredients. Although many of the buildings are similar, none of them are the same. The addition of a wing or a porch, the reduction of a window frame, or even the misplacement of a single window within a symmetrical array catches your eye, extends the rhythm of the structures, and gives their compositions an unexpected twist. Many of these quirks also reveal, or at least make you wonder about, the functions of these buildings and the lives that unfolded inside. They also hint at larger constructs—for instance, the social and economic networks that animated these communities and that the curator Brian Wallis references in the book’s all-too-short introduction.
Over the years, disuse, reuse, and the simple passage of time have reshaped these buildings in different ways, giving more hints of the lives led there, even as natural vegetation has now taken over more and more of their surfaces. The resolution, control of light (not too bright, not too flat), angle (not fully frontal, but not dynamic), and color of the photography sharpens or softens the shapes as necessary to make them even more evocative. Printed on sturdy paper and bordered by seas of white, these images take emblems of everyday life and transform them into monuments to a bygone way of making, trading, and living.
Some day we will be able to publish a similar work that shows the Arby’s, Starbucks, Kroger’s, and Home Depots that are the current paragons of the commercial vernacular. It may be a more difficult undertaking, because the materials and forms of these contemporary structures are less varied, and the objects as a whole are more standardized. But I am sure that, with some good photography, we will be able to find the beauty in today’s banal boxes, just as Gross and Daley have found it in yesterday's.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
