Abandoned Farmhouse Near Marble Falls, Texas
Historical renovation of abandoned Farmhouse near Marble Falls, TX. Photo credit: Stephanie Chambers, Chambers Architects, Inc.
Buildings are neglected for many reasons. Some are exotic products of native people, developed in ways unfamiliar to modern life. Other buildings become way too familiar and unimportant to appreciate any longer. Vernacular architecture, structures using local materials in functional style, developed to meet the needs of common people in their time and place. These anonymously-built cabins, barns and outbuildings are occasionally seen in rural areas.
Men and women who fabricated these structures tell us their stories through the daily labor of their built world. Study of ‘the neglected’ brings diversity to architecture and acknowledges how those who came before us developed culture out of their spatial dimension. One architectural response to the ‘green’/ sustainability movement is to recognize the embodied energy that exists in negected buildings, then adapt whatever is still useful in them as integral components in our present-day designs.