Minnesota/Twin Cities vernacular residential architecture

[FISHMANPET]

Do we have a vernacular architecture? Or at least a surviving form? There's certainly the "mansions" built in the 1800s but those don't really represent the vernacular. The vast majority of our housing was built in the 20th century, at a point where Sears and other companies started selling homes nationwide, removing a lot of the local touch.

We don't have the kind of forms in the south to deal with the warm climates (or maybe our porches are an attempt to emulate that facet of southern vernacular?). Obviously it gets cold here but I don't know what that does to our architecture. Smaller windows and more compact forms, necessitating fewer and smaller exterior walls? We have snow, which has an impact on roof design. But a lot of midwestern cities have those same traits. Is there anything that sets our basic housing stock apart?

[Anondson]

The abundant nearly fully usable basements that aren't just large cellars?

[Nathan]

I would say the size of the homes (2.5 stories and very deep) and the fact that they are single family are a part of it. To the east many are townhomes or without side yards and to the west most are much smaller (1.5 story craftsman or bungalow)

And now of course... Minnesota modern

[EOst]

We do, kind of. Stucco and three-season porches. In the 30s, the Twin Cities had (by a wide margin) the highest percentage of stucco-exterior homes of any major city.

[FISHMANPET]

Why do we have basements when warmer climates don't? I'm sure you can't just pour a 4 inch slab and build on that, or your house would get thrown out of the ground when the ground froze. So we've got to go below the frost line, right? And at that point you might as well just dig it all out rather than pour your footings and fill it back in.

Also any reason we had so much stucco? Did we have a lot of whatever material is needed for stucco, and or a dearth of whatever people used in other places?

[Nathan]

For most of the south west the soil type makes digging basements very difficult, adding a basement to a house in Phoenix or Vegas will add a couple hundred thousand dollars to your cost.

[Anondson]

New England has lotsa of very near to surface bedrock making a basement a bedrock excavation.

[EOst]

I think the stucco percentage more or less correlates to the percentage of the city that was built in the '10s and '20s; many of the Revival styles popular then (esp. Tudor Revival, Spanish, "Moorish") were stucco by default, and there are huge districts of those houses in Minneapolis. When Minneapolis's predominance of stucco was noted in the 30s, 38% of the city was stucco, compared to 21% in St. Paul. That correlates pretty well with the growth you can see in these cities between 1910 and 1930:

[MNdible]

Those maps are so hot.

[EOst]

Those maps are so hot.

https://i.imgur.com/NQuUs1D.gif

[MNdible]

Tingling.

[mister.shoes]

That's really awesome, but it's too bad the freeway voids are ever-present and we can't see the pre-destruction development intact.

[twincitizen]

Those maps are so hot.

Seconded. The only change I'd suggest is eliminating the handful of large parcels (which presumably contain public/quasi-public buildings on parkland, cemeteries, etc.), as they kinda stand out and detract from the "story" the map is telling.

[David Greene]

Why do we have basements when warmer climates don't? I'm sure you can't just pour a 4 inch slab and build on that, or your house would get thrown out of the ground when the ground froze. So we've got to go below the frost line, right? And at that point you might as well just dig it all out rather than pour your footings and fill it back in.

The structural engineer we brought in claims that our 1905 house did not originally have a full basement, just a crawl space. He pointed out where the limestone foundation ends and something else (concrete?) begins.

[David Greene]

I'm not sure there really is a regional vernacular after about 1890. Many (most?) non-custom houses by then were built following stock plans that were available nationwide, well before Sears and others started selling and shipping actual houses. You can go to the Central library and check out whole books of plans from the late-19th through mid-20th century. Keith's was a prominent Minneapolis outfit that published magazines full of plans under various titles over the years.

https://archive.org/details/keithsmagazineon31minnuoft

BTW, this kind of thing is a great resource for restoring houses when you're trying to figure out what it might have looked like.

[FISHMANPET]

Randomly stumbled onto a house with a sleeping balcony in there, I guess that's a vernacular form.

[David Greene]

Randomly stumbled onto a house with a sleeping balcony in there, I guess that's a vernacular form.

Not sure what exactly you mean by sleeping balcony but many houses have upper-level porches that likely served that purpose.

I saw a house on the home tour once that has a lower front porch with a crank on the wall that lowers a bed from the ceiling. Pretty cool!

I can't find it right now but I recently read an article about how houses were cooled before air conditioning became widespread. Those oversized eaves, tall windows and yes, porches, all served specific cooling purposes. Large eaves allowed windows to be open in all kinds of weather, large windows increased air flow and porches provided complete weather protection to not only leave all the windows open but also to allow people to use it as a cool room. The Victorian wrap-around porch was a specific innovation to allow even more windows to be open all the time.

[steve0257]

Why do we have basements when warmer climates don't? I'm sure you can't just pour a 4 inch slab and build on that, or your house would get thrown out of the ground when the ground froze. So we've got to go below the frost line, right? And at that point you might as well just dig it all out rather than pour your footings and fill it back in.

Furnace and coal storage from the houses built when you heated with coal. Also, as a kid I spent a lot of time down there in the summer. It was the coolest part of the house during those hot sticky days.