1. Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion
Fred Kniffen
1965

2. What are Kniffen’s goals
Settlement geography
Focus on houses and barns
Housing a basic fact of human geography
Sense of urgency, unchronicled, wooden buildings falling down

3. Methods Create a typology
Quantified which types are numerically dominant
Qualified as to areal and temporal positions
Seek out origins, routes of diffusion, adaptations, other forces affecting change or stability

4. Mechanism of stability
Concept of Initial Occupance.
first post pioneer permanent settlement imprint established in the several sections of the wooded eastern United States by migrants from seaboard source areas, an epoch ending about 1850.

5. I house = one room deep, two stories tall, side gable
First impressions
I house = one room deep, two stories tall, side gable
fn 9 "The I-house was first so named in 1936 in recognition of the Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa origin of many of its builders in prairie Louisiana.
Pennsylvania German barns
“relation of experiences.” Is this verifiable? more a connoisseurship. Adhoc methodology of experience.

6. I-House, St Mary’s of the Rock, Franklin County, Indiana ca 1850

8. Disciplinary concerns
Occupance pattern is “distinctly geographical.”
Area of inquiry to hold, “even against the onslaught of anthropologists.”
No other discipline is interested in folk housing.
Prolonged study to say what the types are.

9. Later concerns about typology
Ad hoc classification scheme in which significant details, determined on the basis of variable convenient criteria, are isolated and metonymically employed to represent the whole object. Log buildings, pot sherds – Henry Glassie
Researcher category, not about discovering community expressed values.

10. Features of building typology
Typology subdivided in architecture into form, technics and task (use).
Form is the arrangement of elements, or the structure of components.
Construction must be the elements and their rules of engagement.
Use or task is what meaning or semantic relationship these objects have.

11. Adhoc Typology Entirely visual
Focus on specific formal characteristics
Massing, orientation, piercing
Also visible construction features
Materials
Exposed construction features: for example, log corner notching

12. Primary and Secondary characteristics in typology
A necessary element (primary or essential) is one that must be present to identify the object.
A secondary (expendable) class of components can be removed without affecting the artifacts membership in a specific class (type).

17. Verification by comparison with the analysis of rural sociologists

18. Validating by comparison with regional dialects