Settlers, Frontiers and Suburbs: Twelve Houses of the Americas and Their Colonial Cousins

Begin with the pattern behind the rest: settlers combine the building traditions of their home country with the climate and materials of the place they settle. The result looks familiar in form but is adapted, and it repeated across the colonies of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Russia and Italy, so it gave a family of regional results rather than one look.

A gable roofed house that is two stories at the front and one at the rear, named for a slant topped wooden salt box. It became popular in the New England colonies in the seventeenth century, though it most likely began in Kent and East Anglia, and the long rear roof came from the economical habit of adding a lean-to shed behind the house.

The Cape Cod house is low and broad, with a steep gabled roof, a large central chimney and very little ornament. It began in seventeenth century New England, where the steep cedar shingled roof and simple symmetrical plan, built of local materials, suited the stormy weather, and it enjoyed a major revival from the 1930s to the 1950s with Colonial Revival detailing.

Dutch colonial building covers the styles of the whole Dutch colonial empire, from Indonesia, especially Java and Sumatra, to the United States, South Asia and South Africa. In the Dutch East Indies it was studied academically and grew into a distinct tropical architecture, and it is related to but separate from the earlier New Netherland tradition and the later Dutch Colonial Revival.

Creole architecture in the United States appears in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, and also in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with the Ponce Creole style as a regional variant. The entry is brief, but it shows the colonial pattern of the first stop carried into the Caribbean and Gulf South.

The dogtrot house, also called a breezeway house, dog run or possum trot, was common across the southeastern United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its open air breezeway through the middle cooled the house in the hot climate, and scholars differ on whether it began in the southern Appalachians or on the post Revolutionary frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee.

A narrow house, usually about twelve feet wide, with its rooms in a line and a door at each end. It was the most popular housing across the Southern United States from the Civil War through the 1920s, and its origin is disputed: Samuel Wilson Jr traced it to the Creole suburbs of early nineteenth century New Orleans, while John Michael Vlach argued its name comes from a Fon word from Dahomey meaning place of assembly.

On the Great Plains there was little timber or stone, so settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built soddies from prairie sod instead. They first used sod for animal shelters and fences, then for homes, because the dense roots of prairie grass made it abundant and free.

Gingerbread is elaborate decorative trim linked to American Carpenter Gothic of the late 1860s and 1870s and loosely rooted in England's Picturesque movement. It flourished in Chicago, San Francisco, Cape May and Oak Bluffs, and became its own tradition in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, between the 1880s and 1920s, and a Lanna Colonial blend in northern Thailand.

A great house is a large mansion run with luxurious fittings and a substantial staff of servants, a historical term for properties around the turn of the twentieth century, in the late Victorian and Edwardian United Kingdom and the Gilded Age United States. The label names a class of grand residence defined by scale and household support, not one fixed style.

Shed Style is an American residential style that emerged in the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, defined by single sloped shed roofs and a seamless meeting of roof and wall. Charles Willard Moore, with the Sea Ranch development in California, and Robert Venturi, with the Vanna Venturi House, were its leading architects, and it faded after the mid to late 1980s partly because the roof forms cost more to maintain.

The Vancouver special is a house style developed in Metro Vancouver, Canada, and generally built from the 1960s to the 1980s because it could maximize floor space at relatively low construction cost. It closes the path with the same concern that opened it, a house shaped by local conditions, here by the wish for floor space at low cost.