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What is Vernacular:

Vernacular originates from a linguistic concept:
A language or dialect used natively to a region or country;
It's of, relating to, or being a nonstandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country.

Language is always evolving.
Vernacular is evolving.
Vernacular is a very contemporary thing and is not as is commonly understood, a thing relegated to the past, to history, or to anthropological studies of the past.

This means that vernacular is a knowledge used locally through time, and gradually becomes a convention that only exists in a specific region. We often identify Vernacular as an architecture category by the building tradition using local materials and construction techniques that they use.

An apparent paradox exists here: Vernacular originates from local and evolves through daily usage. Once we put it into a style category as a conclusion to a specific regional form, the inherent meaning of vernacular as specific, non-standard, everyday, and constantly evolving disappears.

For this reason, in the discussion of vernacular, we shouldn't stand at a specific historical moment to retrace what vernacular is. The truth is that the Vernacular is an ongoing, open, and never-ending process. It carries traditional knowledge from the past, keeps dealing with the most mundane but essential needs, and coexists and evolves with the landscape, climate, and creatures in the site. When I stepped inside the paddy field, walked on the trail of the fishing pond, and joined the trading between fishermen and local restaurants, I found that life always lived vernacularly.


From Limitation to Specification:

Prior to the urbanization of modern China, when Yakou was isolated from the outside, tools, structures, and buildings were built by local people with limited conditions. Local materials and local building techniques are being used for construction to meet the resources offered by the natural environment or prevent their vulnerability exposure to it.

In this historical period, the limitation created the diversity of vernacular.

For the contemporary vernacular scenario in Yakou, regions are no longer isolated from one another, knowledge, techniques, materials, and resources flow into the local, integrating, replacing, and becoming a part of the local, evolving with local and dealing with the life lives in it. Especially in China, the limitation of construction materials is not the case anymore, they are being produced locally, cheaper, more durable, and easier to assemble or replace. Instead, the old vernacular building becomes a privilege since it requires limited knowledge from “vernacular architecture specialists”.

Since vernacular is still evolving with this irreversible urbanization process, the diversity inherent in vernacular should shift from scarcity of resources to shaping the vernacular specifically.