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Dell Upton, "Architectural History or Landscape History?", In Journal of Architectural Education (August 1991), 195-199.

Dell Upton asserts that twentieth-century experience teaches us that norms of perception underlying notions of universal aesthetics do not exist.  In this essay he posits a number of alternatives in place of aesthetic universals.  Upton believes the individual work as a unit of analysis and the distinction between creator and audience (which are the basis of traditional architectural history) developed in the nineteenth-century as a justification for the existence of the professional architect and designed architecture, intended to discredit the craftsman builder and vernacular forms as well as the untrained person's sense of "taste."  Instead, he proposes a "multiplicity and fragmentation on environmental meaning," analyzing social and historical artifacts in place of value judgements of high and low culture.  He advocates the exploration human experience and social interaction in place of the biography of the builder or designer as the creator of meaning in architectural works.  Upton notes that vernacularists are oftentimes guilty of applying this same hierarchical thinking.  They accept the governing assumptions of architectural history, creating a high and low vernacular architecture. [H. Nasstrom Evans.]