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Show While durability is admittedly an important factor influencing any builder, this preoccupation with the practical implies that folk objects can have no beauty save in economy. A house, however, is more than any scholar's set of "juxtaposed rectangles" 7 and in life is imbued with a variety of specific functions.8 The roof keeps out the rain and the windows let in light, but in addition the total house is visually pleasing to the builder and others in the community. Most contemporary examples of architecture are considered successful if they demonstrate singularity (or effectively emulate popular elements of an original idea). The folk builder, on the other hand, achieves his goal if his design resembles the familiar. The building of a house is an important event: Time and money are expended on a structure which confers status upon its occupant. Decisions affecting house design cannot be frivolous in a careless and haphazard sense; design decisions can, however, be playful and sensitive to particular ideas about beauty. The realization that both progressive and conservative designs are expressive gestures makes possible a meaningful synthesis of the concepts of folk, architecture, and art. A folk house can be studied as art because it is the material articulation of a specific designing process. By concentrating on the more inclusive concept of design, the exclusive and prescriptively "elitist" meanings of the word art can be avoided. Kenneth Ames has recently suggested "that it is time to admit that art is not an eternal truth but a time-linked and locally variable concept, its definition being altered in response to complex patterns of social interaction."9 In shifting away from the study of art to the study of the "designed world," the realm of aesthetic experience is opened up to all people. The mansion on Salt Lake City's South Temple street and the stone house in Willard both comply with the visual requirements of their respective audiences. Neither design is better than the other, nor is one considered "art" and the other something less. A house is not folk because of the way it looks but because its basic plan is traditional within the culture that produced it. Folk describes the process of building and not the absence of style.10 The likes, dislikes, and persistent needs of Utah's pioneer builders are thus expressed to some extent in the controlling decisions which shaped their houses. Design preferences can be discerned in three main areas: construction, decoration, and composition. By describing such complex and interrelated patterns, the folklorist can aid the historian in the attempt to breathe life back into the material landscape. Building Zion: The Techniques of Settlement. Driven from Illinois into the desert wilderness of Utah, the Mormon pioneers were well aware of the biblical overtones of 39 |