| OCR Text |
Show house had to be strong and all its pieces had to fit together. to be affordable. It had How much money one had to spend was an important consideration when comtemplating the finished product. The components of the houses had to be chosen and then appropriately executed. Finally, the house was to be used, so the arrangement of its internal plan had to conform to the client and his or her society's concepts of suitable room-use and privacy. At each juncture of the building process decisions had to be made, made often, and for each house. In short, the folk building tradition was not one involving the simple repetition of known examples; it was, rather, one where design ordered aesethetic and functional needs into an attractive and workable whole. 10 In a series of important articles, Henry Glassie has explored the mechanics of the folk designing process and his writings become a useful means of understanding how Sanpete builders worked. Glassie's work, influenced by the structural linguistics of Noam Chomsky, suggests that makers of folk artifacts are equipped with a system of design that approximates the deep ordering capabilities of language itself. 11 It is natural, he writes, to compare spoken language with other aspects of human behavior for "language is one of the expressions of culture, not the expression of culture. 1112 People make complex things like sentences or houses by first learning and then applying the rules for combining their constituents, whether they be the words of the sentence or the components of the house. Such constituent elements may be identified and described independently, but it is the rules for their combination, the grammar, that structures them into meaningful statements of form. "The problem for the linguist," writes Chomsky, "is to determine from the data of performance the underlying 90 |
