Vernacular Monument – The Quebec Bungalow. The Birth of a New Type
Archetype of the North American architectural landscape, the bungalow, this pavilion-type house, thousands of copies of which are a staple of the suburbs, has generated, in spite of its standardisation, a landscape particularly varied yet genuinely typical of Quebec. This article (first of two) explores the conditions of the birth of the bungalow in Canada, since the First World War, to begin to understand the “Quebecisation” of the bungalow, through its phenomenal success, the material characteristics of its appropriation, its representations, and the reappropriation of which this antithesis of the historic monument may today seem victim. If, indeed, the large gamut of its eventual appropriations made the bungalow so popular, its survival is now challenged by the same standardised construction that allowed these appropriations, under urban pressure to develop the immediate outskirts it once occupied. Could the ever-present bungalow, a paradoxical mainstay of our 20th century, both unique and plural, begin to sing the swan song?