Vernacular Monument – The Quebec Bungalow. From Urban Scale to Domestic Identity
The bungalow, archetype of the North American architectural landscape, is a pavilion-type house. Thousands of copies of this staple of the suburbs have been built, which has generated, in spite of its standardisation, a landscape particularly varied yet genuinely typical of Quebec. This article (second of two) explores the conditions that led to the rise of the bungalow in Canada since the fifties, to begin to understand the “Quebecisation” of the bungalow, by examining 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. While the wide range of its eventual appropriations made the bungalow so popular, its survival is now challenged by the same standardised construction that enabled such appropriations, under urban pressure to develop the immediate suburbs it once occupied. Could the ever-present bungalow, a paradoxical mainstay of the 20th century, both unique and multiform, be beginning to pass from view?