The ‘Village Suisse’ at the Exposition Nationale de Genève (1896)

Elemental Villages: Architectural Ethnography and the Decline of a Geographic Regionalism in France

By 1946, belief in the village-type in France as an immutable and permanent marker of French identity had become destabilised. Not from the advance of urbanisation or industrialisation, but rather as an unintended effect of the ethnographic-architectural study of rural forms. The Enquête d’architecture rurale (EAR) was a unique model of interdisciplinary collaboration, mixing the technocratic impulses of France’s wartime bureaucracy with the traditional symbolism of Pétainiste politics, the conservational practices of a modernising ethnography, and the representational specificity of technical illustration. This article illustrates how, in its attempt to define village typologies through ethnographic taxonomies and architectural drawings, the survey’s results revealed that rather than a typological model, the only empirical conclusion that could be discerned from rural form was its inability to be delineated according to cultural-geographic boundaries.