America's rustic architecture: A cultural narrative in harmony with nature

The purpose of this thesis addresses the question, "Is rustic architecture solely rooted in an American context and therefore an indigenous architectural style?" This scholarship is the culmination of that research. It sets out to prove that rustic architecture is an American architectural style.;Rustic architecture must be understood as the symbiotic relationship between the infrastructure of a material culture and the paradigm shifts of ideology within our American culture and others. Rustic architecture is partially imitative of European and Asian precedents while incorporating American ideologies and is heavily rooted in the American shingle and prairie architectural styles.;Rustic architecture embodied the spirit of the age and transcended the folk vernacular of the log craft tradition of the frontier cabin. It reflected an American zeitgeist lying within the Broader Conservation Movement, the Age of Romanticism, the Transcendentalism Movement, the Arts & Crafts Movement, and the birth of landscape architecture.;It is an excellent example of the American people, a compilation and fusion of many different cultures. Rustic architecture is an American idiom: distinctive in character while rooted in time and place. Since all architecture is the embodiment of cultural norms that preexist a building's style, whether vernacular or architectural, the eclectic assimilation of social, theological, political and economic ideologies coalesced in order for the evolution of rustic architecture to occur. The American social climate created the catalyst and incubator for the evolution and propagation of rustic architecture that could not have happened anywhere else. The synthesis occurred only in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Therefore it is not plausible and is illogical to tell someone who has been born in America, and is legally considered an American, that they actually are not, because their heritage is Native American, English, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, German, Scotch-Irish, Russian, and Japanese. Thus rustic architecture is a true American architectural style based upon its origin of birth and the principle of nationality.