Det sydgötiska husets (vetenskapliga) konstruktion

Abstract

The (Scientific) Construction of the ”Sydgötiska Huset” The sydgötiska huset (South Gothic house) is by far one of the most acknowledged traditional building types within building history from the early period of ethnology and history of vernacular architecture. The name sydgötiska huset is a literary construction proposed by the scholar Sigurd Erixon (1917). Characteristic of the type, as he presented it, is a house-complex including one or two storage houses with a loft added on each side of and rising above a single one story room cottage. Det sydgötiska huset takes a central part in presentations of Swedish vernacular architecture, as an object and a representation of medieval building traditions and a kind of mending of various natural and cultural phenomena in a borderline region within Southern Scandinavia. The aim of this article is to analyse the construction of the South Gothic house as research object within the disciplines of ethnology and history of vernacular architecture. A selection of publications that present this building type serves as material for this study. The article focusing the kind of significant characteristics the historians attach to this typology: how it is built, how old it is, why it looks the way it does, where it comes from and how it has developed. Their different versions reveal how significant characteristics and explanations have been added or/and removed along with an ongoing reproduction of this building type. The concluding remarks focus on differences and similarities between discourses in the publications analysed. Some consequences and alternatives are put forward to the methods in history of vernacular architecture and the story of the sydgötiska huset.