Much of New Orleans’s architecture has been studied through the lens of vernacular buildings. Of particular focus are typological studies that define a wide range of housing types that collectively give the city its visually distinctive streetscapes and urban form. Generations of local and academic historians have defined Creole and American variations on the cottage and town house and their recombinations by looking carefully at space, materials, and construction technologies. Efforts to understand the origins and evolution of the shotgun house type are perhaps the best-known results of this approach, and painstaking research has traced the transatlantic transfer of architectural knowledge from Africa through Haiti to New Orleans, where African building traditions combined with new materials and property regulation to create distinct forms.1 Common to these typological studies is the attribution of form to broad cultural knowledge and anonymous builders steeped in its practices. Perhaps as a result, the...

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