133. American Architecture

            We’re a blended country of a vast array of ethnicities and races and all of those groupings brought with them ways to build. American architecture is all over the place in styles but there are certain aspects that you know as distinctly American. The iconic skyscrapers of Manhattan from the Empire State building to the Chrysler building might come to mind as distinctly American, as would the beautiful span of Brooklyn Bridge.

            We also have the old traditional clapboard structures of New England that have found their way across the country in boxy structures with clean crisp siding often painted white. The log cabin is also a structure that seems iconically American with tales that lead right up to the grandeur of President Lincoln. Both clapboard and log cabin are found out here in Idaho and the Northwest and the West but we have our own distinct architectures. If you cross the paths of the vast western rivers you will see some amazing bridges like Perrine Bridge over the Snake River Canyon in southern Idaho, or the Moyie River Canyon Bridge in the Panhandle of Idaho, or the bridge over Deception Pass in Washington, or the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay in California, or... You’ll also see the dams of the Federal Works Progress Administration such as Nevada/Arizona’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia.

            I know we’re all stuck at home now for health reasons and a quarantine that hangs over all of us with a seemingly unendurable weight, but now that we can’t really get out much except in our own little areas we need to look at the distinctions of our own little neighborhoods. Do you have a ranch house? Maybe you live in a cookie cutter neighborhood where all the homes are split level or neo-Victorian? Maybe your cookie cutter neighborhood, like mine, is over a hundred years old so that new additions have been added, porches filled in, or other little quirks have happened to steal the cookie cutter aspect and the homes have been given a new distinction? Take a walk in your neighborhood and look at the buildings and the diversity that we Americans bring to our architecture in spite of ourselves.

            Now is the time to take stock in what we have and to appreciate it. Use your exercise time to see things like you’ve never seen them before. Of course, one of those things is quite likely the American architecture of your home.