ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses regionalism in America aided by sympathetic cross disciplines, and in a place that retains a strong affinity to the creative prehistoric peoples who once lived here. Americans need to remind themselves that Asian and European architecture developed gradually within discrete geographical peoples related by social customs and common technological means and conditioned by the nature of the land. American architecture evolved more like an ecological experiment, testing the effects of many new environments and the adaptability of traditional building forms. Recent state and local inventories, however, reveal a rich variety of unique and expressive form-styles, more or less vernacular, conditioned by place and time. The first settlers in New England were mainly yeomen, artisans, and tradesmen from rural sections who became the first English colonial builders in the seventeenth century. They brought with them a modernized version of the medieval vernacular compact structures that had already begun to change from the traditional Gothic plan.
