Architectural Style as Evidence

Abstract

Listing copy names architectural styles loosely, and a single label such as "Craftsman Bungalow" conflates what a house is with how it is shaped and what it is decorated with. This article describes an ontology, written in Prolog, that records a house's architectural character on four separate axes: movement, style, form and detail. It covers the styles common in California, from the Victorian family through Period Revival, the Spanish-derived group, the modern line and post-war vernacular. The ontology keeps association apart from entailment. Only one relation, a style expressing a movement, licenses inference; typical forms, typical details and routine confusions are recorded as evidence from which nothing is inferred. Details observed by a person can be weighed against the styles that could explain them, with each detail's weight computed from how many styles claim it rather than fitted, so the division of evidence can be shown and defended in a report. The article also sets out the guards that stop style words modifying something other than the house, such as "Craftsman quality" or "Tudor Drive", from asserting a style, and records the known limits and contested points of the classification.