Shotgun House: The 300 Year Odyssey of an Atlantic House Type

Edwards, Jay; Richardson, Gabriele

From the Final Considerations: "...From almost any perspective, the shotgun house stands as an important historical monument. It offers many miraculous aspects for consideration: 1) it has persisted over a period of more than three centuries that we know about, and it is still thriving in many locations; 2) it has undergone numerous transformations and reinterpretations from indigenous shelter to suburban mansion, while never losing its identity or special symbolic value; and 3) over the centuries it has appealed to, and sustained, an enormous variety of sorts of people operating under radically divergent constraints, provided them with optimum shelter and advantageous architectonic status, and with opportunities which they otherwise might not have enjoyed. The Atlantic linear cottage has also been significant because there have been so very many of them. Though not as numerous now, in North America alone they have numbered, not simply in the tens of thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands. In the twenty-first century, they are perhaps still the most populous house type of New Orleans and also of Haiti. How has it been possible for one simple sort of architectural configuration to achieve such importance to so many people? This question cannot be given a satisfactory answer without coming to the realization that the shotgun, and successful house types in general, exhibit a kind of agency, seemingly independent of individual people, and particularly of professional designers and architects. It may be illusory, but shotgun houses give the appearance of living a life of their own, separated from that of other house types, or from social classes and races and ethnicities. This family of house types appears to have operated upon socio-historical principles unique to itself. Of course, such explanations are deceptive. What underlies the apparent forces of sustainability of material cultural forms is their obvious utility and their socially shared significances over vast reaches of time and space. Just as the wheel flourished from the ox cart, to the war chariot, to the steam locomotive, to the miraculous modern automobile, so, too, has the linear cottage found utility among potential residents and to the powerful manipulators of human groups over fast stretches of time and space...." Project funding was provided in part by a Historic Preservation Fund grant to the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, administered by the State, Tribal, Local Plans and Grants division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior (grant number P16AF00142).

Shotgun House: The 300 Year Odyssey of an Atlantic House Type

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