Built for the climate

Vernacular building is problem-solving without an architect. Nobody chose a steep roof for looks — they chose it because snow has to slide off before its weight matters. Deep eaves, thick earth walls, raised floors, louvred shutters and turf roofs are each a response to one specific local pressure: rain that arrives often, heat that has to be stored and released, a river that rises every wet season, a treeline that sits below the village.

That makes buildings unusually honest evidence. Style travels and can mislead, but a roof pitch, a wall thickness and the height of a floor above the ground are constrained by physics and by what material was within carting distance. Read those three and you have narrowed the climate, the rainfall pattern and often the local geology before you have looked at anything else.