Themes in Great Plains Regional Study

Though Steve Martens and Ronald Ramsay do not make claims for a specific regional architecture, they reveal Great Plains built space as humble, modest, restrained, and presenting a beautiful aesthetic. The Great Plains has hosted built environments that utilize regionally grown or quarried materials: grasses, earthen‐walled buildings, sod huts, local stone, petrified wood, and brick made from local clay. One of the technologies that had a profound influence on regional architecture and reshaped it in its wake was the railway. It drew late‐nineteenth‐century architecture away from local materials toward wooden balloon frames and eastern styles that were shaped by a more humid eastern environment where forests were more plentiful. In addition to local and imported materials and styles, ethnic enclaves of nonnative immigrants brought their traditions directly from Hungary, Russia, Finland, and Iceland. One of the great gifts that Martens and Ramsay’s chapter brings to the reader is a subtle articulation of landscape that incorporates grain elevators, the arrangement of agricultural buildings in rural space, and small Plains town urban spaces. They also suggest that at least some of these spaces have, since the 1970s, received increasing attention from preservationists who seek to celebrate regional architecture.