Church Street Shotgun House​

Site: Galveston, Texas

Competition: INTBAU Belgium's Vernacular Drawing 2025

Team: Alexander J. Ford

Drawings: Elevation [16.5" x 22.4"]

Sp. 2025

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The Church Street Shotgun House was awarded First Prize [ARCAS Choice] by INTBAU Belgium, and La Table Ronde De l'Architecture, in their 2025 Vernacular Drawing competition. The drawing will be exhibited later this year in Bruges, and elsewhere TBD.

 

The competition called for a single drawing of vernacular architecture from the architect's home country. American Shotgun houses are characterized by long, skinny floor plans in which a row of rooms is arranged perpendicular to the street, with each opening directly into the next absent corridors. The history of the shotgun house is unclear at best, and controversial at worst. Some have placed its origins in early 19th-century Louisiana, while others hold that the prototype is to be found at an earlier stage, in Haiti, and was brought over to the American South. In either case the architectural merit of the type is clear: As a house gets larger, a linear configuration with no corridors ensures clear cross-ventilation in every space. The shotgun house became an extraordinarily popular vernacular configuration in the South, with its heyday from the 1860s through to the 1930s. It was common in those days to go to a local lumber yard and be able to purchase a shotgun house kit, to be constructed by a team of associated contractors. Many examples of finely-ornamented shotgun houses (for instance, in the Doric Greek Style, etc) are to be found from Louisville down to San Antonio. In the post-war period, the rise of prefabricated construction, the growth of the automotive industry, and cheap air-conditioning all rendered the advantages of a shotgun house more or less obsolete. This particular shotgun house is located on Church Street in Galveston, Texas, and was chosen for the fact that it clearly expresses the vernacular character with no added stylistic trappings