I-house

This article is about the historic house type. For the Clayton I-House, see Clayton Homes.
Structural failure reveals the interior layout of this house near Craigsville, Virginia. Second-floor rooms on the right side of the house feature doorways into a central hallway.

The I-house is a vernacular house type, popular in the United States from the colonial period onward. The I-house was so named in the 1930s by Fred Kniffen, a cultural geographer at Louisiana State University who was a specialist in folk architecture. He identified and analyzed the type in his 1936 study of Louisiana house types.[1][2][3]

He chose the name "I-house" because the style was commonly built in the rural farm areas of Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, all states beginning with the letter "I".[4] But he was not implying that this house type originated in, or was restricted to, those three states.[1] It is also referred to as Plantation Plain style.

  1. ^ a b "I-House". Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. Retrieved 2008-10-03.
  2. ^ Fred Kniffen, "Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (1965).
  3. ^ Fred Kniffen, "Louisiana House Types," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 26 (1936).
  4. ^ "Designing Place: Architecture as Community Art in Martinsville, Indiana". Morgan County Historic Preservation Society. Archived from the original on 2009-02-10. Retrieved 2008-10-04.; the link is broken but for examples in Indiana see: https://www.in.gov/core/results.html?profile=_default&query=i-house&collection=global-collection