Mediterranean Vernacular

Mediterranean vernacular houses are simple stone boxes with thick walls finished in lime whitewash. Windows are small and closed by wooden shutters, and roofs are flat or low-pitched and covered in clay tile. In dense villages houses share walls, and narrow lanes and outdoor stairs connect them. Many houses are built around an inner courtyard. On Santorini, many houses called yposkafa are partly dug into the soft volcanic rock of the cliffs; their lime coat channels rainwater for collection, and pumice in the walls insulates them.

Oia on Santorini has rows of whitewashed cave houses cut into the slope of the volcanic caldera. The pueblos blancos (white towns) of Andalusia, including Arcos de la Frontera, Grazalema and Zahara de la Sierra, combine whitewashed walls with red or brown tile roofs. In Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, buildings are white with blue doors and shutters, a color scheme popularized by Rodolphe d'Erlanger in the 1920s.

This is a regional tradition with no single originator. Builders around the Mediterranean, from the Greek islands to southern Spain and North Africa, used local stone, lime and clay tile for thousands of years, and their methods changed slowly. Whitewash was used in Roman times. In Andalusia it became widespread during the plague outbreaks from the 14th century on, when people whitewashed houses and churches inside and out as a health measure.

Architects began studying these villages in the 20th century. Bernard Rudofsky wrote his 1931 dissertation on vernacular building in the Cyclades, and in 1964-1965 he organized the exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A 1956 earthquake badly damaged Oia, and many residents left. From 1976 the Greek National Tourism Organisation restored its seamen's houses as guest houses, work that won a Europa Nostra prize in 1979. Mediterranean Revival developers in Florida, such as George Merrick at Coral Gables in the 1920s, borrowed the white walls and tile roofs.