Overview of the project:
The history of Mock Tudor has been relatively unexamined. Where historical research does exist often the work focuses on Mock Tudor buildings through aesthetic issues where architects are viewed as agents in the development of styles. In this project, whilst we still acknowledge the importance of aesthetics and the architect, our focus is more on the social, cultural, political and economic development of Mock Tudor. Specifically our project involves a thorough analysis of collectivities or sites of discursive production that fix and locate the notion of Mock Tudor in different and sometimes even contradictory ways. In this regard; we reject the idea that there is anything like a singular or monolithic story to the history of Mock Tudor architecture. Instead, we view the history of Mock Tudor as non-linear. From this alternative perspective, then, in this project we have explored the social production of Mock Tudor as something that has emerged from multiple sites, from multiple times and spaces that are often very discontinuous from one another.
As we have already found in this growing and developing project, discursive productions of Mock Tudor have occurred accross time and accross the globe in different and often very unusal ways. Thus, whilst we acknowledge that the history of Mock Tudor architecture certainly has its roots in the spaces and times of English history; the discursive issues surrounding this architecture have certainly never remained in England and often discourses of Mock Tudor have been taken up and reappropriated by different peoples in many very different ethnic and national settings. Quite simply, then, whilst Mock Tudor might certainly have emerged in an English context, this signifier has always been nomadic and has crossed borders and boundaries through both English and non-English subjects.
Moreover, in this project and contary to very traditional visions of architecture, we reject the idea that there is anything essential or pre-given in the production of Mock Tudor buildings themselves. Specifically rather than having some pre-given essence we define this building as something that is always already in social processes. Thus, when meanings are attached to buildings these meanings only have relevance to the social, political, cultural and economic relations in which they are emersed. Quite simply Mock Tudor buildings are always in processes of becoming.
