Every Homeowner a Pretendian?

The late 1970s in British Columbia saw the reassertion of the single-family home after the architectural defeat of Late Modernism. Dave Barrett’s NDP government, from 1973–75, produced a last burst of Modernism with the proliferation of mass housing through a newly created Department of Housing. The late decade soon gave way to a familiar postmodern historicism, coinciding with the consolidation and mainstreaming of an anti-modernist counterculture. More surprisingly, it also witnessed the emergence of settler claims to Indigeneity through conceptions of property and architecture. This talk explores the discourse of bioregional, organic, and “Indigenous” architecture through the architecture of West Coast Modernism, approached theoretically through the lens of the philosophical writings of John Locke on property and enclosure.