Christine Franck // is a designer, author and educator with a practice focusing on custom residential design and decoration. A leader in education, she served as the first executive director of the ICAA and has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her published work includes the Winterthur's Traditional American Rooms, Jose M. Allegue: Legacy of a Builder, and the forthcoming ICAA's Handbook of Classical Architecture.
From the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, the landscape of American domestic architecture was a kaleidoscope of revivals of European historic styles. Gothic Revival, Italianate, Tuscan Villa, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and even Egyptian Revival houses were being built around the country. Out of this cacophony a new, uniquely American style emerged: the Shingle Style.
If any architectural style defines the Victorian era it is the Queen Anne style, so much so that we often refer to Queen Anne style houses as Victorian. However, the term Victorian refers not to a particular style but to the era of the reign (1837 – 1901) of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria.
#More
During Queen Victoria’s long reign, England experienced changes brought by industrialization and a growing middle class. In response, mid-nineteenth century English architects turned to the comfort of vernacular domestic architecture emphasizing home and pre-industrial times. This Old English style imitated Tudor manor houses with half-timbering, tile-hung walls, leaded glass windows, and steep roofs. Richard Norman Shaw also created a related style called Queen Anne, which he rendered in red brick with white woodwork. Though called the Queen Anne style, Shaw and other architects drew from sources earlier than Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14).
Likewise in America, rapid changes were taking place. A growing middle class was developing taste and means; balloon framing replaced heavy timber framing, enabling complex building forms; and building components were mass produced and shipped quickly on expanding train routes, encouraging generous ornament and variety. In the face of the changes of industrialization and growth, and with the American centennial approaching, Americans were equally nostalgic for a simpler past.
It is then perhaps no surprise that the half-timbered, multi-gabled British buildings designed by Thomas Harris for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, were an instant hit, as were the works of Shaw published in architectural journals. H. H. Richardson first translated this style to American taste with the Watts-Sherman House (1874) in Newport, Rhode Island. Soon thereafter, the Queen Anne style was born in America.
Queen Anne houses generally have a central block with a steep hipped roof, and projections from the front and sides forming cross gables. Bay windows, one storey porches, and towers create complex massing. Brick, clapboard, shingles, and terracotta used in the same building add to the picturesque quality of these houses. Wooden ornament in the Eastlake style, such as spindles, scrolled brackets, and turned posts decorate eaves, friezes, gables and porches.
Queen Anne style houses vary from the Old English style with half-timbering, to spindlework and Eastlake ornament, to Free Classic houses with classical motifs, to patterned masonry buildings directly evocative of the English Queen Anne style. It is a style of infinite variety, color, joy, visual delight, inventiveness, and adaptability. And while drawing from the past, Queen Anne style houses were a fitting modern expression of the close of the nineteenth century. Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement, by Mark Girouard, is an excellent history and The Queen Anne House: America's Victorian Vernacular by Janet Foster shows these houses in all their splendor.
The term Second Empire refers to the period in France from 1852-1870 when Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, reestablished imperial rule by a coup d’etat, thereby ending the Second Republic of 1848-1852. In an ambitious building campaign, Napoleon III appointed Baron Haussmann to oversee a vast program of work including modernization, improvements to living conditions in the revolution-breeding slums through demolition and rebuilding, and turning Paris into an imperial capital replete with magnificent buildings housing new institutions.
Mid-nineteenth Century America was a time of great energy and change. Cities grew, immigration soared, railroads expanded, and new building technologies emerged. To meet the housing needs and tastes of our growing and increasingly diverse populace, architects designed houses in a multitude of styles. Though widely varied, the Romantic Revival styles of this period all reflect Romantic and Picturesque sensibilities in their yearning for the security of the past to ameliorate the complexities of modern life and in their idealization of nature as an antidote to the city.
The Gothic Revival style, popular in America from the 1830s through the 1860s, could be seen as a mere revival of medieval motifs, but peer beneath the scrolls and trefoils that animate this style and one finds more profound meaning.
The Greek Revival, or Grecian, style (at its height from 1820 to 1840) parallels a period of geographic expansion and growing national identity in America. Part fashion, part conscious aesthetic, the Greek Revival is defined by its inventive use of ancient Greek forms. Publications such as Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens drove a fashion for the Grecian style first in Europe and then in America. But in America, it was more than fashion, it was political. As a young country emerging from the shadow of our British colonial past, we sought new paradigms. Viewing ourselves as inheritors of the Greek democratic tradition, we saw ourselves as the new Athens.
After emerging independent and free from the colonial yoke of Great Britain, post-revolutionary America began to form its national identity. Whether inspired by the works of Seneca or the life of Cincinnatus, early leaders like George Washington understood this nation to be the inheritor of Roman republican traditions. They sought to imbue America’s Novus Ordo Seclorum with symbols and architecture evocative of this. Concurrently, a growing class of merchants and landowners desired ways to show their taste and wealth. This confluence of interests in symbolic meaning and fashionable forms flowered into America’s Federal Style.
In the early days of America’s founding, along the eastern seaboard, English colonists built robustly beautiful homes that are today often referred to as Colonial. However, Georgian, or more descriptively American Georgian, better describes these houses and distinguishes them from earlier colonial traditions of our English, Dutch, Spanish, and French colonists. The term Georgian refers to the period of British history encompassing the reigns of Kings George I through IV (1714-1830). American Georgian architecture is most prevalent prior to and just after our revolution, after which other stylistic influences drawn from discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum captivated popular taste.
From Vernacular to Classical: The Perpetual Modernity of Palladio
University of Notre Dame, June 10-12, 2011
Palladio as Paradigm for Education and Practice Today
by Christine G. H. Franck
Dean Lykoudis, faculty, alumni, students, and colleagues it is a pleasure to be back at Notre Dame for this remarkable conference and exhibition. I offer my sincere thanks to the School of Architecture and Lucien for organizing the conference, to Lucien and Ali for their thoughtful and thought-provoking New Palladians, to the RIBA for their inspirational exhibit celebrating 500 years of Palladio, to Calder Loth for his inimitable contributions to Palladio’s Transatlantic journey, and last to my fellow Institute of Classical Architecture & Art trustee, Anne Kriken Mann, for ensuring that the Palladio made it to America.
Reflecting upon the conference theme of the “Perpetual Modernity of Palladio,” I began to question Palladio’s value today. What lessons can Palladio teach us?
Following close upon the heels of the Virginia Company’s 1607 settlement of Jamestown, a second group of English colonists put down roots in the Northern parts of what was then known as Virginia. Settling Plymouth in 1620 “for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian faith, and honour of [their] king and countrie,” the Pilgrims brought with them to New England their belief in simplicity of worship and strict morality. The English Colonial architecture of New England is perhaps best seen in relation to the character of its Puritan and Separatist settlers.
