INTRODUCTION

        The art of a civilization, rightly interpreted, is a very precise reflection of the society which produced it. . . . In architecture, an art tied to practical purposes and executed always within severe practical limits, this dialectical law is more marked than in any other art.

—R. Furneaux Jordan, A Concise History of Western Architecture, 1984

America is a country of immigrants. The early settlers brought with them building techniques from their respective homelands and house types that matched those left behind. The different social conditions, as well as climate and terrain, however, influenced the development of American houses that were distinct from their European prototypes. It is important to remember that our houses have been shaped by their architectural forebears as much as we as individuals are shaped by our genetic and cultural backgrounds.

We declared our independence from Britain in 1776, but culturally we remained closely tied to English architectural fashions. Even Jefferson’s Neoclassicism and the Greek Revival of the 1820s and 1830s followed trends set in the mother country. In the preface to his extraordinarily popular Victorian Cottage Residences, first published in 1842, Andrew Jackson Downing observed: “The very great interest now beginning to manifest itself in rural improvements of every kind, leads us to believe and to hope, that at no distant day our country residences may rival the ‘cottage homes of England,’ so universally and so justly admired.” Downing was an extremely popular and widely read proponent of country houses. His books sold thousands of copies during the 1840s and 1850s and represented a prevalent attitude in this country. In his preface to the 1980 Dover edition, Adolf K. Placzek said that Victorian Cottage Residences was “one of the most widely used books in American architectural literature.” No history of the American house in the nineteenth century can be separated from the English architecture of the Victorian era. (Our use of the British term “Victorian” is revealing.)

At their best our houses were simpler—not just smaller, which was generally true—and less pretentious than those in England. The principal differences developed from the greater extremes of our climate. The porch, or veranda, became a feature of most American houses because it helped to avert the heat of our summer sun and keep the houses cooler. The British had no need for the porch.

View from driveway of a Shingle style house designed by Walter Cook, 1887

Scale: 1”=16’

The Phillips House, Bellport, Long Island, New York, 1887 Measured before demolition in 1960 by John Milnes Baker

The flexibility of our floor plans was another important difference. Even in the 1820s we used recessed pocket doors to open a dining room and parlor into one large space in warm weather or for entertaining. The cozier spaces could be heated more easily with fireplaces or the new parlor stoves. Central heating in the form of central warm-air furnaces was used here earlier than in Britain and it worked more effectively with an open floor plan. While central heating was not a concern in the design of large summer “cottages” built by the wealthy after the Civil War, the plans of the Shingle style houses often flowed in one continuous space from hall to parlor to dining room. The British tended to have more rooms allocated for specific uses. It is interesting to note that the openness of our floor plans seemed to grow in direct proportion to our confidence as a nation.

By the turn of the twentieth century our houses were studied in European publications and it no longer took a generation for a European innovation to become popular here. The Architectural Record was available to British architects after 1891 and, significantly, Frank Lloyd Wright’s (1867–1959) first retrospective was published in Germany by the Wasmuth Press in 1910. This folio had consider able influence on architects abroad—particularly in Germany and Holland—and practically no influence on architects in America. From the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, America’s self-confidence seemed to waver and our architecture reflected a taste for nostalgic revival of our own colonial styles as well as historical styles from abroad. Neoclassicism never really dies and continues to resurge with varying degrees of proficiency in each generation.

Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a bastion of classical design in Paris. He returned to this country in 1855 and France became an increasingly important source of architectural inspiration. An increasing number of Americans studied in Paris in the years following the Civil War. Classicism won the day at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Chicago’s world’s fair) in 1893, and the Beaux-Arts style emerged in all its glory. Hunt’s Beaux-Arts master plan gave a cohesive order to the exhibition buildings. Except for Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building, virtually all the structures followed classical designs and had a tremendous influence on the Neoclassical revival which followed the fair. The innovative solutions to the new high-rise buildings in Chicago and the suburban houses by Wright and his fellow proponents of the Prairie School were eventually challenged by the revivalist movement after 1910.

Wright’s grandly conceived design for Harold F. McCormick overlooking Lake Michigan was ultimately rejected by the client and a more acceptable eastern architect was retained. Charles A. Platt (1861–1933) designed a perfectly mannered Italian pallazzo for the McCormicks, and the Prairie School lost its chance for social endorsement by the monied establishment.

House near Utrecht, Holland, by Robert van’t Hoff, 1916

Proposed design for Harold R McCormick, near Chicago, by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1907

Villa Turicum, Harold R McCormick House, by Charles A. Platt, 1908

Lovell Beach House, Los Angeles, California, by R. M. Schindler, 1922–1926

Most houses built in the period from 1910 through the crash of 1929 tended to be reminiscent in style. This creative lull lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is interesting to note that Wright’s career was in eclipse during this same period. He spent the years around the First World War in Japan creating the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The few houses that he did during the twenties were for strong-willed eccentric clients—mostly in southern California. (The Millard, Barnsdale, Freeman, and Storer houses were all in greater Los Angeles.)

The main innovative forces at work during this lull were significant but not widespread. Irving Gill and R. M. Schindler’s work in California, for example, anticipated the Modern movement in isolation. While Cass Gilbert tried to negate the efforts of the Chicago School’s search for an appropriate, inherent expression for the skyscraper by reverting to the Gothic style for his Woolworth Tower completed in 1913, Bernard Maybeck’s funky Christian Science church in California and Wright’s Unitarian Church in Oak Park, Illinois, were the last fresh efforts in church design for another generation. Spirited and competent but somehow soulless, the Neo-Gothic churches of Ralph Cram and Bertram Goodhue (for example, St. John the Divine in New York City in 1921) and James Gamble Rogers’s Harkness Tower at Yale (1931) seem self-conscious and forced in their settings.

Walter L. Dodge House, Hollywood, California, by Irving Gill, 1916

There were many competent architects who responded to the more conventional or traditional tastes of the successful businessmen of the day. As derivative as much of their work was these talented and inventive architects designed beautifully scaled, livable houses. Harrie T. Lindeberg, Delano & Aldrich, Mellor, Meigs & Howe, and W. L. Bottomley were all outstanding in their field.

The House and Garden movement began in the early years of the twentieth century. The notion of an ideal life in the country—a life involving sports, animals, and growing one’s fruits and vegetables—was new, modern, and very American. The architects who served these clients performed as much of a service for society as did those who embraced the minimalist aesthetic of the Modern school after 1929.

Red Gate, Seth Thomas House, New Vernon, New Jersey, by Harrie T. Lindeberg, 1926

Robert T. McCracken House, West Mount, Airy, Pennsylvania, by Mellor Meigs & Howe, 1920

In the 1930s the Modern movement became firmly established among the mainstream architects. Wright once again appeared on the scene with his famous Fallingwater and his first of what he called his “Usonian” houses for the Jacobs family near Madison, Wisconsin. The development of the American house during the second half of the twentieth century is a fascinating drama; but first let us go back to the beginning and a look at the early efforts of the colonial period.

Herbert Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1937

Fallingwater, Edgar J. Kauffman House, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936 I have always felt that Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only great house using the characteristic elements of the International style, was his comment to the Internationalists: “If that’s what you want, boys, I’ll show you how it should be done!” The flat roofs, reinforced concrete with bold cantilevers, industrial windows, all part of the Modern vocabulary, were used by Wright without compromising his own sense of site and place—his sense of space.