Monday, July 23, 2001
DIY guide to American architecture
LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis
This explanation is by popular demand (ok, limited popular demand), although the eager may hate me for omitting illustrations and trying to describe features verbally. It concentrates on what you see in New York and upstate. Style elements described are typical, and may be omitted and mixed.
First, look at rooflines. Residential and also business buildings with overhanging eaves or cornices sporting good-sized brackets are Italianate . If the windows diminish in height on 2nd and 3rd floors; if they have round crowns (lintels), that’s further proof. The crowns often have symbolic center keystones, a borrowed element from basic vault construction.Some are crowned by the classical pediments, slightly flattened isosceles triangles (the essential truss-like structure basic to roof construction, in Greek temples as well as in snowy countries).
You are likely to be looking at a Colonial or Georgian Renewal (to 1850, the genuine article dated 1700 to 1830 is scarce, since the Great Fires of 1835 and 1845), if the edge below the eaves is like an abbreviated miniature entablature (the roof-column junction in classic orders) with a course of delicate small blocks, dentils, or thin long brackets, modillions. [The classic entablature elements are: a cornice, as described above but bracketless, then a flat band, or frieze (in home constrution it is called fascia, and the flat underside of the eaves is known as the soffit) which in Greek temples was, decorated with a series of triglyphs (rectangular boxes, each with three or more vertical slots) or metopes (a continuous angular line that twists itself in and out of a string of boxes) then followed below by another flat band, called architrave. Some of these elements appear in several of the described styles, particularly over doorways.] To see the original buildings in most of the styles described here, you have to visit small upstate vacation towns, where you should be spending your money anyway, while tanking up on our history.
Georgians have center dorways and balanced ranks (stacks) of windows on each side; later revivals are often unbalanced. Georgian doors are crowned by flattened-triangular or oval pediments, and framed by pilasters (flat reliefs of columns) on both sides, and may have small entry porches supported by columns. Edges of buildings have quoins, rough stones set in a zigzag pattern. Roofs are hipped (corners sheared off) and there’s either a center chimney or two end chimneys. If the porch is building-high (particularly if building-wide), it’s a Greek Revival; if two stories high, a Classic Revival (like Georgeans, to 1850).
Not all Greek Revivals (1840-80) look like temples of the Classic Antiquity, their most commonly seen design feature is a pediment-like gable facing the street, predominantly a discontinuous pediment (center of the triangle’s bottom is missing), just bent under the eaves, as though to constitute the capitals of the column-like vertical wooden corner posts of the buildings. We have lots ‘em in the City (government buildings, Friends Meeting on Stuyvesant Square). Other Greek Revivals look like Colonials, broadside to the street, but with a center pedimented gable, like a huge dormer, facing the street.
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Back to the Georgian Revivals. Their windows are distinctly framed, with straight crowns (lintels), some with a center keystone Standard windows are double-hung, with tiny panes, 9/9 or 12/12. A later important variation are the Adams (1780-1840; he also influenced the Hepplewhite furniture style) or Federal style structures, distinguished by a narrow window (sidelight) on each side of the door, and a semi-circular or elliptic fanlight, with a sunburst pattern, above the door, all inside the pilaster surrounds. The door is sometimes topped by a flat entablature or a pediment (full or discontinuous; the "broken" pediment, with. a piece artfully removed in each slanted top line, is common in the late revivals). Decorative elements between windows - garlands, swags, cartouches (like the spaces for the legend in ancient maps) - abound. Federal structures have a three-part or Palladian window (named after the Roman architect) in the 2nd floor, above the door, with a circular band crowning the larger center window, and under the eaves they also may have decorative dentils or modillions.
If the roof of a building, broadside, is broken, consising of a steep bottom, then a flatter top part, you’re looking at an 1600-1700s Dutch-style gambrel-roofed structure. Not found in the city, they also have the ends of beams stick out in the steeple-end facade, decorated with metal, as though they were holding the building from exploding outwards. If the steeper bottom is concave, you’re at a French mansard-roofed building (1855-85, see the former Guardian Life, now W hotel; the old Arnold Constable and the Gorham, 19th and Broadway) The latter is known as the Second Empire style
If the roof of a dwelling is steep and the gable end has peaks-and-valleys or wave-pattern boards hanging down (verge boards), this is a Gothic Revival (1840-80), most popular in churches and government buildings. The windows may end with pointed arches , ditto their crowns; finials at the roof-ends; the building may bee cross-gabled (four gables).NYC schools built in the popular Greek Revival sstyle may have corner towers, crenelated parapets (railings above the eaves), and roofs studded with pinnacles or finials.
Coming to Victorian times, Stick Style 1860-90) links the Greek and Gothic Revival to the subsequent Queen Anne style. The street-side gabled fronts of residences have truss-like outside timber showing in the top half of the pediment. Vertical and horizontal wood siding, sometimes x-ed over by decorative timber, x-balusters in porch railings, and crossed decorative elements throughout identify this style. Porch supports have tops like flatttened-out tripods..
A more long-lived Victorian variety is the Queen Anne style (1880-1920), with houses of many gables. Flat surfaces are avoided at any cost. The roofs slant and join every-which way, there are long porches, sometimes with classical columns, more often with supports topped by what look like spread-out decorated trident pitchforks (called spindlework, present also in balusters and vertical ornaments below the eawes of porches). Gable end pediments are filled with half-timbering (like the Tudor houses of the last half-century), turrets with round cupolas abound , as do dormers, with hipped, or pedimented, arched or double-arched roofs, boggling the mind.
The Shingle Style (1880-1920), equally eclectic, may have shingled walls (above the first floor, which may be of rusticated stone), multi-level roofs cutting into each other. Lots more porches with brick, heavy stone or thick, classic column supports, many sporting Romanesque stone vaulting above the stone posts. There are good-sized gables in the roof, with big windows in the tympanum (center of the pediment), to make the living space in the garret more useful.
Richardsonian Romanesque (1880-1900) influenced the Shingle style (note the stone-vaulted porches). Although Henry Hobson Richardson died at 48, in 1886, his rough stone-faced elevations, round stone-vaulted entrances and windows and round cone-topped towers were perpetrated by his followers. Boston’s Trinity Church and Cambridge’s City Hall are prime examples. The several buildings around Union Square and Park Avenue South do not look quite like there should be a moat around each one, but you can get the taste of it.
More to come, on cast-iron, Tudor, Beaux-Arts, Prairie, Craftsman, curtain-wall structures. Thanks to V. & L. McAlesters and many other authors. Time and money permitting, I may do a layman’ architectural style booklet, with illustrations, for New Yorkers. NP
This explanation is by popular demand (ok, limited popular demand), although the eager may hate me for omitting illustrations and trying to describe features verbally. It concentrates on what you see in New York and upstate. Style elements described are typical, and may be omitted and mixed.
First, look at rooflines. Residential and also business buildings with overhanging eaves or cornices sporting good-sized brackets are Italianate . If the windows diminish in height on 2nd and 3rd floors; if they have round crowns (lintels), that’s further proof. The crowns often have symbolic center keystones, a borrowed element from basic vault construction.Some are crowned by the classical pediments, slightly flattened isosceles triangles (the essential truss-like structure basic to roof construction, in Greek temples as well as in snowy countries).
You are likely to be looking at a Colonial or Georgian Renewal (to 1850, the genuine article dated 1700 to 1830 is scarce, since the Great Fires of 1835 and 1845), if the edge below the eaves is like an abbreviated miniature entablature (the roof-column junction in classic orders) with a course of delicate small blocks, dentils, or thin long brackets, modillions. [The classic entablature elements are: a cornice, as described above but bracketless, then a flat band, or frieze (in home constrution it is called fascia, and the flat underside of the eaves is known as the soffit) which in Greek temples was, decorated with a series of triglyphs (rectangular boxes, each with three or more vertical slots) or metopes (a continuous angular line that twists itself in and out of a string of boxes) then followed below by another flat band, called architrave. Some of these elements appear in several of the described styles, particularly over doorways.] To see the original buildings in most of the styles described here, you have to visit small upstate vacation towns, where you should be spending your money anyway, while tanking up on our history.
Georgians have center dorways and balanced ranks (stacks) of windows on each side; later revivals are often unbalanced. Georgian doors are crowned by flattened-triangular or oval pediments, and framed by pilasters (flat reliefs of columns) on both sides, and may have small entry porches supported by columns. Edges of buildings have quoins, rough stones set in a zigzag pattern. Roofs are hipped (corners sheared off) and there’s either a center chimney or two end chimneys. If the porch is building-high (particularly if building-wide), it’s a Greek Revival; if two stories high, a Classic Revival (like Georgeans, to 1850).
Not all Greek Revivals (1840-80) look like temples of the Classic Antiquity, their most commonly seen design feature is a pediment-like gable facing the street, predominantly a discontinuous pediment (center of the triangle’s bottom is missing), just bent under the eaves, as though to constitute the capitals of the column-like vertical wooden corner posts of the buildings. We have lots ‘em in the City (government buildings, Friends Meeting on Stuyvesant Square). Other Greek Revivals look like Colonials, broadside to the street, but with a center pedimented gable, like a huge dormer, facing the street.
.
Back to the Georgian Revivals. Their windows are distinctly framed, with straight crowns (lintels), some with a center keystone Standard windows are double-hung, with tiny panes, 9/9 or 12/12. A later important variation are the Adams (1780-1840; he also influenced the Hepplewhite furniture style) or Federal style structures, distinguished by a narrow window (sidelight) on each side of the door, and a semi-circular or elliptic fanlight, with a sunburst pattern, above the door, all inside the pilaster surrounds. The door is sometimes topped by a flat entablature or a pediment (full or discontinuous; the "broken" pediment, with. a piece artfully removed in each slanted top line, is common in the late revivals). Decorative elements between windows - garlands, swags, cartouches (like the spaces for the legend in ancient maps) - abound. Federal structures have a three-part or Palladian window (named after the Roman architect) in the 2nd floor, above the door, with a circular band crowning the larger center window, and under the eaves they also may have decorative dentils or modillions.
If the roof of a building, broadside, is broken, consising of a steep bottom, then a flatter top part, you’re looking at an 1600-1700s Dutch-style gambrel-roofed structure. Not found in the city, they also have the ends of beams stick out in the steeple-end facade, decorated with metal, as though they were holding the building from exploding outwards. If the steeper bottom is concave, you’re at a French mansard-roofed building (1855-85, see the former Guardian Life, now W hotel; the old Arnold Constable and the Gorham, 19th and Broadway) The latter is known as the Second Empire style
If the roof of a dwelling is steep and the gable end has peaks-and-valleys or wave-pattern boards hanging down (verge boards), this is a Gothic Revival (1840-80), most popular in churches and government buildings. The windows may end with pointed arches , ditto their crowns; finials at the roof-ends; the building may bee cross-gabled (four gables).NYC schools built in the popular Greek Revival sstyle may have corner towers, crenelated parapets (railings above the eaves), and roofs studded with pinnacles or finials.
Coming to Victorian times, Stick Style 1860-90) links the Greek and Gothic Revival to the subsequent Queen Anne style. The street-side gabled fronts of residences have truss-like outside timber showing in the top half of the pediment. Vertical and horizontal wood siding, sometimes x-ed over by decorative timber, x-balusters in porch railings, and crossed decorative elements throughout identify this style. Porch supports have tops like flatttened-out tripods..
A more long-lived Victorian variety is the Queen Anne style (1880-1920), with houses of many gables. Flat surfaces are avoided at any cost. The roofs slant and join every-which way, there are long porches, sometimes with classical columns, more often with supports topped by what look like spread-out decorated trident pitchforks (called spindlework, present also in balusters and vertical ornaments below the eawes of porches). Gable end pediments are filled with half-timbering (like the Tudor houses of the last half-century), turrets with round cupolas abound , as do dormers, with hipped, or pedimented, arched or double-arched roofs, boggling the mind.
The Shingle Style (1880-1920), equally eclectic, may have shingled walls (above the first floor, which may be of rusticated stone), multi-level roofs cutting into each other. Lots more porches with brick, heavy stone or thick, classic column supports, many sporting Romanesque stone vaulting above the stone posts. There are good-sized gables in the roof, with big windows in the tympanum (center of the pediment), to make the living space in the garret more useful.
Richardsonian Romanesque (1880-1900) influenced the Shingle style (note the stone-vaulted porches). Although Henry Hobson Richardson died at 48, in 1886, his rough stone-faced elevations, round stone-vaulted entrances and windows and round cone-topped towers were perpetrated by his followers. Boston’s Trinity Church and Cambridge’s City Hall are prime examples. The several buildings around Union Square and Park Avenue South do not look quite like there should be a moat around each one, but you can get the taste of it.
More to come, on cast-iron, Tudor, Beaux-Arts, Prairie, Craftsman, curtain-wall structures. Thanks to V. & L. McAlesters and many other authors. Time and money permitting, I may do a layman’ architectural style booklet, with illustrations, for New Yorkers. NP
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:33 AM 
