Download Buildings to Know- Romanesque and Queen Anne

Buildings to Know: Stick Style, Romanesque, and Queen Anne style
Griswold House, Newport, Rhode Island, Richard Morris Hunt, 1863-64.
The Griswold House is considered one of Richard Morris Hunt’s important works, and the first
major expression of the “Stick Style”. Named “Stick Style” in the 20th century, such buildings are
characterized by wooden construction with an exterior structural expression, although the flat
panels and trim pieces do not correspond with actual structural members inside. The Griswold
has a complex roofline, whose main mansard-form is pierced by numerous gable and dormer
sections. The roof is finished with bands of polychrome slate, and is enhanced by chimneys with
decorative panels. There are numerous balconies sheltered by deep eaves, with gable ends
decorated with applied Stick style woodwork. An expansive veranda wraps around the southern
and western sides of the house, with an elaborately-decorated port-cochere on the north side;
all these elements are supported on slender, chamfered “stick-like” posts. The Stick Style
became popular for suburban houses in American in the 1860s and ‘70s.
Emlen Physick House, Cape May, NJ, Designed by Frank Furness 1879
Another important American Stick style house is this house built in Cape May, a fashionable
seaside resort of the 19th century. The large summer house for Doctor Emlen Physick of
Philadelphia was designed by Hunt’s former pupil, Frank Furness. Its exterior is distinguished by
Furness’s trademark oversized features, including gigantic upside-down corbelled chimneys,
hooded “jerkin-head” dormers, and the huge stick-like brackets on the porch. The exterior
surface is almost gridded with applied flat moldings that break up the wall surface and suggest
a structural “skeleton”. To contemporaries, this style of house was a modernization of the
gothic style.
Dorsheimer House, Buffalo, NY, Designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, 1869-71
Henry Hobson Richardson, perhaps the greatest architect of the post Civil-War generation in
America, started his career with a design for a French Second Empire house in Buffalo, New
York. But it has neither the plasticity of ornament of the typical French Second Empire building,
nor the wooden construction that could make it “Stick Style”. The three-story brick house is of
a relatively simple “L” plan design featuring incised decorations of rosettes and triglyphs in the
Neo-Grec manner (a mannered expression of modern gothic developed in France in the 1850s.)
The house features bands of gray sandstone emphasizing the corners and lintels; the stone
stands in contrast colorwise with the brick walls. The mansard roof is covered in slate and
features large pedimented dormers. These integral coloristic effects had precedent in mid-19th
century architectural theories and came to prominence in both masonry and wooden buildings
through the 19th century.
Watts - Sherman House, Newport RI, H.H. Richardson, 1874-76
Richardson’s earliest “masterpiece” was the William and Annie Watts-Sherman summer house
in Newport, Rhode Island, a place firmly established as a summer haven for the wealthy by the
1860s, and also a place for architectural experimentation. Richardson had set up his
architectural practice in Boston after his return from France in 1865. He received the
commission for a summer house from newlyweds William Watts and Annie Sherman, and
designed their house in 1874-75.
The Watts Sherman House is directly influenced by English country houses created by Richard
Norman Shaw. Often built for the captains of industry who were “new money” they reflected
long traditions of English architecture and were intentionally medieval in their exterior detail.
Richardson made the interior plan one of open spaces that flow into each other – very unlike
the “rooms off a center hall” plan that had long dominated American building practice.
A comparison of the Watts Sherman House and Richard Norman Shaw’s “Grim’s Dyke”, its near
contemporary, shows they share the use of broad gables, half-timbering, tall chimneys and a
variety of surface textures and materials on the exterior. In the Watts Sherman House, the
upper floors are wooden shingles, a conscious look back to colonial American practice and
another example of the continued exploration of the past to inform designs for the present in
the 19th century.
Glessner House, Chicago, Illinois, H.H. Richardson, 1877-1889.
The urban house functions like a country house, in that it provides visual and psychic separation
from the urban, industrial world that generated the money to create it. From the outside, it
appears fortress-like, while inside it is warm and comfortable with lots of clear-finish
woodwork. Richardson designed the house as a load-bearing brick structure with a cladding of
granite on the front and side, and brick with limestone trim on the rear. The house is laid out
along the perimeter of the lot line, creating a private open courtyard inside. The heavy-looking
rusticated stone and round arches give this unique structure a Romanesque Revival
architectural style name, although it also draws influences from early Renaissance Italian
palazzos.
Ames Memorial Library, North Easton, MA, Designed by H.H. Richardson 1877-79
Like the contemporary Memorial Hall at Harvard, Richardson used an ecclesiastical building
form and precedent for an entirely secular structure. The polychromatic coloration is much
more controlled than High Victorian Gothic examples, with architectural elements like the
round arches consistently articulated in the brownstone, while lighter colored granite walls
provide a contrast and large areas of calming flat surface to balance the decorative groupings.
The building Richardson created is an early form of a public library, and the plan of the library is
clearly expressed on the exterior by the size and placement of the windows – stacks and
reading room are on opposite sides of the building with differentiated window sizes.
Clustered colonettes set between the windows over the stacks of the library create the
appearance of a single long horizontal window across the façade. Banded windows were also
used by Richardson in the Watts Sherman House, derived from Richard Norman Shaw.
Richardson turned away from the insistent verticality of the Gothic and High Victorian Gothic
and emphasized horizontality and smoother, broad planes. Richardson copied decorative
designs found on a French Romanesque church (Ste Nectaire). Decoration was not applied but
created by inlaying different colors of stone geometric floral patterns along the cornice line.
Richardson designed four similar libraries, located in the suburbs of Boston, in the 1880s.
Ames Estate Gate Lodge, North Easton, Massachusetts, H.H. Richardson, 1880-81 This is the
last of the trio of works commissioned by the Ames family of North Easton, Massachusetts from
Henry Hobson Richardson (The others being the Ames Memorial Library and the Oakes Ames
Memorial Hall). Together they form a significant group of slightly different expressions of the
Richardsonian Romanesque style
The Ames Estate Gate Lodge was designed as the northern entrance to Frederick Ames’
“Langwater” estate. The gatehouse building forms a long, low mass lying directly across the
estate's entry road, which runs through the dominant, semicircular arch. The lodge's length is
balanced by a tall, visually prominent roof. The gate lodge grows from wall to gate to building
across its length, all constructed in oversized boulders that seem to be drawn directly from the
earth. Frederick Law Olmstead collaborated on the landscape of the estate; the gatehouse is an
expression of the integration of land and building first advocated by Downing but taken here to
a dramatic extreme.
Marshall Field Warehouse, Chicago, IL, H.H. Richardson, 1885-87 (demolished 1930)
This was a warehouse for the Chicago department store, Marshall Field. The building occupied
an entire city block, west of the Chicago River, and it was not meant for shoppers, but as a
warehouse it was strictly for the use of employees of the store. Thus it is closed on the ground
floor, without windows for window shopping, but that allows for a thick, rusticated base on
which this visually massive building rests. The Marshall Field Store demonstrates Richardson’s
ability to adapt his Romanesque style to a modern commercial premises. The building is
supported by an interior framing of wood and iron, and is clad in a rusticated exterior of
stonework recalling but not imitating an Italian Romanesque palazzo. The exterior design, in
which the windows apparently extend up through multiple floors is achieved by the thin
spandrels between them. The window bays are contained by massive Romanesque arches.
Horizontal and vertical are perfectly balanced by Richardson in this structure; decoration comes
from manipulation of the stone surfaces rather than applied ornament.
Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts, H.H. Richardson, 1874-77
Trinity Church, Boston, 1871-77 is one of the masterpieces of American architecture, combining
a wealth of knowledge of the historical details of the Romanesque style with a logical plan to
make the building work for an active American congregation of the latter 19 th century. It is the
archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by a clay roof, polychromy,
rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower. This style was soon adopted for a number of
public buildings across the United States. It is one of Richardson’s rare church designs, although
church architecture informed so much of what he did for so many different building types.
The church has a short-armed cross plan, giving everyone a seat close to the pulpit. The tower
of the church sits above the central crossing, bringing light into the interior and marking the
church with an impressively tall tower.
Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, PA, H.H. Richardson, 1883-88
Trinity Church is beautiful but it was the Allegheny County courthouse, in downtown Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, that Richardson himself referred to as his “great achievement”.
Richardson died in 1886, so it was completed by his office, according to his plans. The
courthouse complex included county administrative offices for a rapidly growing city rich from
steel manufacturing, the county courts, and a jail. It is marked by a tower that is more slender
than Romanesque proportions, and looks more like the civic skyscraper that was corresponds to
the similar expression being built at the same time in Philadelphia for its city hall in the French
Second Empire style.
The jail is the more austere interpretation of the Romanesque Revival style, executed in a dark
stone that gives a greater sense of weight – and gloom – to the building. Here, the low doors
under heavy voissoirs really do mean one is entering a prison, perhaps never to return to the
light of day.
Brooklyn Historical Society's, Brooklyn, NY, Designed by George Post, 1880-81
George B. Post, an architect an engineer who had studied with Richard Morris Hunt was always
interested in the engineering needed to make buildings bigger, stronger, taller and more
beautiful. For the Brooklyn Historical Society’s new home, he combined an innovative truss
system to support the ceiling of the central library, hung, like the Brooklyn Bridge, from the top
of the building. He encased the dramatic engineering in a Queen Anne Revival style aesthetic
inside and out. The red brick and unglazed terra cotta ornamentation on the exterior includes
sculptural busts of notable men in Western art and literature, adding a didactic quality even to
the outside of this repository for history and culture in Brooklyn. It was the first building in New
York City to use locally produced terra cotta.
Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876, fairgrounds designed by Herman J. Schwarzmann,
Main exhibition building designed by Petit & Wilson.
The Centennial Exhibition was the first World's Fair in the United States, held in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the
signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The main exhibition building was
the largest building in the world, erected using prefabricated construction system of wooden
posts and cast iron supports with wrought iron trusses. The Centennial was visited by millions
of people, and the various buildings representing individual states and foreign nations brought
current architectural ideas to the attention of millions of visitors.
The British Pavilion at the fair, designed by Thomas Harris, was a half-timbered “country house”
in the manner of Richard Norman Show. The British Pavilion in particular was loved by the
American public, and it sparked an interest in historical design from the pre-industrial England,
and early American buildings as well.
Baldwin House, Newport RI, Edward Potter, 1877-1878,
An enthusiasm for the country house with a pre-industrial aesthetic was launched, and
Newport Rhode Island was one of the centers of its development. Only a few blocks from the
Watts-Sherman House, Commodore Charles Baldwin commissioned the house from the New
York architectural firm of Potter and Robertson. It has the multiplicity of everything – gables,
multiple materials, rooms – that would characterize the American suburban house of the last
quarter of the 19th century. This is not a controlled design like the Watts Sherman House.
The popularity of the British pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition, combined with the published
designs of Richard Norman Shaw and the Watts Sherman House, gave birth to a distinctly
American house form with multiple gables, multiple materials, a distinctly pre-industrial
aesthetic but an open plan and amenities available only to a “modern” building. It came to be
called the “Queen Anne” style (not Queen Anne Revival, reserved for urban brick buildings). By
1878, the time the Baldwin House was published, in The American Architect and Building News,
American architects were calling this contemporary style of building “Queen Anne”.
Remember that the pre-industrial look of the Queen Anne style was totally dependent on
industrially-produced materials and technologies.
Haas-Lilienthal House, San Francisco, California, Designed by Peter R. Schmidt, 1886
There are thousands of Queen Anne style houses across the country; one selected as an
example in part because it is open to the public and in its profusion of detail provides a
somewhat representative example of the best work of the style. The house features prominent
open gables, varied styles of shingles and siding, and a turreted corner. Built of redwood and fir,
the house withstood both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes with only minor damage. Wood is
and was the most common building material in the United States, and it was particularly
adaptable for Queen Anne decoration. Redwood, rot-resistant and hard, was an excellent
material for the carved decoration of the Queen Anne style that created surface texture.
Mary Fiske Stoughton House, Cambridge, Massachusetts, H. H. Richardson, 1882
This relatively modest house was the first to be built in what is now called the Shingle style,
although Richardson’s Watts Sherman house had also used shingle siding, as had many
traditional, vernacular houses in America in the 18th century. The unpainted wooden shingles
stretch over the building's irregular volumes like a skin. Richardson took much of the influence
of the Romanesque that he had long worked on in masonry to a wooden form, with the broad
planar surfaces, recessed entry, and no applied ornament.
The house drew immediate notice in the architectural community, and was a significant
influence in the growth in popularity of the Shingle style in the late 19th century.