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Architecture

American Eras

Architecture

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Amateurs and Imitators. Architecture in colonial America was the work of amateurs. Most buildings were built to serve practical functions rather than aesthetic ideals. The cost of building materials made it difficult to execute elaborate designs and purely decorative ornaments. In the third quarter of the eighteenth-century, more public buildings, usually churches, were built and their builders showed more interest in aesthetics. Because such projects were so infrequent, it is difficult to identify any architect who achieved a career in the colonies without devoting most of his time to other forms of work. Given the scarcity of architectural projects, it should not be surprising that colonial architecture tends to be noteworthy less for originality than for novelty. Most colonial buildings imitated particular buildings in London. St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, for example, imitated the interior of London’s St. Martin in the Fields.

Domestic Architecture. The most important change in colonial architecture was in domestic styles. As Northern merchants, Southern planters, and imperial administrators grew wealthy, they sought to display their genteel status through the consumption of imported goods and the display of cosmopolitan tastes in clothing, furniture, books, and especially their houses. If architecture in the colonies did not have the status of a professional art, it nevertheless reveals the pervasive influence of cosmopolitan tastes in the New World. British influence in colonial culture came from recent immigrants, from travel to Europe, or more commonly through books and prints imported from England. Books were particularly important for bringing British tastes, especially in homebuilding and interior decoration, to the colonies. By the end of 1750, there were eighteen different architecture books circulating in the colonies, but by 1760 there were fifty-one. These books account for not only the sometimes remarkable sophistication of particular elements of colonial mansions, but also the eclectic confusion of their overall design. George Mason’s Gunston Hall (1755–1759), for example, drew on five different books for its details of woodworking, plaster, and doorframes. Designer William Buckland used two books that had not even been published when he started building. The end result was a purely classical drawing room, Gothic Rococo arches in another room, and the first expression in American architecture of Chinese taste in the dining room. Like other impressive houses built in the late colonial era, Gunston Hall was built to showcase the latest tastes in architecture.

Harrison and Palladio. Peter Harrison, the first architect in the colonies who had more than one building to his credit, spent the majority of his life working as a customs official in New Haven. He designed the first

public synagogue (1759–1763) in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1760–1761). In these buildings and others, Harrison introduced elements of classical design that came to be known as Anglo-Palladianism. When he died in 1775, Harrison had a library of twenty-seven architecture books, the largest collection in the colonies. Andrea Palladio, an Italian architect during the Renaissance, had led the revival of Roman architecture, writing an influential book based on his intensive studies of the ancient ruins. Building Venetian palazzos and villas in the surrounding countryside, Palladio followed the classical example closely, using stately symmetrical logic and rectangular serenity. He used creative grouping and combination of columns and arches to achieve unity in his designs, which became a trademark of the Palladian influence so evident in the neoclassical architecture in Britain and America in the eighteenth century. The flowering of classical archaeology in Greece in the 1750s and 1760s provided new inspiration to architects on both sides of the Atlantic.

Monticello. Thomas Jefferson was the most talented and accomplished architect in Revolutionary America. For his home at Monticello he managed to draw myriad classical elements together in an overall innovative design. Begun in 1771 and built over the course of Jefferson’s life, Monticello used a hilltop site typical of Roman country homes, but it reversed the usual Palladian scheme, in which service wings flanked a central entrance court. By extending and lowering these wings to the back of the main building, Jefferson used the slopes of the site to transform the flat roofs of the wings into terrace walks. The interior paraded a series of Romaninspired details, with each room including a frieze from an ancient temple and educated the visitor in the variations of classical orders. “The Hall is in the Ionic, the Dining Room in the Doric, the Parlor is in the Corinthian, and the Dome in the Attic,” Jefferson wrote. “In the other rooms are introduced several different forms of these orders, all in the truest proportions according to Palladio.” Jefferson tinkered with and added to the building over forty years, and in this way it was much like the government he had helped design for the new nation—an ongoing experiment that self-consciously drew on the true, rational proportions of the ancient Republics but which in its eclectic and ahistorical combination of elements and values defied precedent. Monticello was a beautiful and awkward structure that was much more than the sum of its parts, a testament to the ongong idealism by which Jefferson and others of the founding generation sought to give form to timeless laws of nature, to adapt their prodigious learning and study to the practical problems of living.

Sources

Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997);

G. E. Kidder-Smith, Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996);

Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture in Colonial America and the Early Republic (New York: Scribners, 1922);

Marcus Whiffen and Frederick Keeper, American Architecture 1607–1976 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

PATIENCE WRIGHT, SCULPTOR AND SPY

The first known American sculptor was a woman, Patience Lovell Wright. Wright molded busts and figures in wax, specializing in the sort of realistic wax tableaux that were made famous by Madame Tussaud in the nineteenth century. Wright turned to sculpture after she was left a widow with five children in 1769. Wright’s life-size portraits of hands and faces were so detailed and accurate that when they were attached to clothed figures, she seemed to have captured people in suspended animation. After touring the colonies Wright moved to London, where she became known not only for her artistic skill but also for her charismatic personality, and in polite society she became notorious for her slightly wild manner of speaking and looking upon her subjects. A major personality during the Revolutionary War, Wright was also a spy who passed on any information that she gleaned from her influential and wealthy circle of patrons. She often hid messages in wax heads of Lord North and various British celebrities that she sent to her sister Rachel in Philadelphia, who would then pass them on to Washington.

Source: Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New York: Crowell, 1968).

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