Architecture

Architecture Public ArchitectureDomestic Architecture
Public Architecture The first public architecture in America were places of ceremonial significance to Native Americans, from the great earth mound at Cahokia, Illinois, to Pueblo kivas. In the early Colonial Era, religious structures were typically the most prominent public buildings. Puritan meetinghouses in New England usually stood on central commons and served not only for religious services, but also for town meetings. In the eighteenth century, church spires were challenged as public landmarks only by symbols of colonial governance, such as the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall, 1731–1753) in Philadelphia. Less formal, but of equal significance to the public realm, were the public markets and taverns. The Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, a principal social center of the capital, became the site for political meetings on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

The establishment of the United States through revolution against the colonial power of Britain called for an immediate creation of public architecture asserting the new nation's democratic values. This is best reflected in the dome‐crowned U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., designed primarily by William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, and Charles Bulfinch from 1793 to 1829, and greatly expanded by Thomas U. Walter from 1851 to 1865. The dome emerged in American governmental architecture as a symbol of democratic gathering for political discourse to foster civic betterment and unity. Thomas Jefferson in his design for the University of Virginia (1817–1826) in Charlottesville as an “academical village,” created an architectural microcosm for the new republic of individual diversity— through the separation and variety of the pavilions, united into a community by Neoclassical colonnades and headed by the library rotunda, a secular temple of enlightened and rational thought. During the early nineteenth century, Neoclassical revival styles held strong associations with the Romantic movement. William Strickland's Second Bank of the United States (1818–1824) in Philadelphia, a Greek Revival adaptation of the Parthenon, evokes a new beginning for Western civilization through a revivification of the democracy and architecture of the ancient Greeks.

During the Gilded Age, civic structures became larger, reflecting the growth of governmental bureaucracy as well as local boosterism; A grand new city hall or county courthouse could assert a locality's primacy over its rivals. One of the most prominent examples is Philadelphia City Hall (1871–1901) by John McArthur Jr., an enormous Second Empire picturesque mass placed on the center square of Philadelphia and topped with a 548‐foot tower. A popular style of American public architecture in the late nineteenth century was the Richardsonian Romanesque, which proclaimed monumentality through massive walls and simple, strong arches, as popularized by architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886) with such buildings as the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (1884–1888) in Pittsburgh.

The new city that arose after the Chicago fire of 1871 was not dominated by the traditional landmarks of public architecture, but by commercial skyscrapers. Even a major public space like Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's Auditorium (1886–1890) was cloaked in commercial facades containing a hotel and offices. Yet commercial buildings sometimes provided the grandest and most inviting public spaces of the day, such as the interior courts of Daniel H. Burnham's Marshall Field Store (1902–1914). In capitalist America, the private sector has built some of the most notable architecture for the public. Toward the end of his career, Sullivan attempted to define an American democratic architecture through such small‐town banks as the National Farmers Bank (1906–1908) at Owatonna, Minnesota.

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago presented the more imperial image of Beaux‐Arts Classicism to the public. The City Beautiful Movement arose creating ensembles of public buildings as the focus of urban plans. Washington, D.C., in particular was transformed into an ordered procession of Classical Revival government buildings, museums, and monuments. Some of America's greatest public buildings were created during this American Renaissance, such as the Boston Public Library (1887–1895), designed by the firm of Charles Follen McKim, William R. Mead, and Stanford White; Richard Morris Hunt's entrance wing (1895–1902) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Henry Bacon's Lincoln Memorial (1912–1922) in Washington, D.C., and several archetypical domed state capitols from Rhode Island to Utah. Millionaire capitalists turned philanthropists endowed the nation with many new public buildings, most notably Andrew Carnegie's funding of hundreds of public libraries. Large railroad stations offered the public noble entrances into cities with central halls on a scale to please an emperor, as still can be seen in New York's Grand Central Terminal (1903–1913) by the firms of Reed and Stem, Warren and Wetmore.

During the New Deal Era the Public Works Administration (1933–1939) constructed many new public buildings, from small‐town post offices to college libraries, often in a stripped classical style suggesting stability in austere times. After World War II, new art museums were often the most dramatic and timeless definitions of architecture for the public, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum (1956–1959) in New York and Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum (1966–1972) in Fort Worth, Texas. The triumph of modernism and the growth of government led to urban renewal projects that eradicated older sections of cities in preference for anonymous skyscrapers and vacuous plazas, as epitomized by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza (1962–1978) in Albany, by Wallace K. Harrison and Max Abramovitz. By the 1970s, postmodernism began a reexamination of the traditional symbolism of public architecture. James Hammond, Thomas H. Beeby, and Bernard Babka's Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago (1987–1991) reasserts an ornamented monumentality and traditional grandeur for a major public building.

The automobile profoundly affected traditional notions of public space. In the decades after World War II, shopping centers and malls replaced Main Street and the town square as the center of most American communities. This development can be particularly traced in the suburbs of Minneapolis from Southdale Shopping Center (1956) to the Mall of America (1992). As the twentieth century ended, public life for some Americans was perhaps no better represented than by the artificial, controlled, and fantastic domains of theme parks, particularly Walt Disney World Resort (1971) near Orlando, Florida. Yet American public architecture still has moments of greatness, such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981–1982) in Washington, D.C., where two angled, partially subterranean walls of dark granite bearing the names of the war dead become a vortex for the fractured public feelings of a nation.
See also Architecture: Domestic Architecture; City Planning; Indian History and Culture: Migration and Pre‐Columbian Era; Modernist Culture; Puritanism; Sculpture; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Henry‐Russell Hitchcock and and William Seale , Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A., 1976.
Lois Craig and and the Staff of the Federal Architecture Project , The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in United States Government Building, 1978.
Diane Maddex, ed., Built in the U.S.A.: American Buildings from Airports to Zoos, 1985.
Craig Zabel and Susan Scott Munshower, eds., American Public Architecture: European Roots and Native Expressions, 1989.
Alan Gowans , Styles and Types of North American Architecture: Social Function and Cultural Expression, 1992.
Pamela Scott , Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation, 1995.

Craig Zabel

Domestic Architecture Since the Colonial Era, house building in America has been characterized by three qualities: a persistent use of the traditional European housing forms and styles; a gradual but significant increase in the amount of space allocated to each person; and, despite growing population and ecological pressures, a continued interest in free‐standing, single‐family houses. From the eighteenth century on, single‐family housing has also been considered a badge of social status and a form of art.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the first colonists often built thatched huts and wigwams, modeled after Native American forms. As soon as possible, however, they turned to traditional European structures. Settlers in St. Mary's City, Maryland, for example, erected medieval‐style houses, thirty feet long and eighteen feet wide, constructed on poles embedded in the earth, that resembled the timber‐framed houses they had known in England.

More permanent house forms, supported by rock foundations, supplanted pole houses by the early eighteenth century. Many were “hall‐and‐parlor” houses, like the Fairbanks house in Dedham, Massachusetts (1636), the oldest surviving wooden frame building in America. These houses often had two equal‐sized rooms, about sixteen feet square or one “bay,” to either side of a central hallway and a massive seven‐foot fireplace for heat. Built with small windows and heavy doors, these structures displayed a fortresslike appearance.

By the early eighteenth century, simple clapboard‐sided timber‐framed houses, now two stories high and three bays wide, were a familiar sight on the eastern seaboard. Although a wide variety of other house styles, ranging from the log cabins of Germans and Scandinavians to the earth‐walled adobe homes of Hispanic settlers in the Southwest, also dotted the landscape, by the 1730s the simple rectangular structures (sometimes also called I‐houses, each two rooms wide and one room deep) had become commonplace.

The I‐house never became either a totally dominant or a static and unchanging style, however. The regional variants of log houses, adobe structures, and other ethnic housing forms persisted far into the twentieth century, and almost every conceivable variation of the I‐house form was also built. In the southern tidewater, front porches and rear sections were added. In New England, the roof sometimes extended back down to cover a rear kitchen, creating a “salt‐box” look. And Dutch settlers in the cities of New York and New Jersey favored parapeted roofs where the gable end of the house extended above the roof line, or (after 1750) distinctive gambrel roofs, which start at one pitch or downward slant for a few feet and then change to a steeper pitch.

By the 1750s, colonial prosperity had created an upper class that sought to raise its status by adopting British classicism. Refined by English architects Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, and James Gibbs, this style was popularized in pattern books that provided drawings of window moldings, flattened classical columns (pilasters), and gable decorations. These Georgian‐style houses were built often in a symmetrical five‐bay pattern (two windows, a door, two windows). The Georgian style modernized the traditional I‐house form by adding stylish decorative detailing.

American fondness for wooden classical house style resulted in the adoption, between the 1770s and 1850s, of a number of variations of this design, including the more delicate Adamesque style (including a prominent front door with fanlight and delicate roof moldings), named for the Scottish architectural brothers Robert and James Adams; the Roman Revival (with a two‐story front porch supported by columns); and the Greek Revival (with a low‐pitched roof and cornice lines emphasized by wide, divided bands of trim).

Whether built in the North or South, classical revival houses added a quality of simple elegance to the westward expanding frontier settlements. They also fit well with the popular commitment to democratic politics that contemporaries associated with the Roman and Greek empires. Long a recognizable feature of the East Coast landscape, colonial styles enjoyed revivals in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the classical revival's dominance was undercut by the architectural plan‐book writer Andrew Jackson Downing, who helped popularize Gothic, Italianate, and other historical revival housing forms. This Romantic movement, which endowed house design with moral significance, portrayed the house as a symbol of intellectual achievement and social status.

While wealthy industrialists in Newport, Rhode Island, built huge homes patterned after Italian villas, Americans of more modest means took advantage of the availability of mass‐produced windows, doors, and two‐by‐four‐inch interior framing (called the balloon frame), and the invention of central heating, electric lighting, and indoor plumbing, to increase the convenience and space in their homes as well. In the Middle West, Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects created their own distinctly American style, the Prairie School, characterized by its prominent, overhanging roof line and horizontal bands of windows.

From the 1890s on, middle‐class Americans also built smaller, more efficient houses. These were located in new residential suburbs, connected to nearby cities first by train and later by automobile freeways. From the turn of the century until the 1930s, small one‐ or two‐story bungalows, with large front porches, sprang up in many of these suburbs.

After World War II, one‐story ranch or Cape Cod houses superseded bungalows in popularity. But even these small structures were often enlarged. Where each family member in the 1790s enjoyed between 67 and 169 square feet of space, family members in 1991 could expect to enjoy an average of 674 square feet.

Although Modernism, with its square forms, use of steel and glass, and flat roofs was popularized in the 1950s by the German expatriate architects Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), the style remained most popular among the wealthy. Despite the persistent interest of architects, most domestic housing has been designed and constructed by local builders in small, suburban developments, following styles available in popular magazines and plan books. Strong, well‐built, and full of conveniences, these comfortable structures are testimony to the persistence of traditional housing forms in America.
See also Architecture: Public Architecture; Housing; Modernist Culture; Suburbanization.

Bibliography

Lester Walker , American Shelter: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Home, 1981.
Gwendolyn Wright , Building the Dream, 1981.
Virginia and and Lee McAlester , A Field Guide to American Houses, 1984.
Clay Lancaster , The American Bungalow, 1880–1930, 1985.
Clifford E. Clark Jr. , The American Family Home, 1800–1960, 1986.
Alan Gowans , The Comfortable House, North American Suburban Architecture, 1890–1930, 1986.

Clifford E. Clark Jr.