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Portraits of American Architecture by Harry Devlin
Portraits of American Architecture by Harry Devlin
Hard Cover Notice the front cover
191 pages
Copyright 1989
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
I The Romantic Mood 11
II The Victorian Impact13
III The Greek Revival31
IV The Gothic Revival48
V Ways and Means 73
VI The Italianate Style80
VII The Octagon Style A Classical House in a Romantic Era94
VIII The Mansard or Second Empire Style107
IX Some Working Buildings of the Victorian Age118
X Queen Anne132
XI The Romanesque Style 139
XII Vernacular Styles and Fashionable Alterations148
XIII The Stick Style159
XIV The Shingle Style170
XV The End of an Era 179
Index190
INTRODUCTION
A MEASURE OF ROMANTICISM marks those who love old houses. There is a yearning to know more about an old house-to see beyond the bricks, wood, and mortar into a dwelling that may have sheltered generations of a family or, perhaps, nurtured the tangled plot of a Gothic tale. In writing and painting PORTRAITS OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE I wish to encourage that very Romanticism by celebrating the Victorian era in America, an epoch that produced vital, exuberant, and miraculous architectural expressions-miraculous because the extraordinary circumstances and climate of the period will never occur again.
History, sociology, and aesthetics all come alive when viewed through the windows of a nineteenth-century house. But old houses are jealous of their secrets, and Romanticists must pass unrequited unless they understand something of the history of the era and the fascinating mood in which its buildings were conceived.
The houses I have portrayed were chosen because they are accepted versions of the array of architectural styles that appeared in the last century. Many are, or were, in New Jersey. Inflfrom the South came to New Jersey by way of Philadelphia, while New England's architectural contributions arrived there via New York City. By the time styles reached New Jersey, building methods and stylistic characteristics had evolved to forms that would remain essentially constant as they moved westward across the continent.
Woven into the narrative and into the words accompanying the paintings are references to arts other than architecture, as no single art fares well in isolation. The Gothic mood, for example, affected literature, architecture, drama, music, and painting. Therefore, names of otherwise disparate individuals figure in the seventy-year span this book encompasses. Madame de Stael, Thomas Jefferson, Frances Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Aaron Copland, Mary Shelley, and Dolly Madison all find some commonality in the pages that follow. Almost forgotten names are resurrected: Batty Langley, Capability Brown, and Orson Squire Fowler, in their time, exerted great influence on our landscape, our architecture, and our very way of thinking.
The portraits of the structures are factual, but liberties were taken with backgrounds and foregrounds for clarity and composition. I have cut down forests of trees, utility poles, and other offending objects to present clearly the nature of the subjects. I have also made more subtle selections. Just as human portrait subjects have their best sides, so do houses. Houses convey varying moods at different seasons and times of day and, needless to say, many visits were required to catch the subjects at their best.
The development of my personal interest in architecture-specifically nineteenth-century houses-can be traced back to my college years. The journeys between my home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Syracuse University were frequent and the routes I took were varied. Those were late Depression years and the roads through Pennsylvania and New York were memorable for their noble houses in sad decay.
At that time, I had no architectural understanding-I simply found ancient houses entirely fascinating. Information about these old places was hard to come by and it was an era when anything Victorian was held in contempt. But in time I learned to identify Greek Revival, Gothic, and Mansard. Italianates, Queen Annes, and the Stick Style were mysterious terms to be introduced in years to come.
On leaving Elizabeth for the journey north, the first structure to fire my youthful imagination was a hotel, the Cochran House of Newton, New Jersey, which has since been destroyed. It was a masterpiece of carpenter's lace and lathesman's art. Across the Delaware in Milford, a number of Romantic houses, unlike anything I had ever known, gradually gave way to farms and forests and then to architecturally barren areas near Pennsylvania coal mines. On Route i i, in Great Bend, I saw my first Greek Revivals. A little further on, at the approach to Binghamton, there rose a great deserted Victorian that might have been home to the Magnificent Ambersons. A year later, it was gone, fallen to flame or the wrecker's ball. The loss I felt for the Binghamton house foretold the future of an artist determined to recapture the mood and ambience of an architectural epoch so thoroughly maligned.
My post-college years found me in my first studio in Greenwich Village, which was a few steps away from the Jefferson Market building, a whimsical mof vari-colored stone and sand castle forms that I found immensely pleasing. Many years later, restored and freed of the visual distraction of the 6th Avenue El, that structure was seen in a very different way. The years between had added to an understanding of the history of architecture and now the old market building became Ruskinian Gothic and the rich allusions associated with that form added aesthetic and intellectual pleasure to visual enjoyment.
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