Queen Anne Style architecture (United States)
Encyclopedia
In America, the Queen Anne style of architecture, furniture and decorative arts was popular in the United States from 1880 to 1910. In American usage "Queen Anne" is loosely used of a wide range of picturesque buildings with "free Renaissance" (non-Gothic Revival
) details rather than of a specific formulaic style in its own right.
Queen Anne Style buildings in America came into vogue in the 1880s, replacing the French-derived Second Empire as the "style of the moment." The popularity of high Queen Anne Style waned in the early 1900s, but some elements, such as the wraparound front porch, continued to be found on buildings into the 1920s.
The "Queen Anne" style
that had been formulated in Britain by Norman Shaw and other architects arrived in New York
with the new housing for the New York House and School of Industry (Sidney V. Stratton
, architect, 1878) at 120 West 16th Street. Gabled and domestically scaled, it is of warm, soft brick enclosing some square terracotta panels, with an arched side passage leading to an inner court and back house; its detailing is largely confined to the treatment of its picturesquely-disposed windows, with small-paned upper sashes and plate glass lower ones. There are triple windows of Serlian motif and a two-storey oriel
that projects asymmetrically. The Astral Apartments
, built in Brooklyn in 1885-1886 to house dock workers, provides another similar, and larger, example of red brick and terracotta Queen Anne architecture in New York.
E. Francis Baldwin's stations for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
, built variously of brick and wood, are also familiar examples of the style.
The most famous American Queen Anne residence (see photo left) is the William Carson Mansion
of Eureka, California
. Newsom and Newsom, notable builder-architects of 19th Century California
homes and public buildings, designed and constructed (1884–1886) this 18-room home for one of California's first lumber barons. All styles described below as well as others are present in this example of American Queen Anne Style.
Distinctive features of American Queen Anne style (rooted in the English style) may include an asymmetrical facade
; dominant front-facing gable
, often cantilever
ed out beyond the plane of the wall below; overhanging eaves
; round, square, or polygonal tower(s); shaped and Dutch gable
s; a porch
covering part or all of the front facade, including the primary entrance area; a second-story porch or balconies; pediment
ed porches; differing wall textures, such as patterned wood shingles shaped into varying designs, including resembling fish scales, terra cotta
tiles, relief
panels, or wooden shingles over brickwork, etc; dentils; classical columns; spindle work; oriel
and bay windows; horizontal bands of leaded windows; monumental chimneys; painted balustrades; and wooden or slate
roofs. Front gardens often had wooden fences.
Within the American Queen Anne Style, there are also the Eastlake and Shingle Styles:
, is named for Charles Eastlake
(1836–1906), an Englishman whose Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (1868) was highly influential in American design, by translating John Ruskin
and William Morris
' ideas into a decorative vocabulary for the carpenter and builder. The Eastlake style's importance is delineated by the use of geometric shapes made possible by modern machine techniques of the era. By making these intricate shapes with machines, it was possible to duplicate the exact complex patterns repeatedly, and in unusual places, such as the inside plates of a hinge. Eastlake himself always emphasized "simple, elegant motifs" rather than the florid decorative excesses of high Victorian style, and the majority of the items labeled "Eastlake" appalled him, as he frequently wrote during his lifetime. This is particularly evident in the United States, where basic Eastlake motifs were usually multiplied into a dizzying geometric mandala of Victorian intricacy.
As the 20th century approached, there was then a revival of old forms in furniture under the name of the Queen Anne, although frequently spoken of by dealers, with absurd anachronism, as the Early English. While the articles made according to Eastlake's instructions may be considered a reform, and the Neo-Jacobean a fashion, the revival of the Queen Anne seems to have sufficiently positive features to be regarded as a style. This revival is said to be the work of that knot of poets and artists and connoisseurs of bric-a-brac, at whose head stand Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and William Morris
, and the traces of Italian fancy and English quaintness combined in it declare that it might have been their work if it is not.
Its introduction was associated with a revival of Queen Anne forms in architecture, such as the somewhat Dutch character of country house with red brick trimmings and curved gables, to be found in the latter years of William and Mary, qualified by new invention and modern taste. Of course it met with opposition and criticism; for it seemed to have sprung into notice full grown, not like a growth answering a need, but like a surprise. Animated discussions concerning its merits and demerits, displaying equal acrimony and ignorance, took place in the meetings of the architects and others interested in such things, various voices declaring that nobody would credit Queen Anne's epoch with any style at all, and that if the epoch had a style, it was not this; that this was a mongrel, violating classic rules while pretending to be a form of classic, and yet really not unsuited to Gothic surroundings; and that, being an attempt to unite the truthfulness, variety, and picturesqueness of the Gothic with the common sense of the Italian, it should be called the Free Classic, for it was in reality only a Renaissance, less strict and refined that the old Renaissance. A writer in The Builder said: "We are now offered in some quarters the revival of the furniture of the Queen Anne and Georgina Period, of which Chippendale and Sheraton were the leading makers. This type of furniture revels in curved lines and surfaces really unsuitable, as we have before said, to wood construction and which, in fact, seem designed to create difficulties of execution in order to overcome them." But it is not all this bombe furniture referred to, with its curved lines and surfaces, that was chosen for the archetype of the new Queen Anne. It is true that Chippendale and Sheraton produced such designs, but they also, as we have seen, produced others more characteristic of themselves and of the period. The first portion of Chippendale's One Hundred and Sixty Plates has examples of the rolling abominations of the Rococo, but the rest is a collection of simple and rather elegant shapes; and what resemblance there is between the Chippendale furniture and the Queen Anne is confined to the latter portion of his illustrations and the articles manufactured from those designs.
The revived Queen Anne and that which was purely home bred and national of the original style, revels in no curves whatever but is severely square and straight. Its lines are a rebound from the curves of two centuries. All of its articles stand well off the floor, upon strong supports, the construction perfectly apparent, the corners sharp, the panels many and small; it carries much plate glass, cut always with a deep bevel, and it has a great deal of carving in the face, that is, in such relief, of the conventional forms of fruit, flowers, foliage, birds, and animals, and their idealized suggestions; it uses but little metal in its heavy articles, but illuminates itself with numberless small and precious mirrors, with brass sconces and candelabra, and with rare china, and its mantelpieces overflow with sculptured beauty of column and capital and frieze. Some of the choicer traits of the Elizabethan occasionally appear in the carving of the cabinets; there is even a hint of the Louis Quinze in the long reedy legs that now and then uphold some light square object. Generally it was thoroughly eclectic, and if there was the least reminiscence of the Gothic in the tops of sideboards, buffets, and cabinets, there was also a general character of the Louis Quinze throughout the whole. But the style has struck the beauty loving eye wherever it has been seen. The Queen Anne was perhaps the most satisfactory American domestic furniture, being reasonable and sufficiently beautiful. It is quaint and picturesque, and has the simplicity and quietness of old work, without architectural pretension.
The Shingle Style in America was made popular by the rise of the New England school of architecture, which eschewed the highly ornamented patterns of the Eastlake style. In the Shingle Style, English influence was combined with the renewed interest in Colonial American architecture which followed the 1876 celebration of the Centennial. Architects emulated colonial houses' plain, shingled surfaces as well as their massing, whether in the simple gable of McKim Mead and White's Low House
or in the complex massing of Kragsyde
, which looked almost as if a colonial house had been fancifully expanded over many years. This impression of the passage of time was enhanced by the use of shingles. Some architects, in order to attain a weathered look on a new building, even had the cedar shakes dipped in buttermilk, dried and then installed, to leave a grayish tinge to the façade.
The Shingle Style also conveyed a sense of the house as continuous volume. This effect—of the building as an envelope of space, rather than a great mass, was enhanced by the visual tautness of the flat shingled surfaces, the horizontal shape of many shingle style houses, and the emphasis on horizontal continuity, both in exterior details and in the flow of spaces within the houses.
McKim, Mead and White and Peabody and Stearns
were two of the notable firms of the era that helped to popularize the Shingle Style, through their large scale commissions for "seaside cottages" of the rich and the well-to-do in such places as Newport, Rhode Island. However the most famous Shingle Style house built in American was "Kragsyde
" (1882) the summer home commissioned by Bostonian G. Nixon Black, from Peabody and Stearns. Kragsyde was built atop the rocky coastal shore near Manchester-By-the-Sea, Massachusetts
, and embodied every possible tenet of the Shingle style.
Many of the concepts of the Shingle Style were adopted by Gustav Stickley
, and adapted to the American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement
. Additionally, there are several other notable styles of Victorian architecture, including Italianate, Second Empire, Folk and Gothic revival.
Gothic Revival architecture
The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...
) details rather than of a specific formulaic style in its own right.
American Queen Anne style
The "Queen Anne" style
Queen Anne Style architecture
The Queen Anne Style in Britain means either the English Baroque architectural style roughly of the reign of Queen Anne , or a revived form that was popular in the last quarter of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century...
that had been formulated in Britain by Norman Shaw and other architects arrived in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
with the new housing for the New York House and School of Industry (Sidney V. Stratton
Sidney V. Stratton
Sidney Vanuxem Stratton was an American architect born in Natchez, Mississippi, but whose practice was entirely in New York City. Stratton is now scarcely known, but he was one of the first American architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, along with H. H...
, architect, 1878) at 120 West 16th Street. Gabled and domestically scaled, it is of warm, soft brick enclosing some square terracotta panels, with an arched side passage leading to an inner court and back house; its detailing is largely confined to the treatment of its picturesquely-disposed windows, with small-paned upper sashes and plate glass lower ones. There are triple windows of Serlian motif and a two-storey oriel
Oriel
An oriel window is a type of bay window which projects from a wall.Oriel may also refer to:Places in the United Kingdom:*Oriel College, Oxford*Oriel Street, Oxford*Oriel Square, Oxford*Oriel Chambers, LiverpoolPlaces in Ireland:...
that projects asymmetrically. The Astral Apartments
Astral Apartments
Astral Apartments is a historic apartment building located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York, New York.The Astral was built in 1885-1886 as affordable housing for employees of Charles Pratt's Astral Oil Works. It is a massive brick and terra cotta building in the Queen Anne style. It features a...
, built in Brooklyn in 1885-1886 to house dock workers, provides another similar, and larger, example of red brick and terracotta Queen Anne architecture in New York.
E. Francis Baldwin's stations for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was one of the oldest railroads in the United States and the first common carrier railroad. It came into being mostly because the city of Baltimore wanted to compete with the newly constructed Erie Canal and another canal being proposed by Pennsylvania, which...
, built variously of brick and wood, are also familiar examples of the style.
Carson Mansion
The Carson Mansion is a large Victorian house located in Old Town, Eureka, California. Regarded as one of the highest executions of American Queen Anne Style architecture, the home is "considered the most grand Victorian home in America." It is one of the most written about and photographed...
of Eureka, California
Eureka, California
Eureka is the principal city and the county seat of Humboldt County, California, United States. Its population was 27,191 at the 2010 census, up from 26,128 at the 2000 census....
. Newsom and Newsom, notable builder-architects of 19th Century California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
homes and public buildings, designed and constructed (1884–1886) this 18-room home for one of California's first lumber barons. All styles described below as well as others are present in this example of American Queen Anne Style.
Distinctive features of American Queen Anne style (rooted in the English style) may include an asymmetrical facade
Facade
A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....
; dominant front-facing gable
Gable
A gable is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of a sloping roof. The shape of the gable and how it is detailed depends on the structural system being used and aesthetic concerns. Thus the type of roof enclosing the volume dictates the shape of the gable...
, often cantilever
Cantilever
A cantilever is a beam anchored at only one end. The beam carries the load to the support where it is resisted by moment and shear stress. Cantilever construction allows for overhanging structures without external bracing. Cantilevers can also be constructed with trusses or slabs.This is in...
ed out beyond the plane of the wall below; overhanging eaves
Eaves
The eaves of a roof are its lower edges. They usually project beyond the walls of the building to carry rain water away.-Etymology:"Eaves" is derived from Old English and is both the singular and plural form of the word.- Function :...
; round, square, or polygonal tower(s); shaped and Dutch gable
Dutch gable
A Dutch gable or Flemish gable is a gable whose sides have a shape made up of one or more curves and has a pediment at the top. The gable may be an entirely decorative projection above a flat section of roof line, or may be the termination of a roof, like a normal gable...
s; a porch
Porch
A porch is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.There are various styles of porches, all of which depend on the architectural tradition of its location...
covering part or all of the front facade, including the primary entrance area; a second-story porch or balconies; pediment
Pediment
A pediment is a classical architectural element consisting of the triangular section found above the horizontal structure , typically supported by columns. The gable end of the pediment is surrounded by the cornice moulding...
ed porches; differing wall textures, such as patterned wood shingles shaped into varying designs, including resembling fish scales, terra cotta
Terra cotta
Terracotta, Terra cotta or Terra-cotta is a clay-based unglazed ceramic, although the term can also be applied to glazed ceramics where the fired body is porous and red in color...
tiles, relief
Relief
Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...
panels, or wooden shingles over brickwork, etc; dentils; classical columns; spindle work; oriel
Oriel window
Oriel windows are a form of bay window commonly found in Gothic architecture, which project from the main wall of the building but do not reach to the ground. Corbels or brackets are often used to support this kind of window. They are seen in combination with the Tudor arch. This type of window was...
and bay windows; horizontal bands of leaded windows; monumental chimneys; painted balustrades; and wooden or slate
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...
roofs. Front gardens often had wooden fences.
Within the American Queen Anne Style, there are also the Eastlake and Shingle Styles:
Eastlake Style
The Eastlake Style, of the Eastlake MovementEastlake Movement
The Eastlake Movement was a nineteenth century architectural and household design reform movement started by architect and writer Charles Eastlake . The movement is generally considered part of the late Victorian period in terms of broad antique furniture designations...
, is named for Charles Eastlake
Charles Eastlake
Charles Locke Eastlake was a British architect and furniture designer. Trained by the architect Philip Hardwick , he popularised William Morris's notions of decorative arts in the Arts and Crafts style, becoming one of the principal exponents of the revived Early English or Modern Gothic style...
(1836–1906), an Englishman whose Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (1868) was highly influential in American design, by translating John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
and William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
' ideas into a decorative vocabulary for the carpenter and builder. The Eastlake style's importance is delineated by the use of geometric shapes made possible by modern machine techniques of the era. By making these intricate shapes with machines, it was possible to duplicate the exact complex patterns repeatedly, and in unusual places, such as the inside plates of a hinge. Eastlake himself always emphasized "simple, elegant motifs" rather than the florid decorative excesses of high Victorian style, and the majority of the items labeled "Eastlake" appalled him, as he frequently wrote during his lifetime. This is particularly evident in the United States, where basic Eastlake motifs were usually multiplied into a dizzying geometric mandala of Victorian intricacy.
As the 20th century approached, there was then a revival of old forms in furniture under the name of the Queen Anne, although frequently spoken of by dealers, with absurd anachronism, as the Early English. While the articles made according to Eastlake's instructions may be considered a reform, and the Neo-Jacobean a fashion, the revival of the Queen Anne seems to have sufficiently positive features to be regarded as a style. This revival is said to be the work of that knot of poets and artists and connoisseurs of bric-a-brac, at whose head stand Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
and William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, and the traces of Italian fancy and English quaintness combined in it declare that it might have been their work if it is not.
Its introduction was associated with a revival of Queen Anne forms in architecture, such as the somewhat Dutch character of country house with red brick trimmings and curved gables, to be found in the latter years of William and Mary, qualified by new invention and modern taste. Of course it met with opposition and criticism; for it seemed to have sprung into notice full grown, not like a growth answering a need, but like a surprise. Animated discussions concerning its merits and demerits, displaying equal acrimony and ignorance, took place in the meetings of the architects and others interested in such things, various voices declaring that nobody would credit Queen Anne's epoch with any style at all, and that if the epoch had a style, it was not this; that this was a mongrel, violating classic rules while pretending to be a form of classic, and yet really not unsuited to Gothic surroundings; and that, being an attempt to unite the truthfulness, variety, and picturesqueness of the Gothic with the common sense of the Italian, it should be called the Free Classic, for it was in reality only a Renaissance, less strict and refined that the old Renaissance. A writer in The Builder said: "We are now offered in some quarters the revival of the furniture of the Queen Anne and Georgina Period, of which Chippendale and Sheraton were the leading makers. This type of furniture revels in curved lines and surfaces really unsuitable, as we have before said, to wood construction and which, in fact, seem designed to create difficulties of execution in order to overcome them." But it is not all this bombe furniture referred to, with its curved lines and surfaces, that was chosen for the archetype of the new Queen Anne. It is true that Chippendale and Sheraton produced such designs, but they also, as we have seen, produced others more characteristic of themselves and of the period. The first portion of Chippendale's One Hundred and Sixty Plates has examples of the rolling abominations of the Rococo, but the rest is a collection of simple and rather elegant shapes; and what resemblance there is between the Chippendale furniture and the Queen Anne is confined to the latter portion of his illustrations and the articles manufactured from those designs.
Shingle Style
William D. Low House
An icon of American architecture, the William G. Low House was a seaside cottage at 3 Low Lane in Bristol, Rhode Island. Designed in 1886-87 by architect Charles Follen McKim of the New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White, the house — with its single, exaggerated, 140-foot-long gable — embodied the...
or in the complex massing of Kragsyde
Kragsyde
Kragsyde is the name of a mansion built on Smith's Point at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, United States, in 1883 and demolished in 1929. The house was commissioned by Bostonian George Nixon Black, Jr. to the famous architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns .Kragsyde is generally regarded as...
, which looked almost as if a colonial house had been fancifully expanded over many years. This impression of the passage of time was enhanced by the use of shingles. Some architects, in order to attain a weathered look on a new building, even had the cedar shakes dipped in buttermilk, dried and then installed, to leave a grayish tinge to the façade.
The Shingle Style also conveyed a sense of the house as continuous volume. This effect—of the building as an envelope of space, rather than a great mass, was enhanced by the visual tautness of the flat shingled surfaces, the horizontal shape of many shingle style houses, and the emphasis on horizontal continuity, both in exterior details and in the flow of spaces within the houses.
McKim, Mead and White and Peabody and Stearns
Peabody and Stearns
Peabody & Stearns was a premier architectural firm in the Eastern United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, the firm consisted of Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns, Jr...
were two of the notable firms of the era that helped to popularize the Shingle Style, through their large scale commissions for "seaside cottages" of the rich and the well-to-do in such places as Newport, Rhode Island. However the most famous Shingle Style house built in American was "Kragsyde
Kragsyde
Kragsyde is the name of a mansion built on Smith's Point at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, United States, in 1883 and demolished in 1929. The house was commissioned by Bostonian George Nixon Black, Jr. to the famous architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns .Kragsyde is generally regarded as...
" (1882) the summer home commissioned by Bostonian G. Nixon Black, from Peabody and Stearns. Kragsyde was built atop the rocky coastal shore near Manchester-By-the-Sea, Massachusetts
Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts
Manchester-by-the-Sea is a town on Cape Ann, in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 5,228.-History:...
, and embodied every possible tenet of the Shingle style.
Many of the concepts of the Shingle Style were adopted by Gustav Stickley
Gustav Stickley
Gustav Stickley was a manufacturer of furniture and the leading proselytizer for the American Arts and Crafts movement, an extension of the British Arts and Crafts movement.-Biography:...
, and adapted to the American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
. Additionally, there are several other notable styles of Victorian architecture, including Italianate, Second Empire, Folk and Gothic revival.
See also
- Category:Victorian architectural styles
- Category:Victorian architecture in the United States