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WHAT STYLE IS IT?
| FALL 2006
SUMMER 2006
SPRING 2006
SPRING 2005
WINTER 2005 |
Building Blocks
The Gothic Revival style, popular in America from the 1830s through the 1860s, may be seen as a mere revival of medieval motifs. But look beneath the scrolls and trefoils that animate this style, and one finds more profound meaning.
In the last half of the eighteenth century, the authority of the Renaissance was challenged by the empiricism of the Neoclassical age. Archaeological investigations revealed diversity not present in the Renaissance works that guided architecture well into the eighteenth century. Suddenly, architects could look to a variety of models for specific imitation. In addition, the romantic sentiment seen in the literary works of Shelley and Byron, or equally in music and art, fueled the idealization of the dark mysteries of the Middle Ages—romanticism appealed to the emotional rather than the rational.
The Gothic Revival was rooted in the newfound freedom of the modern age and a nostalgia for the past. In Hugh Morrison’s Early American Architecture, he describes the shift in American nineteenth-century architecture as being brought on by “scientific archaeology [having] destroyed the theoretical bases of Renaissance architecture, while Romanticism [destroyed] its taste.” Paralleling the Greek Revival in America, the Gothic Revival found its popularity in houses, particularly rural ones. Books such as Andrew Jackson Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), which sold some 16,000 copies, promulgated the taste for the romantic residences.
Buildings of the Gothic Revival style fulfill romantic ideals with picturesque, asymmetrical massing and plans. The Gothic Revival house has varying heights and projections, is capped by multiple steeply pitched gables, is lit by angled bay windows and leaded glass casement arched windows (often paired), and is shadowed by entry towers and wide porches, which give the effect of some distant mysterious past. Elaborate scroll-sawn vergeboards decorate gables, while scrolls and finials, trefoils and quatrefoils, brackets and pendants are found everywhere. The Gothic Revival style can be found across the country, but when they were built, they were about far more than their appearance. In The Architecture of Country Houses, Downing describes why his countrymen should have good houses: “A good house (and by this I mean a fitting, tasteful, and significant dwelling) is a powerful means of civilization. A nation whose rural population is content to live in mean huts and miserable hovels is certain to be behind its neighbors…But, when smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country we know that order and culture are established.”
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