 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
   |
|
   |
||||||
|
|
|
While the Queen Anne was the last variation in the long history of Victorian home styles, when it appeared on the scene in the early 1880s, its uniqueness did carry the Victorian influence into the next century. Architects, borrowing design elements from other Victorians created new homes to satisfy the desires of wealthy American industrialists. This new class sought vacation homes away from the crowded cities. Employing the decorative woodwork of the Queen Anne, they created fashionable "summer cottages," complete with ice cold lemonade. Primarily along the pristine Atlantic coast, rambling free form houses, obviously Queen Anne in origin, but less ornate, and characterized by unpainted wooden shingles, emerged. These homes, known simply as Shingle, were essentially transitions between the last of the Victorians and the "modern" house construction begun in the early 1900s. Unlike most of the 1700s and 1800s, residential architecture in the first days of the 1900s was imprinted immediately with the style of one man, Frank Lloyd Wright. As early as 1893, Wright began experimenting with a new style, which along with a group of Chicago architects, became the distinctive, Midwestern style known as Prairie Style. Between 1900 and 1911, Wright was commissioned to design several houses, each recognized today, as pure examples of his work. In contrast to the wealthy clients who could afford to engage an architect, the burgeoning cities, teeming with people in need of housing, gave rise to more modest interpretations of Prairie architecture. As the 1800s came to a close and the new century began, the American Four Square or Prairie Box style emerged, so called because it shared many features with the Prairie architecture that Wright had pioneered. Akin, as well, to the Prairie style, and like the American Four Square, the Craftsman Bungalow was the dominant style for smaller houses during this period. Although the roots of the American Bungalow can be traced to Bengal, India during the years of British colonialism, which is credited as well with inspiring the British Arts & Crafts movement, in its Craftsman form, it clearly borrowed from the Prairie School, which not only changed modern architecture forever, but played an important role in the Aesthetic Arts & Crafts movement, influencing furniture and furnishing designs as well. An unlikely fusing of the southwestern Spanish Mission style and the Midwestern Prairie School at the turn of the century created Mission architecture, which flourished alongside Arts & Crafts homes for the first decades of the 1800s.
Homepage | About Us | Contact Us Copyright
© 2001 Eastender Restoration |
|||||||||||
