Yesterday's American architecture quiz was was too hard. I honestly had no idea how to categorize it. It was a highly pleasing pastiche, and thus an unfair question. Our expert tells us this:
That one was a bit of a mishmash, I imagine. Been changed a lot over the years. If I was a betting man, I'd say it was Italianate. Squarish, with a clerestory most call a cupola. The second story porch is officially called a "gallery," and I don't think it's original. I think the bottom floor bracketed porch is the original, and they maybe built the other one on top of its roof and added a door. That sort of arrangement is popular in places like Louisiana but not the Northeast much. I imagine the eaves of the main house had modillions or brackets like you see on the bottom floor's porch and they were removed. It may be the whole thing was much older and the Italianate style was overlaid on it. That was popular in the mid 1800s. I think the Adam style fanlight front door and flanking windows are more recent additions, too.
I like to take architectural pics when I go places. As Sipp says, people who make things are demigods, changing the world. Swords, guns, tables, plows, iPhones, or homes. This elegant and not ostentatious manse in Newport was built, no doubt, by a genius evil Capitalist as a summer cottage for his family and friends while he worked in NYC, and is more straightforward than the last one. (All substantial summer homes in Newport - and the seaside in New England in general - are called "summer cottages," as opposed to town houses.)
Date and style, anyone?
Yesterday's house was what we would term Neo-Classical, built 1890-1920. Our resident expert: That building is not a style I'd go out of my way to build or anything, but it's based on one of the coolest things in the history of the US: The Columbian Exp
Tracked: Sep 23, 13:50