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For civic architecture, I really like Richardson Romanesque.
In a previous post, I mentioned my appreciation of neo-gothic but Richardsonian Romanesque is right up there as well. This structure in Chicago always causes me to stop and admire:
In a previous post, I mentioned my appreciation of neo-gothic but Richardsonian Romanesque is right up there as well. This structure in Chicago always causes me to stop and admire:
Yes, beautiful... the style is strong, imposing and yet also romantic... rustic and yet also sophisticated.
I lived in Rochester, NY while I worked at Kodak in the good old days, and there was a private home done in this style at 1050 East Avenue that I used to gawk at. I had a book of exceptional homes around Rochester and they told its story - the owner had inherited a fortune, and he took a 2-year trip to Europe and left the design of his home - and the budget! - entirely in the hands of an elite architect, J. Foster Warner, who built him this 35-room Romanesque mansion, completed in 1892. Warner also designed George Eastman's mansion, which is just up the street.
Last year while exploring small towns in NH, I came across this Pillsbury Free Library, built in 1891 in the small town of Warner, that I also found very pretty. Apparently, the money for the building was donated by George A. and Margaret C. Pillsbury (yes, that Pillsbury). George had lived in Warner for some time and had fond memories.
Last edited by OutdoorLover; 02-18-2024 at 11:05 AM..
This may only be interesting to me, but I like history... I found these photos of the old YMCA building in my current town of Newburyport, MA. This magnificent Romanesque building was built in 1891. In the black and white photo, some interesting details show that the street was either dirt or gravel at that time, and you can see a wagon or buggy wheel at lower left - the centuries old transportation was still in use, but you can also make out an electric line suspending overhead, and apparently the Newburyport Electric Light Company illuminated the first electric street lights in 1887, just 4 years before this building was built, and really just a few years after electric street lights were introduced in Boston. Apparently the wonders of electrification were spreading all over New England rapidly at this time, which must have been very exciting. You can see the prosperity and the exuberance of this period in the Romanesque architecture that was being used at this time.
Craftsman. Love the craftsmanship (!) and unique and useful built-ins. The rooms are roomy and the materials first class. The Sears Catalog houses were built with redwood studs.
OutdoorLover: New England, and Massachusetts especially, have scores of these buildings in cities and towns large and small.
The style is often called "Richardsonian Romanesque" because most of them were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, one of the top architects who has ever practiced in this country. (The Wikipedia article on Richardson places him at the pinnacle along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright [who got his start in architecutre working under Sullivan].)
BTW, both Wright and Sullivan cited this Philadelphia architect as a major influence on their own work, and Wright himself probably rescued Frank Furness and many of his buildings from obscurity and demolition when he visited the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school in the late 1950s and talked him up to the faculty there. I think you will find his distinctive, muscular Victorian style at the very least of interest to you.
Here are two photos of one of Furness' best-known buildings, his University of Pennsylvania Library (now Fisher Fine Arts Library) of 1891. Here is how it looked in 1900:
University of Pennsylvania Library, 1900. Image by Detroit Photographic Co., now in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
An innovative feature of the original building was that the book stacks (the hipped-roofed wing to the right of the main entrance tower) was designed to be expandable, with a wall mounted on screw jacks so that it could be moved out and additional stack modules inserted
And here is how it looks now, after a couple of misguided additions in the 1910s and 1920s that eliminated the expandable stack wall:
Fisher Fine Arts Library. Public domain image by MatthewMarcucci at English Wikipedia
This may only be interesting to me, but I like history... I found these photos of the old YMCA building in my current town of Newburyport, MA. This magnificent Romanesque building was built in 1891.
Wow - what a spectacular structure! And it was a victim of fire from what I could learn of it.
I remember exactly one building absolutely blowing me away, and that was the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. It is in the Romanesque Revival style and I guess I like that style. Of course, the setting had a lot to do with it!
Wow - what a spectacular structure! And it was a victim of fire from what I could learn of it.
Yes, for a YMCA building, in our little city of about 20,000 people, that was a pretty grand building that I am sure was built at considerable expense; and as you note, unfortunately it was destroyed by fire after about a century. A nice footnote is that someone saved some of those stones, and when the new Newburyport train station was built about a decade after the fire, they incorporated those saved stones into the design of the train station portico, which I think gives it a touch of class :-)...
Last edited by OutdoorLover; 02-28-2024 at 04:20 PM..
To LIVE in and LOOK at - Mid Century Modern, hands down. Just open enough to have a good flow, from room to room. Emphasis on light and incorporating the inside and outside. Sliding doors. Patios or later decks. "Modern" conveniences such as intercoms, central vacuum, central air conditioning. Large and sometimes multiple corporate gathering areas - not only a living room, family room or den, and a finished basement, often outfitted with a wet bar, spacious bedrooms with double sized closets.
Architectural features such as a significantly larger primary bedroom with en-suit. Frequently vaulted ceilings. Large floor to ceiling windows. Or picture windows. Natural features such as planters, real wood knotty pine paneling, stone and exposed brick.
They are eminently livable and built around entertainment, family, socializing, and the people who live there. The style supports a realistically casual lifestyle, over formality/
One of the styles at the other end of the scale from Richardson Romanesque, and common in these parts, with surviving examples going back to the 1600s, is the Cape Cod. Some of them can be rather large, and they may have had more ornament added over time, but a classic Cape is a simple design, rather plain, and yet, still quite lovely in my opinion. Here are some cute little older examples and a larger reproduction Cape that is still true to the form.
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