When a civilization ends, it does not leave behind a tombstone. Instead, it leaves stackings of stones (i.e. buildings.) We lose the remembrance of individual people, the things they said, did, and wrote, but we remember what they built because those things endure for much longer. The Ancient Greeks and Romans tell us about themselves through their Classical Architecture. We remember the Medieval period in Europe from its castles and Gothic Cathedrals. We remember the early 20th century from the Art Deco buildings it left behind. The style tells us something about their priorities, what they believed, what they knew, and what their hopes were. In a sense, the buildings a culture leaves behind are a kind of epitaph.
Let’s look through the structural epitaphs of our ancestors.
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One interesting facet to American architecture is that it is largely a from-the-ground-up enterprise, as the Native tribes in North America did not leave a lot of enduring stone and/or rock construction (there are incredible stone and rock constructions father south, throughout Mexico, Central America, and South America, though.)
When Europeans arrived, they brought with them building styles of all types and ages and geographic backgrounds. A lot of government architecture, for example, adopted Classical styles from Ancient Greece and Rome. Not far away, you might see a Medieval Gothic style Church, and a little farther down the road, you might see Victorian style residences.
One example of mixing and matching, or maybe you might just consider it evolution of the Classical style, is called “Italianate.” An excellent Italianate building exists today in Portland, Maine.
Victoria Mansion
This beautiful residence was constructed in the mid 19th century, just before the American Civil War. It was built as a summer home for hotelier Ruggles Sylvester Morse. The brownstone Italianate home has been listed as a National Historic Landmark, due to its unique construction and excellent preservation, since 1971.
Victoria Mansion, also known as the Morse-Libby House or Morse-Libby Mansion, is a historic house in downtown Portland, Maine, United States. The brownstone exterior, elaborate interior design, opulent furnishings and early technological conveniences provide a detailed portrait of lavish living in nineteenth-century America. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its architectural significance as a particularly well-preserved Italianate mansion.
House
This stately brownstone Italianate villa was completed in 1860 as a summer home for hotelier Ruggles Sylvester Morse. Morse had left Maine to make his fortune in hotels in New York, Boston and New Orleans. The house was designed by the New Haven architect Henry Austin. Its distinctive asymmetric form includes a four-story tower, overhanging eaves, verandas, and ornate windows. The frescoes and trompe-l’œil wall decorations were created by the artist and decorator Giuseppe Guidicini.
The building is recognized as one of the finest, and least-altered examples of a large Italianate brick/brownstone home in the United States. Gustave Herter created the interiors in a range of styles, and this house is his earliest known and only intact commission. Due to donations by the Libby family, 97 percent of the original contents survive, including Herter furniture, elaborate wall paintings, artworks, carpets, gas lighting fixtures, stained glass, porcelain, silver, and glassware.
The house has twin sinks in the guest bedroom on the second floor; a Turkish smoking room, which is one of the first example of Islamic architecture in the United States; carved marble fireplaces; and a flying staircase. When designing the home, Morse incorporated features from his luxury hotels, including the large and tall entryway, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The house used some of the latest technologies of the era (some of which he also took from his hotels), such as central heating, gas lighting, hot and cold running water, and a servant call system. As part of a new and unique design, the water for the house was provided by gutters in the tower and third floor, which ran down through pipes into all the rooms, with separate pipes for heated water, which was heated using coal, and another for cold water.
Morse lived in the house until his death in 1893. A year later, the house and its contents were sold by his wife to Joseph Ralph Libby, a Portland merchant and department store owner. The Libby family occupied the house for over 30 more years, until 1928, without making significant changes to it. However, one significant change made was the repainting of the green room in white, which restorationists were unable to restore once it became a museum.
Museum
The last of the Libbys moved out of the home in 1928. Due in part to the Great Depression a year later, the home was repossessed in 1939 due to back taxes soon after the 1938 Portland flood. After this, the house became abandoned and its fate was uncertain. There were plans by an oil company to buy the dilapidated home, and then demolish it to build a gas station. However, it was saved by William H. Holmes who bought the house in order to preserve it as a museum. In 1941, Holmes opened the house as the Victoria Mansion (named for Britain’s Queen Victoria), later being added to the National Historic Register, and continues to be open as a museum every day from 10am-3:45pm.
There are a couple of terms worth knowing and understanding from the wiki article above:
Brownstone is a brown Triassic–Jurassicsandstone that was historically a popular building material. The term is also used in the United States and Canada to refer to a townhouse clad in this or any other aesthetically similar material.
Hummelstown brownstone is extremely popular along the East Coast of the United States, with numerous government buildings throughout West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Delaware being faced entirely with the stone, which comes from the Hummelstown Quarry in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, a small town outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Hummelstown Quarry is the largest provider of brownstone on the east coast. Typically, the stone was transported out of Hummelstown through the Brownstone and Middletown Railroad.
Brownstones are also scattered throughout Manhattan from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights, with notable concentrations in the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Harlem and East Harlem. In Queens and The Bronx, the historic districts of Long Island City and Mott Haven also host many brownstones. Brownstones also predominate in some Hudson County neighborhoods directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, especially in Hoboken and around Van Vorst Park and Hamilton Park in Jersey City. New York City brownstones can cost several million dollars to purchase. A typical architectural detail of brownstones in and around New York City is the stoop, a steep staircase rising from the street to the entrance on what amounts to almost the second-floor level. This design was seen as hygienic at the time many were built, because the streets were so foul with animal waste.
The Rittenhouse Square and Fairmount neighborhoods of Philadelphia also include examples of brownstone architecture. Many of these homes have been converted into apartment buildings.
Back Bay, Boston, is known for its Victorian brownstone homes – considered some of the best-preserved examples of 19th-century urban design in the United States.
Although some brownstones exist in Chicago, a similar residential form known as “greystones” is far more prevalent. A greystone is a type of residential structure that utilizes Indiana limestone for its facade, regardless of its overall architectural style. As in Brooklyn, there is a “Greystone Belt” in Chicago, with large numbers of such structures located in the south and northwest quadrants of the city. It is estimated that around 30,000 of Chicago’s greystones built between 1890 and 1930 are still standing.
The other term we pick up from Victoria Mansion is “Italianate.”
The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian Renaissance architecture with picturesque aesthetics. The resulting style of architecture was essentially of its own time. “The backward look transforms its object,” Siegfried Giedion wrote of historicist architectural styles; “every spectator at every period—at every moment, indeed—inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature.”
The Italianate style was first developed in Britain in about 1802 by John Nash, with the construction of Cronkhill in Shropshire. This small country house is generally accepted to be the first Italianate villa in England, from which is derived the Italianate architecture of the late Regency and early Victorian eras. The Italianate style was further developed and popularised by the architect Sir Charles Barry in the 1830s. Barry’s Italianate style (occasionally termed “Barryesque”) drew heavily for its motifs on the buildings of the Italian Renaissance, though sometimes at odds with Nash’s semi-rustic Italianate villas.
The style was employed in varying forms abroad long after its decline in popularity in Britain. For example, from the late 1840s to 1890, it achieved huge popularity in the United States, where it was promoted by the architect Alexander Jackson Davis.
About 15% of Italianate houses in the United States include a tower
There are a lot of additional fun architecture words to learn about / read up on there, if you are so inclined. However, I want to send you on an excellent virtual tour of Victoria Mansion. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself wanting to visit Maine, after:
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