| Styles of Homes: The Victorian Period 1860–1900. Richardsonian Romanesque 1880–1900. |
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| Style |
Material |
Orientations of structure |
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| Refined |
Stone,
brick |
Vertical |
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| |
| Key features |
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Roman arches; round towers; rough-hewn stone walls;
complex rooflines; a variety of windows including groupings
of arched windows, deeply recessed windows, and bay
windows.
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| Architectural Features |
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| Entrance Door |
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- Heavy, castle-like doors
- Prominent panels in one column
- Arched opening
- Ornate detailing and substantial hardware
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| Shutters |
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- Not typically used on this style
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| |
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| Garage Door |
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- Vertical orientation of surface material
- Layered trim boards
- Simple square lites or more complex arched lites
- Stained (not painted)
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| Style Summary |
In the middle decades of the 19th century, European
Romanesque models were sometimes used for American
public and commercial buildings (the Romanesque revival
style), but these precedents reached American houses only in
a later 19th-century form shaped by the powerful personality
and talent of Henry Hobson Richardson. Born in Louisiana,
Richardson attended Harvard and then studied architecture at
the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (he was only the
second American to do so). He returned to the United States
after the Civil War and opened an office in New York, which he
subsequently moved to Boston.
During the 1870s he evolved his strongly personal style, which
incorporated Romanesque forms and which, like its mid-century
predecessor, was applied principally to large buildings. Unlike
the earlier and more correct Romanesque Revival, Richardson
borrowed from many sources; he incorporated the polychromed
walls seen in the contemporary late Gothic Revival; his arches
started at ground level rather than from a supporting pedestal;
and most importantly, he stressed unusual, sculpted shapes,
which gave his buildings great individuality.
His followers were usually less inventive; most houses in this
style merely add Romanesque detailing to the typical hipped-with-cross-gables shape of the dominant Queen Anne style.
Excerpted from A Field Guide to American Houses, Virginia and
Lee McAlester, Alfred Knopf, New York, © 2000. |
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