I guess we’re going to have to explain ourselves right up front.
I’m not exactly sure how to explain Queen Anne architecture properly. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Queen Anne, for starters. In America, we’d call furniture and architecture related to Queen Anne’s salad days as Jacobean, or William and Mary style. Queen Anne is a Victorian era style, just to confuse things further. And to place the capstone of intellectual delirium tremens on this edifice of misnomers, Queen Anne architecture means something different in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.
From about 1880 until World War I, Queen Anne was the pre-eminent style of architecture in America. It supplanted Second Empire. It had all sorts of subtypes, including generally the style we featured yesterday: Stick.
That’s the Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco right there at the top of the page. It’s a Queen Anne on steroids. I have older pictures of it, too, without the Volvos in the picture, and there’s another Victorian wonder next door instead of the bland, shabby box you see off to the right.
Here’s a closer look at the fabric of the place. The visual density of the wall surfaces is very high. You can see how there is a kind of dynamism of the grouping of the interior rooms that show through to the outside, rippling along the facades, jutting out and retreating here and there, each wrinkle or bulge an opportunity for embellishment. The houses look like they’re dancing around on the foundation. How far we’d come from the staid rectangular symmetrical assemblages of rooms and the chaste Greek and Roman themes of the colonial styles:
We’ve lost the knack for laying on decoration like this. It’s really hard to get it all on the house like that. Each layer of filigree is like upping the ante; and the proportions, placement, and prominence of each design elements affects the whole thing. It’s like playing a piano. It’s easier to be interesting playing with all ten fingers, but much harder to do than chopsticks.
We’ve lost all sorts of other knacks besides embellishment, too. The wrap around porch is a lost art, for one. So we’ll talk about Queen Anne for a few days. We’ll have to divvy it up into Spindle Style, and Free Classic, and Mock Tudor, and Shingle Style and… well, pull up a chair. A Queen Anne chair, if you’ve got one.
A timber- Lumber that is nominally 5 inches or more in least dimension.
A plank- a heavy thick board, especially one 2 to 4 inches thick and at least 8 inches wide
A board-Lumber that is nominally less than two inches thick and two inches or more wide.
A stick- A long slender piece of wood
A Stick Style house: Not “A” Stick Style house. More or less, it’s “The” Stick Style House. the Carson House in Eureka, California. It’s still there, too:
I literally am having trouble comprehending this shack. It’s like the world’s wedding cake or the hood ornament on the universe or something. The Library of Congress has some more pictures. The place has the effect on me that flashing lights have on people prone to epilepsy. I’m slack-jawed looking at it.
Click on the pictures and look at it large. It has an almost impenetrable amount of surface decoration. The effect is somehow airy, though.
William McKendrie Carson ran a lumber mill. A redwood lumber mill. Redwood is rare and unusual today in house construction, but it was the early equivalent of pressure treated wood. The heartwood from redwood is as impervious to rot and unattractive to bugs as the nasty greenish southern yellow pine treated lumber you’re all familiar with now, giving you splinters on people’s decks. Along with some types of cedar, it was used in places where rot would be a problem, like house sills and various exterior millwork. Thirty years ago I’d still see it used for here and there in that fashion.
Here’s the good part: Just like many people in the building trades now, when things got slow at the millwork plant, Carson decided to give his employees something to do instead of laying them off. This is why all general contractors houses are elaborate and unfinished, generally. In 1885, he sent his workers to build him a house. And just to numb my mind further, since he had a lot of it on hand, of course, he had them make this whole house — framing, siding, all those gew-gaws– out of redwood.
We like to go to the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, and poke around what passed for a summer cottage for the Vanderbilts. It’s an enormous pile of marble hard by the Atlantic Ocean. I think it would be cheaper to build the Marble House now than the Carson house. After all, marble is just rocks. Redwood’s really expensive. And marble doesn’t need painting. I bet this does:
The inside is an insane riot of woodwork too, of course. Carson probably thought he saw plenty of redwood all day long at work, so the interior woodwork is made from an enormous lot of a wood called “primavera” that he had imported for the place. I’m sure the architect and the owner knew that redwood would make for a very dark, plain interior. Primavera is also called white mahogany. It’s insanely rare and expensive now, too.
I could never live in the Carson House. I’d just sit in there, drooling a bit, and gape at the place, trying to conjure in my mind the scale you’d use to weigh the effort and material used to build this thing. A man’s gotta go out from time to time.
[Editor’s Note: We’ve been talking about American House Styles, if you just came in. We ran out of gas at the Second Empire about two weeks ago. We’re going to press on like a fake nail] (Author’s Note: There is no editor. Raise your hand when you’re tired of that joke.) Look disparagingly at your companion. Affect a haughty tone. Rear up to your full height and drone the following through your nose:
My dear sir or madam. A Queen Anne? I think not. Anyone can see that is a Stick Style manse. Please refrain from offering your defective architectural surmises until you have educated yourself amongst the tribes of the Eastlakes. Harrumph.
The problem is that things are getting subtle. Queen Anne covers a lot of ground. To many, anything plainer than Second Empire after the Civil War is a Queen Anne. Not exactly. We’re still wallowing in the gothic, more or less, and in the picturesque. From about 1860 ’til the turn of the 20th century, you could find the Stick Style from New England to San Francisco. Actually, mostly in New England and San Francisco. The first picture is the Westerfield House in San Francisco, for instance. There’s a lot more like that there to this very day.
The Stick Style is like a bridge between the affectation of medieval gothic picturesque styles and the Queen Anne style which would blanket the United States from the 1880s until WW I. They’re all mixed up together sometimes, and they share a lot of millwork styles, too. And there was a lot of millwork. Eastlake decoration is common. He was another bridge between the medieval and the modern. The idea was to achieve a riot of surface patterns. They’d apply “stickwork” to the wall surfaces in all sorts of directions and widths and depths and patterns, some mimicking the timberwork of medieval facades, some just going with geometric intricacies. They all generally show a big, steeply pitched gable to the street, with decorative trusses in the peaks; or my favorite version has a great big tower. There’s brackets and exposed rafter ends and Eastlake trim and polychrome painted surfaces going in every direction enough to make any prospective housepainter call his yacht broker. And therein lies the problem. They could build them, but they couldn’t keep after them. Little by little, or sometimes all at once, the detailing was stripped away and simplified because it was too labor intensive to keep up. You mostly have to recognize the style on the remaining examples by a sort of detective work — a decorative timber truss on the steep gable; maybe some brackets at the front door. Here’s a picture of one in Newport, Rhode Island I snapped while out walking this spring: They were very exuberant, and the polychrome possibilities made them very picturesque, but eventually they became associated with a kind of dustcatcher broken-down haunted house vibe. You know, sorta like this: The Victorians had all the fun. Did you speak French, bubbele?
He gazes out of the photo, mute, enigmatic, not quite smiling, and speaks to me across the decades.
When I was a little boy, amusements were few and far between. Television was still in black and white for us, and after the reruns of Gilligan’s Island and The Three Stooges, not much was on the idiot box, as my father called it.
I remember my father and me trying to watch a hockey game broadcast from the west coast featuring the California Golden Seals, who were setting a new low in sports sumptuary and getting pasted by our mighty Boston Bruins — Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and Pie McKenzie and… well, I can still recite all their names down to the most obscure, even Garnet (Ace to his friends)Bailey. On a thirteen inch black and white TV with rabbit ears. We might as well have used the Etch-a-Sketch.
Eisenhower’s X-Box, the Etch-a-Sketch was.
And so it always seemed a real treat when we could wheedle our mother to drag out the elegant but battered silverware box, left from some set our family never owned, filled with the family photographs. The pictures were mostly black and white too, the current cutting edge of photography being Polaroid’s prehistoric b&w instant photos. They’d come out of the camera, and you’d count to a now forgotten tempo, and pray, and pull off the cover paper to expose the image and stop the developer, and smear your clothes, and hope the picture was vaguely done.
We’d see the usual babies on the shag carpet, buns up; confirmation and communion suits that fit like either a tent or a rubber glove, never any degree in between; little girls in their Easter jumpers and patent leather shoes, with their mothers wearing a hat, a real hat, ready for church. Father, grim, unsmiling in his workday suit, a little shiny at the elbows and knees.
Those photos were only the littlest bit interesting after a while, because they were for the most part, well — us. The exotic ones were always deeper in the pile, instantly recognizable as special by that magnificent sepia tone that photos used to have, and spalling and cracking like a fresco in damp cathedral.
There they’d be, the southern Italian or Irish immigrant faces, looking stoically at the camera, surrounded by extended family on a stoop in Cambridge or Dorchester or Roxbury Massachusetts, or perhaps Antigonish, Nova Scotia. They had their hard lives written all over their faces. But always calm looking. Serene, really; not introspective or egoist. And they looked into the lens in a way that we never do. Not at it, but through it.
Our parents would strain to remember all the names, and who did what and from where, and why and when. And I figure, with the small wisdom that I’ve accumulated with age, that when we pestered them too much about someone obscure, they made stuff up.
And then his face would turn up. Handsome, mysterious, forever young. Forte.
Who’s that?
That’s my brother Bobby, my mother would answer. And that was that.
I was young, and still in the thrall of my parents, and sensed it. Here is a place you do not go.
The years passed, and the TV was in color, and my wrists and ankles began to show from my hand-me-down cousins’ clothes. And the box came out less often. But when it did, the tantalizing face, handsomer than all the others, undiminished by time or care, resplendent in a uniform, always caught your eye. He died before I was born I learned, by osmosis I think, I don’t remember ever having the nerve to ask, and I’m sure it wasn’t offered.
In Korea.
And the earth spun, and the seasons changed, and then I was a man.
One day, my mother came to me. She had a picture. it had lain stored and untouched for fifty years, coiled, and she couldn’t unroll it without destroying it. We slowly, ever so carefully unrolled it, the flecks of black and white popping off, as I stared at the faces. Hundreds and hundreds of faces. Five rows, stretching right off the page, four feet long, all in identical infantry uniforms, except the six cooks dressed all in white. C Company 506- Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Camp Breckinridge, KY. December 27, 1952.
And there was only four ways to stand out in that mob of faces. The cooks, of course. One man in the hundreds wears an officer’s hat, and looks ten minutes older than the rest. One man is holding drumsticks over a military style snare drum. And in the very center, in the very front, one man holds the company colors on a lance. Two crossed muskets, a Capital “C” and a “506.”
And he has the face that speaks to me.
Now when I was in college, on a lark, my friends and I went skydiving. We trained all day in a sweltering hangar in upstate New York amongst the farms. They strapped army surplus gear on us, hung us on straps depending from the hangar roof, and shook us around violently by our heels until we demonstrated that we could unbuckle our main chute from the straps on our shoulders, then pull the cord on our belly chute. Fun.
We climbed resolutely into a DeHavilland Beaver, which now seems to me an odd name for a plane, and knelt in rows in the fuselage. A few long minutes later we launched ourselves, some with difficulty, out the open hole in the side and into a whirlwind far over the patchwork quilt of the fields. A tether pulled our chute for us, and we drifted down and found a place with a liquor license.
I called my father, and told him what I had done. Expecting praise, I guess, or some such. And he called me, gently, the fool I was.
I protested: but you were in a bomber plane. They must have made you jump. And he told me, son, if that plane was on fire, filled to the brim with rabid rats, and piloted by a dead man, I’d still take my chances in the plane. And to jump from a perfectly good one, he said, is foolish. Click.
My father was in the Army Air Force. Ball gunner, hanging in a plastic bubble under a B-24J, Les Miserables, over the Pacific. Air Medal. Distinguished Flying Cross. After I pestered him enough, he once told me a sort of a story about the war. He reeled off the names, Tarawa. Pelelau, Kwajalein, Tinian. He mentioned, in an offhand way, that after some island had been bombed flat, they later landed on it. It looked like the island had been picked up ten feet, he said, then dropped. His CO told them that some planes were coming. On these planes were some people. They were coming from somewhere. They were going somewhere else. When the planes landed, my father and his compatriots were instructed not to talk to these men, or even about them; and if he said so much as hello to one of them, or said “boo” about them to anyone else, he would spend the remainder of the war in a military prison, incommunicado. My father lost his desire, if he had had any, to speak about those men. He surmised some of them later flew a plane named the Enola Gay.
My father seldom talked much about being in the military.
And my mother never talked about the brother in the photographs.
Now the picture, the coiled picture, was ruined. But then, we don’t watch black and white TV any more, do we? My mother took that picture, and a bankroll, and had a necromancer or an alchemist or something at a digital photography studio restore it, perfectly, and make copies for all of us nephews. Mine hangs today over my kitchen table.
He watches over me.
I was forty years old. My mother told me, Uncle Bobby hated his real name.
His real name?
Francis, she said.
My middle name is Francis. I never knew.
(Editor’s Note: Sippican Cottage will return on Tuesday. Have a pleasant Memorial Day Weekend)
[Author’s Note: There is no editor]
Something is broken in American housing. I don’t know how to fix it.
The problem we face is a good sort of problem to face. We are well housed. As far as I can gather, better than anywhere else on Earth. And no fair telling me you’d rather live in an apartment in Paris and eat baguettes from the corner bakery every day. You’re rich if you live like that. People of very modest means can afford to live decently in the United States. That’s what I’m referring to. Rich people can live well just about anywhere. I’ve been to Europe and seen how the lower middle class lives. Hint: hot water, clean water, working toilets, cooling and heating intermittent if not downright optional.
So the utilitarian aspect is more or less covered. But a house represents a lot more than running water. It is the symbol of a society. It’s got a great big anima in it. It represents things, to and about its occupants, neighbors, community and country, planet. It’s not just a box to live in. Or it shouldn’t be. I’m afraid that’s what it’s becoming, though.
There have been various periods of boom and bust in American architecture. The most interesting work I ever did out in the landscape was always restoring things that had come and gone, and now come again. I liked places that are invested with the zeitgeist of their times. You can sort of feel it while you’re banging on it.
I’ve offered an overview of American architecture here on this page. We got as far as Second Empire, and will return to that magnificent skein of building style vivisection shortly. But while I was doing it, going over it, writing about it, wallowing in it, I realized it was all being lost.
Not the particular items themselves, exactly. It’s hard to tear down anything that’s notable, or just plain old anymore without a picket line immediately forming in front of it. People often lovingly restore notable things now, and have enough funds to do it, too. That’s not the problem.
We’ve lost our way in another way. It’s the approach to building things that we’ve lost. Post-modernism has killed the soul of American architecture. And I’d like it back, please.
Post-modernism is the idea that everything is just an affectation, and so you can pull it apart and make little jokes out of the bits. I reject the approach, and not just in architecture. The problem with the Daily Show and Colbert is not that they are smarmy wags, it’s that they derive their smugness from making fun of a establishment that no longer exists, if it ever did. Yes, everything sucks. But I hate to break it to you: You’re the everything now.
Every radio station is “alternative” now. The problem is there is nothing much to be the alternative to anymore. Mindless oppositionism is stupid. A little stupid is fun. When the preponderance of anything is stupid, the fun’s gone and it’s just stupid.
Architecture in America has always been an assemblage of affectations. And don’t kid yourself; the lack of ornamentation that was pursued as a fetish for the last 70 years by the modernist is neither modern nor a lack of fussiness. And listen up you rich ascetics: There’s nothing fussier than trying to achieve absolute plainness.
So the 1860s church was not really a Greek temple, after all, it just used that affectation as a symbol. But what a symbol; what an affectation. They understood the meaning of the things they applied to the fabric of the buildings, and the proportions and materials and finish and everything. They didn’t paste a bunch of Greeky crap on a weird box to get a laugh.
I’m growing sad that the average American house has become a three car garage with an enormous rubbery box of a house nailed on the ass end of it. We used to do better. We can do better again.
Month: May 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
I guess we’re going to have to explain ourselves right up front.
We’ve lost the knack for laying on decoration like this. It’s really hard to get it all on the house like that. Each layer of filigree is like upping the ante; and the proportions, placement, and prominence of each design elements affects the whole thing. It’s like playing a piano. It’s easier to be interesting playing with all ten fingers, but much harder to do than chopsticks.
So we’ll talk about Queen Anne for a few days. We’ll have to divvy it up into Spindle Style, and Free Classic, and Mock Tudor, and Shingle Style and… well, pull up a chair. A Queen Anne chair, if you’ve got one.
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