The mid seventies saw many other American reflections of Shaw’s Manorial mode and soon of his Queen Anne also, none of them so successful as the Sherman house. But the deep business recession that followed the Panic of 1873 led to a general mood of repentance after the extravagances, architectural and otherwise, of the post-war boom. From the resultant nostalgia for the simpler ways of the American past there began to develop at this time a great interest in the houses of the Colonial period, an interest that readily merged, however, with the current English preoccupation with the vernacular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To an extent difficult for posterity to appreciate, the nascent ‘Shingle Style’,[[340]] which crystallized towards the end of the decade with the revival of building production, was to its protagonists already a sort of Colonial Revival. Although its origins are partly Shavian, it represents above all a reaction, as did Shaw’s Manorial mode in England, against the ‘modernism’ of the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire, now grown thoroughly unfashionable except in the West.
Boston was still the architectural metropolis of the United States, and it was around Boston, especially in the work of Emerson and Little, the latter a serious early student of old Colonial work, that this crystallization of the Shingle Style first took place (see Chapter [13]). But it was at once taken over and given a somewhat more Shaw-like elaboration by the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, formed in 1879. From the early eighties, and for over a decade, the Shingle Style was widely practised by architects from coast to coast, and not least happily in the Far West. The characteristic use of shingles as an all-over wall-covering emphasized the continuity of the exterior surface as a skin stretched over the underlying wooden skeleton of studs, in contrast to the way the preceding Stick Style had echoed that skeleton in the external treatment. The shingles properly provide the name for a most characteristically American domestic mode; but it was in planning that American architects made the really original contribution in what was the most significant development of the detached house since the Picturesque period.
Figure 26. W. R. Emerson: Mount Desert, Maine, house, 1879, plan
One of the first mature examples of the Shingle Style, a house built by Emerson on Mount Desert in Maine in 1879, well illustrates the virtuosity of the new planning (Figure [26]). Rooms of varied shape and size are loosely grouped about the hall and open freely into one another. The various levels of the different areas are related to the landing levels of the elaborate staircase. Above all, it should be noted that the verandas are not mere adjuncts or afterthoughts, as they were even on Richardson’s Andrews house, but major elements, both space-wise and visually, of the whole composition. Such houses parallel in their three-dimensional complexity the massing of the Italian Villas of the earlier nineteenth-century decades with their loggias, pergolas, and prospect towers, yet they bear little or no visual resemblance to them, since the later houses are always much more sculpturally plastic and less articulated in composition. The windows are generally of double-hung small-paned sashes of a type at once Queen Anne and Colonial, but they are frequently grouped in the Shavian way, as well as being ingeniously placed in order to vary the internal lighting effects, so that the pattern of fenestration is not at all of an eighteenth-century order.
Richardson certainly did not initiate the Shingle Style; but he took it over in 1880 and made it very much his own, using it for all his later country and suburban houses. Dropping all detail, whether Richardsonian Romanesque, Shavian Manorial, Queen Anne, or American Colonial, he retained much of the ease and casualness of Shaw’s best early houses. But there is also a great deal of similarity to the simple massive effects of the old Colonial houses also. Spiritually, so to say, if not so much visually, Richardson’s shingled houses most resemble Webb’s best work; of these Richardson presumably had no knowledge, although it is just possible that he might have seen some when he was in England in 1882, well after the Shingle Style was fully established.
Richardson’s Stoughton house in Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., of 1882-3 is perhaps his best shingled one, at least in the relatively untouched form in which it, almost alone, alas, has come down to us (Plate [124B]). It certainly shows little evidence of the interest that he is known to have taken in Burges’s and Shaw’s work while he was abroad just before this. The entrance, originally, was through the loggia recessed into the main mass of the house (it is now from Ash Street on the left). The living-hall extends, as in the Sherman house, from front to back and the stairs sweep up in a quarter-circle over the entrance. The drawing room at the corner and the dining room behind the loggia both open into the hall through wide doors; only the small library is isolated from the general flow of space. Externally, the shingled surfaces, broken only by banks of double-hung windows, model the complex mass into a unified composition, the almost submerged stair-tower successfully linking the two gabled wings at right angles to one another by its rounded form. There is no ornament of any sort, and the weathered grey of the shingles is varied only by the dark-green paint of the window sash.
McKim, Mead & White’s houses of the early eighties, several of them equally fine, are usually rather more elaborate in their massing and are likely to be enlivened with much imaginative detail.[[341]] Some of the detail recalls this or that style of the past, but all of it is thoroughly personalized by White’s delicate hand. One of their best houses is the one for Isaac Bell, Jr, built in 1881-2 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I. (Plate #126:pl126). This is less unified externally than the Stoughton house but more open in plan (Figure [27]). A wide veranda, with very elegant bamboo-like supports, extends around two fronts, expanding into a two-storeyed open pavilion on the right. This pavilion provides a semicircular void to balance the round tower at the rear left corner. The patterns of the original cut shingles on this house, although obviously suggested by English tiling, are much softer and more graceful, almost bringing to mind birds’ plumage.
Inside, the hall is articulated by a wide ingle-nook, rather dark and low, in sharpest contrast to the great flight of stairs beyond down which floods light from the window-wall at the half landing. Twenty-five-foot sliding doors, hung from above, make it possible to open the drawing room through almost its entire length into the hall. The Bell dining room, connecting at its end through French windows with the curved portion of the veranda, has some of the finest of White’s orientalizing detail. This is much more original than that in the new library he decorated at this time in the Sherman house or the dining room he added to Upjohn’s Kingscote, both also in Newport.
McKim, Mead & White’s slightly earlier H. Victor Newcomb house of 1880-1 in Elberon, N.J., is at once clumsier and more Shavian externally than the Bell house; but the spatial treatment of the living-hall is most original and very significant for later developments (Plate [125A]). The main rectangular space, of which the shape is emphasized by the ceiling beams and by the abstract geometrical pattern of the floor, seems to flow out in various directions into other rooms and into several bays and nooks; but the actual room-space is sharply defined by a continuous frieze-like member that becomes an open wooden grille above the various openings. There can be little question that the major influence here is from the Japanese[[342]] interior, but from the Japanese interior understood as architecture. This is not just a superficial matter of Nesfieldian japonisme such as White was employing so much in his ornament in these years. The Kingscote dining room has somewhat similar spatial qualities but more eclectic detailing and richer materials: marble, Tiffany glass tiles, cork panels, stained glass, etc.