Figure 27. McKim, Mead & White: Newport, R.I., Isaac Bell, Jr, house, 1881-2, plan
In 1879 Cyrus McCormick had his Chicago mansion built by the local architect Adolph Cudell (1850-1910) and his partner Blumenthal in the form of a very corrupt Second Empire hôtel particulier. It is good evidence of the rapidity with which taste changed at this time that two years later he called on McKim, Mead & White to build for him in Richfield Springs, N.Y., one of the finest and most carefully composed of all their Shingle Style houses. This house is notable not only for the subtly Japanese character of the various sorts of veranda supports but even more for the way the composition is unified under the broad front gable by the long horizontal line of the veranda roof repeating that of the stylobate-like stone wall of the terrace below. It is most unfortunate that this house is now in a state of near-collapse.
Little’s contemporary Shingleside House of 1881 in Swampscott, Mass., has been mentioned already. Soberer than the Bell or the McCormick houses in its rectangular shape and almost total lack of exterior detail, this had a galleried two-storey hall with a window-wall as the principal living area. In the combining of different levels this house recalled a little Cloverley Hall, but it was completely Americanized in scale and in detail without being archaeologically Neo-Colonial.
By the mid eighties J. Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913) had introduced the Shingle Style to Chicago, and other Eastern architects were building good houses of this order in such Western towns as Cheyenne, Idaho; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Pasadena, California. In Philadelphia Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) developed the mode with a very characteristic personal difference, often eschewing the use of shingles. If his exteriors are rather English in their frequent use of brick and real half-timbering, his plans are most original. The long rooms of varied and irregular shape are strung out on either side of halls from which rise stairs within grilled enclosures of a sort that appeared in England only in the houses of the nineties by Voysey and his contemporaries.
The heyday of the Shingle Style was brief, even though it continued in use well down into the nineties. The Colonial Revival implications, present from the first, soon encouraged more and more comprehensive use of eighteenth-century detail, and this supported the general tendency of the mid eighties in America away from the irregular and towards more formal order (see Chapter [13]). Something of this change could be seen in Richardson’s latest houses in masonry such as the Glessner house of 1885-7 at 18th Street and South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which still stands, and the contemporary Mac Veagh house, long since destroyed, also in Chicago, both of which were almost symmetrical as regards their front façades. The most drastic examples, of course, of this Academic Reaction were such houses as McKim, Mead & White’s Villard group in New York (Plate [109B]) and their H. A. C. Taylor house in Newport with its formal Anglo-Palladian plan of central hall and four corner rooms. Despite its even tighter plan, however, their extant W. G. Low house in Bristol, R.I., of 1887—a year later therefore than the demolished Taylor house—can properly be cited again as a masterpiece of the Shingle Style (Plate [127]). This illustrates very well how the loose massing of the houses of the early eighties could be organized into a carefully balanced composition without succumbing to any historical mode of design, whether Italian Renaissance or American Colonial.
Particularly interesting in this connexion are the small houses at Tuxedo Park, N.Y., which Price designed for Pierre Lorillard in 1885-6, some years before he began to build Renaissance skyscrapers (see Chapter [14]). Lorillard’s own house has a rather tight plan of the Neo-Colonial sort; but the exterior with its paired chimneys on the front, a Richardsonian entrance arch between them, and the verandas and terrace treated as voids carefully related to the solid mass behind is still in the earlier tradition (Plate [125B]). In such other houses by Price at Tuxedo as those for William Kent and Travis C. Van Buren, the loose open plans of the immediately preceding years were organized into T and X patterns, and the verandas and terraces were even more formally treated as important elements in compositions made up of well-defined voids and solids (Figure [28]).
This brings us to the beginning of the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, already introduced as an important coadjutor of Sullivan from 1887 to 1893. Although Wright’s mature career begins only about 1900 (see Chapter [19]), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than the work of Sullivan.
Figure 28. Bruce Price: Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Tower House, 1885-6