TYPE OF EARLY CONNECTICUT HOUSE, MIDDLETOWN, CONN.
chimney again dominates the plan, which, it is true, taxes modern ingenuity to make a graceful feature of the interior. A relic of old Stratford ([Plate XXIII]) supplies another interesting type for reincarnation. It is more generous in the matter of chimneys, but has less pitch to the roof. The photograph reveals a texture to the shingled sides which we may hardly obtain in modern work, though at a small additional cost, for the sake of art purely, we may use the wide-gauge shingles, but must see that they line accurately, as they do on the old house at Stratford. They are an unwarranted affectation, the ragged butts generally used to obtain archaic atmosphere in the houses of our time.
We shall see that in New York State and in New Jersey the Dutch influences prevailed in the early architecture, and in Pennsylvania, the German. It is all good architecture, however. The Dutch hoods are habitually at the eaves, while the German hoods which separated the first and second stories were often carried around the entire building, as flounces upon a skirt (see Plates [XXV] and [XC]). The hoods are all fascinating, thoroughly architectonic, yet how little have they been studied and developed in modern design! The niceties of their application and use are little understood by the average architect, who, ordinarily, would think he was wasting his client’s money to exploit anything of the kind. You see, he forgets that his client has spiritual needs as well as physical ones. The gambrel roofs of the Dutch houses have come to be commercial commodities and are continually resorted to—no, are continually parodied, I mean to say—by modern builders who cannot tell what this immutable art principle we are talking about may be. They are simply magnificent, the roof lines of the old stone house at Hackensack, N. J., shown in [Plate XXV], yet they are not good enough for the modern inventor, he must try some fancied improvement in the way of a grotesque pitch, for which he racks his brain. Of these same fancied improvements I could supply examples ad infinitum, but they could only pain the reader, however great a favor I might be doing American commercialism.
And now I must pause again for the present, because I am come to the doorway of Wyck at Germantown ([Plate XIX]), and before it the architectural critic
JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN, PA.
HOUSE AT HACKENSACK, N. J. EARLY 18TH CENTURY.