Architecture of the United States

The architecture of the United States demonstrates a broad variety of architectural styles and built forms over the country’s history of over four centuries of independence and former Spanish and British rule.

Architecture in the United States is as diverse as its multicultural society and has been shaped by many internal and external factors and regional distinctions. As a whole it represents a rich eclectic and innovative tradition.

Colonial
When the Europeans settled in North America, they brought their architectural traditions and construction techniques for building. The oldest buildings in America have examples of that. Construction was dependent upon the available resources. Wood and brick are the most common elements of English buildings in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and coastal South. It had also brought the conquest, destruction, and displacement of the indigenous peoples existing buildings in their homeland, as their dwelling and settlement construction techniques devalued compared to colonial standards. The colonizers appropriated the territories and sites for new forts, dwellings, missions, churches, and agricultural developments.

Spanish influences
Spanish colonial architecture was built in Florida and the Southeastern United States from 1559 to 1821. The conch style is represented in Pensacola, Florida, adorning houses with balconies of wrought iron, as appears in the mostly Spanish-built French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. Fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed the original French structures in New Orleans. Many of the city’s present buildings date to late-18th-century rebuilding efforts.

Southwest
Spanish exploration of the North American deserts, the present day Southwestern United States, began in the 1540s. The conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado crossed this region in search of the mythical “cities of gold.” Instead they found the ancient culture and architecture of the Pueblo people. The Pueblo people built dwellings of adobe, a sun-dried clay brick, with exposed wooden ceiling beams. Their cubic form and dense arrangement gave villages a singular aspect. The modest unadorned structures remained constant and cool. The Spanish conquered these pueblos and made Pueblo de Santa Fe the administrative capital of the Santa Fe de Nuevo México Province in 1609. The Palace of the Governors was built between 1610 and 1614, mixing Pueblo Indian and Spanish influences. The building is long and has a patio. The Mission San Francisco de Asis in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico dates from the 1770s and used the adobe technique as well, which gave the edifice a striking look of bold austerity. Centuries later the Pueblo Revival Style architecture style developed in the region. The Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson, Arizona, has Churrigueresque detailing from southern examples in New Spain. Its facade is framed by two massive towers and the entrance is flanked by estipites.

California province
In the late 18th century, the Spanish founded a series of presidios (forts) in the upper Las Californias Province to resist Russian and British colonization there, the Presidio of San Diego, Presidio of Santa Barbara, Presidio of Monterey, and Presidio of San Francisco were established to do this and support the occupation by new missions and settlements. From 1769 to 1823, the Franciscans created a linear network of twenty-one Missions in California. The missions had a significant influence on later regional architecture. An example of a period residence is the Casa de la Guerra, in Santa Barbara.

English influences
Excavations at the first permanent English speaking settlement, Jamestown, Virginia (founded 1607) have unearthed part of the triangular James Fort and numerous artifacts from the early 17th century. Nearby Williamsburg was Virginia’s colonial capital and is now a tourist attraction as a well-preserved 18th-century town.

Timber, especially white and red cedar, made for a great building resource and was readily abundant for the settlers in the English colonies, so naturally many houses were made of wood. As for decorative elements, as said before most colonial houses were built plainly and therefore most colonial house designs led to a very simple outcome. Although one subtle element of ornamentation that was used was used on the front door. The owner would take nails, think of an object or pattern to make with them, and nail that decoration onto the door. The more nails one had, the more extravagant and elaborate the pattern could become.

The most prized architectural aspect of the house was the chimney. Large and usually made of brick or stone, the chimney was very fashionable at this time, specifically 1600–1715. During the Tudor period in England, which lasted up until around 1603, coal became the popular material for heating the home. Before that, a wood fire was burned on the floor in the center of the house, with the smoke escaping only through windows and vents. With coal, this method could not suffice because the smoke was unacceptably black and sticky. It needed to be contained and the function of a chimney was to do just that.

Georgian architecture
The Georgian style appeared during the 18th century, and Palladian architecture took hold of colonial Williamsburg in the Colony of Virginia. The Governor’s Palace there, built in 1706–1720, had a vast gabled entrance at the front. It respects the principle of symmetry and uses the materials that were found in the Tidewater region of the Mid-Atlantic colonies: red brick, white painted wood, and blue slate used for the roof with a double slant. This style is used to build the houses for prosperous plantation owners in the country and wealthy merchants in town.

Architecture for a new nation
In 1776 the members of the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies. After the long and distressing American Revolutionary War, the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the existence of the new republic, the United States of America. Even though it was a firm break with the English politically, the Georgian influences continued to mark the buildings constructed. Public and commercial needs grew in parallel with the territorial extension. The buildings of these new federal and business institutions used the classic vocabulary of columns, domes and pediments, in reference to ancient Rome and Greece, which symbolize the democracy of the newfound nation. Architectural publications multiplied: in 1797, Asher Benjamin published The Country Builder’s Assistant. Americans looked to affirm their independence in the domains of politics, economics, and culture with new civic architecture for government, religion, and education.

Federal architecture
In the 1780s the Federal style of architecture began to diverge bit-by-bit from the Georgian style and became a uniquely American genre. At the time of the War of Independence, houses stretched out along a strictly rectangular plan, adopting curved lines and favoring decorative details such as garlands and urns. Certain openings were ellipsoidal in form, one or several pieces were oval or circular.

The Bostonian architect Charles Bulfinch fitted the Massachusetts State House’ in 1795–1798 with an original gilded dome. He worked on the construction of several houses in Louisburg Square of the Beacon Hill quarter in Boston. Samuel McIntire designed the John Gardiner-Pingree house (1805) in Salem, Massachusetts with a gentle sloped roof and brick balustrade. With Palladio as inspiration, he linked the buildings with a semi-circular column supported portico.

The Federal style of architecture was popular along the Atlantic coast from 1780 to 1830. Characteristics of this style include neoclassical elements, bright interiors with large windows and white walls and ceilings, and a decorative yet restrained appearance that emphasized rational elements. Significant federal style architects at the time include: Asher Benjamin, Charles Bulfinch, Samuel McIntire, Alexander Parris, and William Thornton.

Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, who was the third president of the United States between 1801 and 1809, was a scholar in many domains, including architecture. Having journeyed several times in Europe, he hoped to apply the formal rules of palladianism and of antiquity in public and private architecture and master planning. He contributed to the plans for the University of Virginia, which began construction in 1817. The project was completed by Benjamin Latrobe applying Jefferson’s architectural concepts. The university library is situated under a The Rotunda covered by a dome inspired by the Pantheon of Rome. The combination created a uniformity thanks to the use of brick and wood painted white. For the new Virginia State Capitol building (1785–1796) in Richmond, Virginia, Jefferson was inspired by the ancient Rome Maison Carrée in Nîmes, but chose the Ionic order for its columns. A man of the Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson had participated in the emancipation of New World architecture by expressing his vision of an art-form in service of democracy. He contributed to developing the Federal style in his country by combining European Neoclassical architecture and American democracy.

Thomas Jefferson also designed the buildings for his plantation Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Monticello is a tribute to the Neo Palladian style, modeled on the Hôtel de Salm in Paris, that Jefferson saw while the ambassador to France. Work on Monticello commenced in 1768 and modifications continued until 1809. This American variation on Palladian architecture borrowed from British and Irish models and revived the tetrastyle portico with Doric columns. This interest in Roman elements appealed in a political climate that looked to the ancient Roman Republic as a model

New capital city
The United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. is an example of uniform urbanism: the design of the capitol building was imagined by the French Pierre Charles L’Enfant. This ideal of the monumental city and neoclassicism. Several cities wanted to apply this concept, which is part of the reason why Washington, D.C. did. The new nation’s capital should have the best examples of architecture at the time.

The White House was constructed after the creation of Washington, D.C. by congressional law in December 1790. After a contest, James Hoban, an Irish American, was chosen and the construction began in October 1792. The building that he had conceived was modeled upon the first and second floors of the Leinster House, a ducal palace in Dublin, Ireland which is now the seat of the Irish Parliament. But during the War of 1812, a large part of the city was burned, and the White House was ravaged. Only the exterior walls remained standing, but it was reconstructed. The walls were painted white to hide the damage caused by the fire. At the beginning of the 20th century, two new wings were added to support the development of the government.

The United States Capitol was constructed in successive stages starting in 1792. Shortly after the completion of its construction, it was partially burned by the British during the War of 1812. Its reconstruction began in 1815 and did not end until 1830. During the 1850s, the building was greatly expanded by Thomas U. Walter. In 1863, the imposing Statue of Freedom”, was placed on the top of the current (new at the time) dome.

The Washington Monument is an Obelisk erected in honor of George Washington, the first American president. It was Robert Mills who had designed it originally in 1838. There is a perceivable color difference towards the bottom of the monument, which is because its construction was put on hiatus for lack of money. At 555.5 feet (169.3 m) high, it was completed in 1884 and opened to the public in 1888.

South
In the Deep South the colonial houses sometimes support a neoclassical pediment with columns, as at Belle Meade Plantation in Tennessee, with a symmetrical columned porch and narrow windows. The domestic architecture in the South adapted the classic model by supporting a mid-height balcony on the front without a pediment or entrance portico, such as at Oak Alley Plantation, in St. James Parish, Louisiana. These houses adapted to the regional climate and into the economy of a plantation with slave labor for construction.

Frontier vernacular
The Homestead Act of 1862 brought property ownership within reach for millions of citizens, displaced native peoples, and changed the character of settlement patterns across the Great Plains and Southwest. The law offered a modest farm free of charge to any adult male who cultivated the land for five years and built a residence on the property. This established a rural pattern of isolated farmsteads in the Midwest and West instead of the European and eastern U.S. states’ villages and towns. Settlers built homes from local materials, such as rustic sod, semi-cut stone, mortared cobble, adobe bricks, and rough logs. They erected log cabins in forested areas and sod houses, such as the Sod House (Cleo Springs, Oklahoma), in treeless prairies. The present day sustainable architecture method of Straw-bale construction was pioneered in late-19th-century Nebraska with baling machines.

Mid-19th century

Greek Revival
Greek revival style attracted American architects working in the first half of the 19th century. The young nation, free from Britannic protection, was persuaded to be the new Athens, that is to say, a foyer for democracy.

Italianate

Gothic Revival
From the 1840s on, the Gothic Revival style became popular in the United States, under the influence of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852). He defined himself in a reactionary context to classicism and development of romanticism. His work is characterized by a return to Medieval decor: chimneys, gables, embrasure towers, warhead windows, gargoyles, stained glass and severely sloped roofs. The buildings adopted a complex design that drew inspiration from symmetry and neoclassicism.

The great families of the east coast had immense estates and villas constructed in the style, with antipodes of Neoclassicism. Some took Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House as a model. Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892) worked on villa projects in the Hudson River Valley and used details from the Gothic to Baroque repertoire. For the Jay Gould estate country house “Lyndhurst” in Tarrytown, New York, Alexander Jackson Davis designed a building with a complex asymmetrical outline, and opened the double-height art gallery with stained glass windows.

Gilded Age and late 1800s

Late Victorian architecture
Following the American Civil War and through the turn of the 20th century, a number of related styles, trends, and movements emerged, are loosely and broadly categorized as “Victorian,” due to their correspondence with similar movements of the time in the British Empire during the later reign of Queen Victoria. Many architects working during this period would cross various modes, depending on the commission. Key influential American architects of the period include Richard Morris Hunt, Frank Furness, and Henry Hobson Richardson.

After the war, the uniquely American Stick Style developed as a form of construction that uses wooden rod trusswork, the origin of its name. The style was commonly used in houses, hotels, railway depots, and other structures primarily of wood. The buildings are topped by high roofs with steep slopes and prominent decoration of the gables. The exterior is not bare of decoration, even though the main objective remains comfort. Richard Morris Hunt constructed John N. Griswold’s house in Newport, Rhode Island in 1862 in this style. The “Stick Style” was progressively abandoned after c. 1873, gradually evolving into the Queen Anne Style.

While medieval influence rode high, in the second half of the 19th century, architects also responded to commissions for estate scale residences with Renaissance Revival residences. Industry and commerce tycoons invested in stone and commissioned mansions replicating European palaces. The Biltmore Estate near to Asheville, North Carolina is in the Châteauesque style of French Renaissance Revival, and is the largest private residence in the U.S. Richard Morris Hunt interpreted the Louis XII and François I wings from the Château de Blois for it.

Rise of the skyscraper
The most notable United States architectural innovation has been the skyscraper. Several technical advances made this possible. In 1853 Elisha Otis invented the first safety elevator which prevented a car from falling down the shaft if the suspending cable broke. Elevators allowed buildings to rise above the four or five stories that people were willing to climb by stairs for normal occupancy. An 1868 competition decided the design of New York City’s six story Equitable Life Building, which would become the first commercial building to use an elevator. Construction commenced in 1873. Other structures followed such as the Auditorium Building, Chicago in 1885 by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. This adopted Italian palazzo design details to give the appearance of a structured whole: for several decades American skyscrapers would blend conservative decorative elements with technical innovation.

Soon skyscrapers encountered a new technological challenge. Load-bearing stone walls become impractical as a structure gains height, reaching a technical limit at about 20 stories (culminating in the 1891 Monadnock Building by Burnham & Root in Chicago). Professional engineer William LeBaron Jenney solved the problem with a steel support frame in Chicago’s 10-story Home Insurance Building, 1885. Arguably this is the first true skyscraper. The use of a thin curtain wall in place of a load-bearing wall reduced the building’s overall weight by two thirds. Another feature that was to become familiar in 20th-century skyscrapers first appeared in Chicago’s Reliance Building, designed by Charles B. Atwood and E.C. Shankland, Chicago, 1890 – 1895. Because outer walls no longer bore the weight of a building it was possible to increase window size. This became the first skyscraper to have plate glass windows take up a majority of its outer surface area.

Beaux-Arts and the American Renaissance
Daniel Burnham’s “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, Illinois, ceremonially marks the dawn of the golden age for the Beaux-Arts style, and larger firms such as McKim, Mead and White. The era is documented in photo architectural albums such as the Architectural photographic series of Albert Levy.

The Columbian Exposition also reflected the rise of American landscape architecture and city planning. Notable were the works of Frederick Law Olmsted, an already-prominent and prolific landscape architect who had designed the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Exhibition, having previously designed New York’s Central Park in the 1850s, the layout of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and many other works nationwide. Olmsted and his sons were also involved in the City Beautiful movement, which, as its name suggests, sought to aesthetically (and thus culturally) transform cities. The aspirations of the movement can be seen in the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C..

As the century progressed, the Beaux-Arts influence would become somewhat more restrained, returning to its more Neoclassical roots. The Lincoln Memorial (1915–1922), made out of marble and white limestone, takes its form from doric order Greek temples without a pediment. Its architect, Henry Bacon, student of the ideas from the Beaux-Arts school, intended the 36 columns of monument to represent each of the 36 states in the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death. The Jefferson Memorial was the last great monument constructed in the Beaux-Arts tradition, in the 1940s. Its architect, John Russell Pope, wanted to bring to light Jefferson’s taste for Roman buildings. This is why he decided to imitate the Pantheon in Rome and grace the building with a similar type dome. It was severely criticized by the proponents of the International Style.

Early suburbs (1890–1930)
With the boom in the use of electric streetcars, the inner ring of suburbs developed around major cities, later to be aided by the advent of bicycles and automobiles. This boom in construction would result in a new, distinctly American form of house would emerge: the American Foursquare.

Arts and Crafts Movement
Greene and Greene – Gamble House (Pasadena, California), Robert R. Blacker House, Thorsen House
Bernard Maybeck – Swedenborgian Church (San Francisco, California)
Mary Jane Colter – Mary Jane Colter Buildings
Julia Morgan – Asilomar Conference Grounds
Lummis House
Adirondack Architecture, Log home

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School
Frank Lloyd Wright – List of Frank Lloyd Wright works, List of Frank Lloyd Wright works by location
Taliesin East, Taliesin West
Robie House, Ennis House, Fallingwater, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Catalog Homes

Revivalism in the 20th century
The trend of reviving previous styles continued over from the 19th century. Many of the revivals beginning in the late 19th century on into the 20th century would focus more on regional characteristics and earlier styles endemic to the United States and eclectically from abroad, further influenced by the rise of middle-class tourism.

Mediterranean revival
The early 20th century saw Mediterranean Revival style architecture enter the large estate design vocabulary. A major and significant example is the Hearst Castle on the Central Coast of California, designed by architect Julia Morgan. The San Francisco Bay Area estate Filoli, by Willis Polk, is in Woodside, California with the mansion and gardens now part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public.

the Dumbarton Oaks estate, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., has Italian Renaissance gardens by early landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and architectural design by several architects including Philip Johnson. The Harold Lloyd Estate, “Greenacres” in Beverly Hills, California, is a significant example from the 1920s, with extensive gardens by a leading estate Landscape designer in that era, A.E. Hanson.

Spanish Colonial revival
The 1915 Panama-California Exposition the architecture by Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow Sr. intentionally moved beyond the Mission Revival Style, from their studying Spanish Colonial architecture and its Churrigueresque and Plateresque refinements in Mexico. The project was a popular success, and introduced the Spanish Colonial Revival style to many design professionals and the public in California and across the country.

George Washington Smith, based in Montecito and Santa Barbara, designed the detailed and integrated Andalusian Spanish Colonial Revival Casa del Herrero estate in 1926. Smith, Bertram Goodhue, Wallace Neff, and other notable architects created many ‘Country Place Era’ properties throughout California during this period. A civic example is the Santa Barbara County Courthouse and a commercial example the Mission Inn in Riverside, California.

Other colonials
Colonial Revival architecture – American Colonial
Cape Cod style
Dutch Colonial Revival architecture
Tudor Revival architecture
Pueblo Revival architecture
Exotic revivals
Moorish Revival architecture, commonly used in Shriner temples and movie theatres.
Mayan Revival architecture
Egyptian Revival architecture

Style Moderne and the Interwar skyscraper
Skyscrapers as architectural battleground
One culturally significant early skyscraper was New York City’s Woolworth Building designed by architect Cass Gilbert, 1913. Raising previous technological advances to new heights, 793 ft (233 m), it was the world’s tallest building until 1930. Frank Woolworth was fond of gothic cathedrals. Cass Gilbert constructed the office building as a cathedral of commerce and incorporated many Gothic revival decorative elements. The main entrance and lobby contain numerous allegories of thrift, including an acorn growing into an oak tree and a man losing his shirt. The popularity of the new Woolworth Building inspired many Gothic revival imitations among skyscrapers and remained a popular design theme until the art deco era. Other public concerns emerged following the building’s introduction. The Woolworth Building blocked a significant amount of sunlight to the neighborhood. This inspired the New York City setback law that remained in effect until 1960. Basically the law allowed a structure to rise to any height as long as it reduced the area of each tower floor to one quarter of the structure’s ground floor area.

Another significant event in skyscraper history was the competition for Chicago’s Tribune Tower. Although the competition selected a gothic design influenced by the Woolworth building, some of the numerous competing entries became influential to other 20th-century architectural styles. Second-place finisher Eliel Saarinen submitted a modernist design. An entry from Walter Gropius brought attention to the Bauhaus school.

Roadside architecture
The automobile culture of the United States has spawned numerous forms of architectural expression peculiar to that country (or alongside Canada), often vernacular in origin, especially in Diners.

“Ducks”

Googie

Miami Modern

Post-War suburbs
The 1944 G. I. Bill of Rights was another federal government decision that changed the architectural landscape. Government-backed loans made home ownership affordable for many more citizens. Affordable automobiles and popular preference for single family detached homes led to the rise of suburbs. Simultaneously praised for their quality of life and condemned for architectural monotony, these have become a familiar feature of the United States landscape.

Modernism and reactions

Early Modernism
Interest in the simplification of the interior space and exterior facade progressed due to the work of Irving Gill, characterized by several Californian houses with flat roofs in the 1910s such as the Walter Luther Dodge house in Los Angeles. Rudolf M. Schindler and Richard Neutra adapted European modernism to the Californian context in the 1920s with the former’s “Lovell Beach House” in Newport Beach and Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the latter’s Lovell Health House in the Hollywood Hills.

International style
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois), 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments
Louis Kahn – Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Phillips Exeter Academy Library
Richard Neutra – Von Sternberg House, Kaufmann Desert House
Eero Saarinen – TWA Flight Center, Dulles International Airport
Welton Becket – Capital Records Building, Riverplace Tower, Equitable Life Building
Antoine Predock – CLA Building, Flint RiverQuarium, McNamara Alumni Center

European architects who emigrated to the United States before World War II launched what became a dominant movement in architecture, the International Style. The Lever House introduced a new approach to a uniform glazing of the skyscraper’s skin, and located in Manhattan. An influential modernist immigrant architect was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), both former directors of Germany’s famous design school, the Bauhaus.

The Reliance Building’s move toward increased window area reached its logical conclusion in a New York City building with a Brazilian architect on land that is technically not a part of the United States. United Nations headquarters, 1949–1950, by Oscar Niemeyer has the first complete glass curtain wall.

American government buildings and skyscrapers of this period have are a style known as Federal Modernism. Based on pure geometric form, buildings in the International style have been both praised as minimalist monuments to American culture and corporate success by some, and criticized as sterile glass boxes by others.

Skycraper hotels gained popularity with the construction of John Portman’s (1924–) Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta followed by his Renaissance Center in Detroit which remains the tallest skyscraper hotel in the Western Hemisphere.

Postmodernism
In reaction to the “glass boxes” issue, some younger American architects such as Michael Graves (1945– ) have rejected the austere, boxy look in favor of postmodern buildings, such as those by Philip C. Johnson (1906–2005) with striking contours and bold decoration that alludes to historical styles of architecture.

Frank Gehry – List of works by Frank Gehry
Chiat/Day Building, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Source From Wikipedia