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I've walked past here a few times but now the refubishment is finished it's great to see it without scaffolding.
Desingned by Michel de Klerk and built between 1917-1920 in the Amsterdam School style to provide dwellings with modern facilties and move families out of slum dwelling.
This is the first time I've been in the museum which includes a tour of the fantastic old post office and one of the flats, the rest of which are still occupied.
Just off the normal tourist roads some people still live in tiny caves. Five people sleep in this one every night. Light comes from one lightbulb. Outside it's nice and warm, but she is wearing many layers of clothing, because inside it is freezing.
Imouzzer-Kandar, Morocco
Assignment for School: photos of a modern private dwelling. I chose this appartment near the Central Station in Antwerp.
Jacob's Well, the parish rooms of Holy Trinity, Micklegate, in Trinity Lane is a beautiful and historic mediaeval house dating from the fifteenth century.
Many organisations use Jacob's Well on a regular basis and it is available for hire for meetings, private functions, wedding receptions etc. There is a well-equipped kitchen and both ground floor and first floor rooms are available for hire.
Jacob's Well is used for church social events and activities providing a warm, welcoming and secure place to meet. York Butcher's Gild use Jacob's Well as their Gild Hall.
holytrinityyork.org/jacobs-well
A little history……………...
Jacobs Well, the parish room for the Priory Church of the Holy Trinity, Micklegate, York, and for which the Parochial Church Council is responsible, was originally a late medieval house consisting of an open hall with a two-storey cross-wing on the East (Trinity Lane) side. This is an unusual medieval building and not one found elsewhere in York. What was originally a separate house forms the northern part of this cross-wing where the kitchen is now located.
At the Dissolution of the adjacent Priory in 1539 the house was purchased by Dame Isabella Ward, the last Prioress of Clementhorpe Nunnery, but before her death was conveyed to Feoffees for charitable purposes. Around 1600 the hall was converted into a two storey building which became an inn at some later date.
Early in the nineteenth century, to increase accommodation, the innkeeper added a third storey constructed in brick, thus heavily loading the timber frame below. The church acquired the property in 1904 and an extensive renovation was put in train, including the installation of a new staircase to the north of the original hall and a large bay window in the South Wall.
The entrance in Trinity Lane was improved by the addition of carved entrance porch brackets and canopy from the Wheatsheaf Inn in Davygate, formerly the town house of the Bishop of Durham.
In the early 1980’s, the Church Council became concerned about the condition of the building and a survey showed that the medieval frame had been overloaded by the addition of the extra storey. Following monitoring by English Heritage, it was accepted that the only solution was to remove the third storey. and replace the roof at its lower 1815 level.
An appeal was launched and with a generous grant from English Heritage the work on the Grade 1 Listed Building took place, being completed in October 1991.
The Church Council was delighted with the result and a management committee was set up to manage the building and to make it available for hire to the public. About this time, the Gild of Butchers decided to move from their Hall in the Shambles and make Jacobs Well their ‘home’. Much of the furniture in the building belongs to them.
www.jacobswellyork.org.uk/html/history.html
web.archive.org/web/20180705232959/http://www.jacobswelly...
THE STORY OF JACOB’S WELL
Holy Trinity Priory was established around the year 1100 by Benedictine monks from Marmoutier in France, on the site of a pre-Conquest church mentioned in the Domesday Book. The old church was rebuilt at this time though remnants are incorporated into the present church, which dates from after a great fire in 1137, and has been much altered since.
Jacob’s Well was built on the edge of the Priory precinct around 1474 with an endowment given by Alderman Thomas Nelson. Alderman Nelson’s gift enabled the building of a ‘lodging chamber’ for a chantry priest to pray three times a week for himself and his family in the Priory church.
The building constructed at this time was a ‘hall house’ with a wing. The ‘hall’ was the square room, originally the full height of the house, open to the roof and without its present ceiling. The wing was the long jettied range fronting on to Trinity Lane, now containing the entrance. Originally the front door was at the end of the wing, and can be seen in the kitchen, a later addition, beneath the projecting first floor jetty. The jetty of this side meets the jetty along Trinity Lane at a dragon post embedded in the angle between the two walls. The dragon post supports the dragon beam which forms such a dramatic feature in the ceiling in the corner of the wing.
Holy Trinity Priory was dissolved in 1535 though the church was kept in use as the parish church. In 1547, the chantry was suppressed and the priests moved out of the house. Not yet known as Jacob’s Well, it was bought in 1549 by Isabel Warde, the last Prioress of Clementhorpe Nunnery, for herself and her sister. Their brother was a Brother in the Priory.
In 1566, three years before her death in 1569, Isabel Ward made a Deed of Gift to the parishioners of Holy Trinity Church, to provide a Charity for the parish. The agreement made between Isabel and her Charity Trustees was that she should be allowed to live in the house for the rest of her natural life on annual payment of a rent of one red rose, payable on Midsummer Day. After her death, the house would revert to the Trustees.
In the Deed of Gift, the building was described as “two houses in Trinity Lane” though no architectural evidence survives to show how it was divided into two.
In 1633, Henry Rogers, Rector of Holy Trinity is recorded as living in the house before building himself a new Rectory where the present Rectory stands. He was probably responsible for the 17th century alterations in the house. These include the insertion of the floor in the hall and new brick mullioned windows on the first floor, one in the new upstairs room over the hall, one in the wing, both looking out at the back on to the church.
The fireplaces on both floors of the wing, which are not original to the building, may have been built as part of these alterations. At the same time, as better access to the upper floor would have been needed, a spiral staircase would have been provided in the corner beside the chimney breast.
By 1749, licensed premises had come into being, leased by the Trustees to Elisabeth Knapton. In the lease, the house was described as “lately … two messuages”, suggesting that the two separate parts had been reunited for form a single house. It was now known as Jacob’s Well.
Elizabeth Knapton retained the lease until 1790, and was followed by Roger Glover and John Furnish, described as a ‘coach masters’. Their joint business in 1792 is represented by the Sun Insurance firemark, fixed to the wall on the ground floor, to the left of the kitchen door. The building is described as “their dwelling house”, of ”timber, plaster and tiled”, and they had a coach-house, stable and granary on the other side of the street.
The coach-masters’ business lasted until 1815. In that year, £130 was spent on additions and repairs to the building. Now would have been the time when another storey was built on top of the wing, and the extension which forms the present kitchen was added, both constructed in brick. With the front door now inaccessible within the extension, the entrance to the building would have been moved to its present position. Once again Jacob’s Well Inn was licensed to sell ale.
In 1902, according to licensing records, the inn consisted of a bar and a smoke room, and a taproom used as dining-room and kitchen. Accommodation for the resident licensee was upstairs. In the following year, perhaps because the inn was no longer a viable business, the licence was surrendered and transferred to a new public house in Nunnery Lane. Jacob’s Well was taken back into use by the Trustees as the Parish Room for Holy Trinity Church.
A major restoration and remodelling was begun in 1905 by the antiquarian architect, Walter Harvey Brook, as recorded on the plaque opposite the front door. As part of this, the handsome new staircase was installed, and the large bay window in the hall overlooking the Rectory garden was built, together with a new fireplace. The front door was reconstructed incorporating canopy brackets rescued from the demolished Wheatsheaf pub in Davygate. Notice the fine carving around the door arch outside, recording the date. Lastly, a new doorway opposite the front door was made into the garden, convenient for the new Rectory, rebuilt in 1898, next door.
By the end of the twentieth century, motor traffic waiting outside Jacob’s Well to turn into Micklegate was putting the medieval timber-framed building at risk of damage. Thus it was to become one of what must be very few Grade I listed buildings to be partially demolished with the approval of English Heritage. In 1991-2, the architectural firm of Peter Marshall, Architects, was engaged to remove the added heavy brick top floor and restore the building. They were responsible for the design of the new roof built over the original wing visible now on the first floor. Its ‘crown post’ structure recreates what would have been there originally, and is copied from the roof of the original hall visible now at the top of the staircase. What had been an early nineteenth century kitchen fireplace to the left of the front door was converted to the men’s toilet, the adjacent enclosed space, which once accommodated the spiral staircase, became the ladies’ toilet.
So Jacob’s Well reached its present form, the latest phase in its long life. For 500 years it has maintained the tradition of hospitality and service to the parishioners of Holy Trinity Micklegate, and long may it continue to do so.
With thanks to Alison Sinclair for compiling this history of the building.
The Story of Jacobs Well can be found here:-
www.jacobswellyork.org.uk/html/the_story_of_jacobs_well.html Trinity Lane, York.
web.archive.org/web/20180705232934/http://www.jacobswelly...
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Jacobs Well is a mediaeval Grade I listed building in the Micklegate area of York, England. It is the church hall of Holy Trinity, Micklegate.
Architecture
The building was originally a hall house, consisting of a hall rising the full two-story building, with a wing at the east end. It may have had a matching wing at the west end, but no evidence survives. The house is timber-framed, with the ground floor infilled with Mediaeval brick. Its upper floor is jettied. Its main entrance has a 15th-century canopy. The roof is of crown post construction, the roof in the wing being a reconstruction.[1][2]
The building is named after the Well of Sychar, or more commonly, Jacob's Well where Jesus is said to have spoken to a Samaritan woman.
History
The origin of the building is not known with certainty, but its current custodians claim that it was built in about 1474 as lodgings for a chantry priest based at neighbouring Holy Trinity Priory. The construction was funded by Thomas Nelson, a city alderman, who wished the priest to pray for his family. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the building was purchased by Isabella Ward, former prioress of Clementhorpe Nunnery. She lived in the house with her sister, which appears to have been divided in two during this period. Before Ward's death, she donated the property to the Feoffees of York. They permitted her to continue to live in the house for a peppercorn rent of one red rose a year.[1][2][3][4]
During the early 17th century, the house was used as a rectory for Holy Trinity, Micklegate. A first floor was added to the hall, making the whole building two stories. Around this date, new windows and fireplaces were added, many of which survived. The building was again divided into two houses, then in the 1740s was converted into a pub, for the first time known as "Jacobs Well".[3][4]
In about 1790, the building was converted back to a house, leased by Roger Glover and John Furnish, who ran a stagecoach business. They obtained fire insurance for the building, the sun mark for which survives. In 1815, they had a third storey, of brick, added to the wing, and an extension built to house a kitchen. This extension covered the original entrance, so a new entrance was created on Trinity Lane, which remains the main entrance to the building.[3][4]
With the alterations complete, the building again became a pub, with two bars downstairs, and accommodation for the landlord above. However, it struggled to make money in its hidden location, and in 1903 the alcohol license was surrendered. The feoffees retained ownership of the building, and they decided that it should become a parish room for Holy Trinity Church.[1][3][4]
In 1905, local antiquarian Walter Harvey Brook made major alterations to the building, adding a new staircase, bay window and fireplace, and creating a new door to the garden. A 15th-century canopy was added to the main entrance, taken from the Old Wheatsheaf Inn on Davygate.[1][3][4]
By the 1980s, the building was in danger of collapse, in part due to vibrations caused by traffic passing along Trinity Lane. In order to save it, the brick top storey was removed, and a new roof was constructed for the wing to match that over the hall. This work was completed in 1991, and since then, use of the building has been under the care of Holy Trinity, Micklegate.[2][3][4]
The building is the home of Gild of Butchers in York, having moved from their hall in The Shambles.[5]
"Selling the Dwelling: The Books That Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000" At the Grolier Club December 11 2013-February 7 2014; Curated by Richard W. Cheek
"In December of 2013 the Grolier Club will host an extraordinary exhibition on the history of the American Dream of home ownership. Over 200 rare books, periodicals, drawings, periodicals, and printed ephemera will show how the idea of “A Home for All” was marketed in the United States, first through eighteenth-century builder’s guides, then by nineteenth-century pattern books, and finally by twentieth-century house plan catalogues.
"The plans, elevations, and large, elaborate, and often colorful perspective views in these books fueled the growth of home ownership in America. The story begins in 1775 with George Bell’s reproduction of Abraham Swan’s The British Architect, credited as the first architectural book published in America. The show will contrast early American editions of luxurious pattern books for the wealthy with a selection of the more modest “builder’s guides” used by most Americans who desired to construct a house. As the Republic grew, and novel styles of design began to challenge Classical and Federal norms, new domestic pattern books such as Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences (1837) began to offer plans and elevations in the new Italianate and Gothic styles.
"After a hiatus in building during the Civil War, American house building resumed in earnest, fueled by an explosion of architectural book publishing, which now focused on providing house plans by mail. The trend begins in 1856 with Cleaveland and Backus’s Village and Farm Cottages and Cummings and Miller’s Architecture (1865), and grows throughout the 1870s with Hussey’s 1875 Home Building, and Palliser’s Model Homes for the People (1876).
"By the 1880s the quasi-periodical publications of Robert W. Shoppell’s “Co-operative Building Plan Association” illustrate the growing importance of magazines -- Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful and House and Garden -- as a vehicle for popularizing house designs. At the turn of the century, as the demand for more small houses increased, local millwork companies and national retailers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began to produce pre-cut homes that could be shipped by railroad for assembly by local carpenters. The exhibition devotes a special section to the advertising and marketing of this new mode of house-building.
"With so many different businesses issuing house plan books simultaneously, an incredible variety of often elaborately-designed and printed publications was produced, usually accompanied by other forms of advertisement such as home planning guides, company journals, flyers, posters, calendars and paper models. Focusing directly on the consumer, chiefly on women, this vast panoply of promotional material promised a tasteful, convenient, and comfortable dwelling to anyone who purchased the products and services or followed the advice being offered. The post-WWII home-building boom reinvigorated plan book production, with modernism gaining a foothold when the undecorated version of the ranch house became part of the vogue for wide, single-level houses in the 1950s and early 1960s.
"The exhibition tracks extensive and rapid changes to the literature of house building after 1970. The level of house catalogue publication declined in the 1970s and 80s, chiefly because large tract developers were making more of the design decisions for new dwellings than prospective homeowners were. Many smaller house plan publishers went out of business, and the supply of plan books was further diminished in the 1990s, as house designs became increasingly available on internet sites which offered CD-ROMS instead of printed catalogues.
"The evolution of the house design book in the United States is a long and complicated story, filled with architectural creativity and banality, commercial genius and excess, egalitarian and humanitarian ideals, literary and social ambition, can-do individualism, faith in progress and invention, and endless energy. All of these quintessential American traits are bound within the pages of the builder’s guides, pattern books, catalogues, and other forms of architectural literature that have competed for the financial and psychological rewards involved in designing and building a domestic haven for every citizen. Curator Richard W. Cheek highlights the more visually arresting and socially compelling examples of this genre, focusing on books that reveal the character of our country as much as they do the style of our houses."
Photograph by James Russiello
Located near Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs, Colorado. 700 to 800 year old "authentic" cliff dwellings of the Anasazi (ancient people). As you can see from this photo, sidewalks and other modern amenities have been added to make it easier for you to spend your money here.
"Selling the Dwelling: The Books That Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000" At the Grolier Club December 11 2013-February 7 2014; Curated by Richard W. Cheek
"In December of 2013 the Grolier Club will host an extraordinary exhibition on the history of the American Dream of home ownership. Over 200 rare books, periodicals, drawings, periodicals, and printed ephemera will show how the idea of “A Home for All” was marketed in the United States, first through eighteenth-century builder’s guides, then by nineteenth-century pattern books, and finally by twentieth-century house plan catalogues.
"The plans, elevations, and large, elaborate, and often colorful perspective views in these books fueled the growth of home ownership in America. The story begins in 1775 with George Bell’s reproduction of Abraham Swan’s The British Architect, credited as the first architectural book published in America. The show will contrast early American editions of luxurious pattern books for the wealthy with a selection of the more modest “builder’s guides” used by most Americans who desired to construct a house. As the Republic grew, and novel styles of design began to challenge Classical and Federal norms, new domestic pattern books such as Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences (1837) began to offer plans and elevations in the new Italianate and Gothic styles.
"After a hiatus in building during the Civil War, American house building resumed in earnest, fueled by an explosion of architectural book publishing, which now focused on providing house plans by mail. The trend begins in 1856 with Cleaveland and Backus’s Village and Farm Cottages and Cummings and Miller’s Architecture (1865), and grows throughout the 1870s with Hussey’s 1875 Home Building, and Palliser’s Model Homes for the People (1876).
"By the 1880s the quasi-periodical publications of Robert W. Shoppell’s “Co-operative Building Plan Association” illustrate the growing importance of magazines -- Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful and House and Garden -- as a vehicle for popularizing house designs. At the turn of the century, as the demand for more small houses increased, local millwork companies and national retailers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began to produce pre-cut homes that could be shipped by railroad for assembly by local carpenters. The exhibition devotes a special section to the advertising and marketing of this new mode of house-building.
"With so many different businesses issuing house plan books simultaneously, an incredible variety of often elaborately-designed and printed publications was produced, usually accompanied by other forms of advertisement such as home planning guides, company journals, flyers, posters, calendars and paper models. Focusing directly on the consumer, chiefly on women, this vast panoply of promotional material promised a tasteful, convenient, and comfortable dwelling to anyone who purchased the products and services or followed the advice being offered. The post-WWII home-building boom reinvigorated plan book production, with modernism gaining a foothold when the undecorated version of the ranch house became part of the vogue for wide, single-level houses in the 1950s and early 1960s.
"The exhibition tracks extensive and rapid changes to the literature of house building after 1970. The level of house catalogue publication declined in the 1970s and 80s, chiefly because large tract developers were making more of the design decisions for new dwellings than prospective homeowners were. Many smaller house plan publishers went out of business, and the supply of plan books was further diminished in the 1990s, as house designs became increasingly available on internet sites which offered CD-ROMS instead of printed catalogues.
"The evolution of the house design book in the United States is a long and complicated story, filled with architectural creativity and banality, commercial genius and excess, egalitarian and humanitarian ideals, literary and social ambition, can-do individualism, faith in progress and invention, and endless energy. All of these quintessential American traits are bound within the pages of the builder’s guides, pattern books, catalogues, and other forms of architectural literature that have competed for the financial and psychological rewards involved in designing and building a domestic haven for every citizen. Curator Richard W. Cheek highlights the more visually arresting and socially compelling examples of this genre, focusing on books that reveal the character of our country as much as they do the style of our houses."
Photograph by James Russiello
Photo by Sandra Shapiro (?), circa 1989, from the Donald Hutslar collection; used courtesy of Jean Hutslar.
An intriguing building; in Ohio, brick and log construction are rarely seen conjointly. The brick portion may predate the log section. Note the sealed firebox opening (originally, the chimney existed on the exterior), centered "undereave" window (boarded), and half-dovetail notching.
33 High Street.
Erected 1830. Meeting discontinued in 1851. Building sold in 1948 when it was converted into a house during which the north wall shown was entirely rebuilt.
Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (aka Shakertown)
Read about all our adventures at quidquidquidquid.blogspot.com!
Bandelier National Monument is a 33,677-acre (13,629 ha) United States National Monument in New Mexico preserving the homes and territory of the Ancestral Pueblo People. Most of the pueblo structures date to two eras, in total from 1150 to 1600 CE.
Bandelier was designated by President Woodrow Wilson as a National Monument on February 11, 1916, and named for Adolph Bandelier, a Swiss anthropologist who researched the cultures of the area and supported preservation of the sites. The National Park Service co-operates with surrounding pueblos, other federal agencies, and state agencies to manage the park. The monument received 193,914 visitors in 2011.
In October 1976, roughly seventy percent of the monument, 23,267 acres (9,416 ha), was included within the National Wilderness Preservation System. The park's elevations range from about 5,000 feet (1,500 m) at the Rio Grande to over 10,200 feet (3,100 m) at the summit of Cerro Grande. The Valles Caldera National Preserve adjoins the monument on the north and west, extending into the Jemez Mountains.
Much of the area was covered with volcanic ash (the Bandelier tuff) from an eruption of the Valles Caldera volcano 1.14 million years ago. The tuff overlays shales and sandstones deposited during the Permian period and limestone of Pennsylvanian age. The volcanic outflow varied in hardness; the Ancestral Pueblo People broke up the firmer materials to use as bricks, while they carved out dwellings from the softer material.
Human presence in the area has been dated to over 10,000 years before present. Permanent settlements by ancestors of the Puebloan peoples have been dated to 1150 CE; these settlers had moved closer to the Rio Grande by 1550. The distribution of basalt and obsidian artifacts from the area, along with other traded goods, rock markings, and construction techniques, indicate that its inhabitants were part of a regional trade network that included what is now Mexico. Spanish colonial settlers arrived in the 18th century. The Pueblo Jose Montoya brought Adolph Bandelier to visit the area in 1880. Looking over the cliff dwellings, Bandelier said, "It is the grandest thing I ever saw."
Based on documentation and research by Bandelier, there was support for preserving the area and President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation creating the monument in 1916. Infrastructure, including a lodge, was built during the 1920s and 1930s. The structures at the monument built during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps constitute the largest assembly of CCC-built structures in a National Park area that has not been altered by new structures in the district. This group of 31 buildings illustrates the guiding principles of National Park Service Rustic architecture.
The monument was closed to the public for several years during World War II, since the lodge was being used to house personnel working on the Manhattan Project to develop an atom bomb.
Address/Title: 712 North First Street
Photographer: Zehmer, John G. (John Granderson), 1942-
Original Description (from Book): The character of this small wooden building has been obscured by asphalt siding.
City/Location: Richmond (Va.)
Date of photograph: ca. 1978
Map URL: maps.google.com/maps?q=37.548768,+-77.43727+(712%20North%...
Original Publication: Zehmer, John G., and Robert P. Winthrop. 1978. The Jackson Ward historic district. Richmond: Dept. of Planning and Community Development.
Rights: www.library.vcu.edu/copyright.html
Reference URL: dig.library.vcu.edu/u?/jwh,663
Collection: VCU Jackson Ward Historic District
Local Accession Number: 06_11_001986
Title: Unidentified dwelling
Genre: Stereographs; Photographic prints
Date issued: 1850-1920 (approximate)
Physical description: 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph ; 9 x 18 cm.
General notes: Title supplied by cataloger.; Image caption illegible.
Date notes: Date supplied by cataloger.
Subjects: Houses
Collection: Stereographs
Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department
Shelf locator: Unknown State
Rights: No known copyright restrictions.
Go to Page with image in the Internet Archive
Title: The book of the home : a practical guide to household management, v.5
Creator: Davidson, H. C
Creator: University of Leeds. Library
Publisher: London : Gresham
Sponsor: Jisc and Wellcome Library
Contributor: University of Leeds Library
Date: 1900
Vol: v.5
Language: eng
Description: v. 1. The choice of a house, the law of landlord and tenant, decoration of the house, furnishing the house -- v. 2. Furnishing the house (continued), heating and lighting, draperies and home upholstery, final decoration, the garden -- v. 3. The engagement of servants, the law of master and servant, the treatment of servants, cook's department, the larder, cookery -- v. 4. Cookery (continued), the store cupboard, servants and their duties, spring-cleaning, household economy, laundry work, the dairy, the poultry-yard -- v. 5. The law of husband and wife, the master's duties, the mistress's duties, the toilet, choice and care of dress, home dressmaking, embroidery -- v. 6. Embroidery (continued), home art work, reading and correspondence, household repairs, entertaining, locomotion, domestic pets, home occupations for profit -- v. 7. The first baby, management of children, children's dress, children's amusements, health, sickness, invalid cookery, education -- v. 8. Education (continued), home gymnastics, music, recreation, choice of a career, holidays, Christmas and other festivals, coming out of a daughter, a wedding
This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library
The University of Leeds Library
If you have questions concerning reproductions, please contact the Contributing Library.
Note: The colors, contrast and appearance of these illustrations are unlikely to be true to life. They are derived from scanned images that have been enhanced for machine interpretation and have been altered from their originals.
Read/Download from the Internet Archive
"Selling the Dwelling: The Books That Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000" At the Grolier Club December 11 2013-February 7 2014; Curated by Richard W. Cheek
"In December of 2013 the Grolier Club will host an extraordinary exhibition on the history of the American Dream of home ownership. Over 200 rare books, periodicals, drawings, periodicals, and printed ephemera will show how the idea of “A Home for All” was marketed in the United States, first through eighteenth-century builder’s guides, then by nineteenth-century pattern books, and finally by twentieth-century house plan catalogues.
"The plans, elevations, and large, elaborate, and often colorful perspective views in these books fueled the growth of home ownership in America. The story begins in 1775 with George Bell’s reproduction of Abraham Swan’s The British Architect, credited as the first architectural book published in America. The show will contrast early American editions of luxurious pattern books for the wealthy with a selection of the more modest “builder’s guides” used by most Americans who desired to construct a house. As the Republic grew, and novel styles of design began to challenge Classical and Federal norms, new domestic pattern books such as Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences (1837) began to offer plans and elevations in the new Italianate and Gothic styles.
"After a hiatus in building during the Civil War, American house building resumed in earnest, fueled by an explosion of architectural book publishing, which now focused on providing house plans by mail. The trend begins in 1856 with Cleaveland and Backus’s Village and Farm Cottages and Cummings and Miller’s Architecture (1865), and grows throughout the 1870s with Hussey’s 1875 Home Building, and Palliser’s Model Homes for the People (1876).
"By the 1880s the quasi-periodical publications of Robert W. Shoppell’s “Co-operative Building Plan Association” illustrate the growing importance of magazines -- Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful and House and Garden -- as a vehicle for popularizing house designs. At the turn of the century, as the demand for more small houses increased, local millwork companies and national retailers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began to produce pre-cut homes that could be shipped by railroad for assembly by local carpenters. The exhibition devotes a special section to the advertising and marketing of this new mode of house-building.
"With so many different businesses issuing house plan books simultaneously, an incredible variety of often elaborately-designed and printed publications was produced, usually accompanied by other forms of advertisement such as home planning guides, company journals, flyers, posters, calendars and paper models. Focusing directly on the consumer, chiefly on women, this vast panoply of promotional material promised a tasteful, convenient, and comfortable dwelling to anyone who purchased the products and services or followed the advice being offered. The post-WWII home-building boom reinvigorated plan book production, with modernism gaining a foothold when the undecorated version of the ranch house became part of the vogue for wide, single-level houses in the 1950s and early 1960s.
"The exhibition tracks extensive and rapid changes to the literature of house building after 1970. The level of house catalogue publication declined in the 1970s and 80s, chiefly because large tract developers were making more of the design decisions for new dwellings than prospective homeowners were. Many smaller house plan publishers went out of business, and the supply of plan books was further diminished in the 1990s, as house designs became increasingly available on internet sites which offered CD-ROMS instead of printed catalogues.
"The evolution of the house design book in the United States is a long and complicated story, filled with architectural creativity and banality, commercial genius and excess, egalitarian and humanitarian ideals, literary and social ambition, can-do individualism, faith in progress and invention, and endless energy. All of these quintessential American traits are bound within the pages of the builder’s guides, pattern books, catalogues, and other forms of architectural literature that have competed for the financial and psychological rewards involved in designing and building a domestic haven for every citizen. Curator Richard W. Cheek highlights the more visually arresting and socially compelling examples of this genre, focusing on books that reveal the character of our country as much as they do the style of our houses."
Photograph by James Russiello