The Queen Anne and the Late Victorian townhouse in Philadelphia, 1878-1895.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Jeffrey Alan.

Contributor:

Brownlee, David Bruce, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture.

Art--History.

Art.

History.

Research.

United States--Research.

United States.

0323.

0377.

0729.

Penn dissertations--History of art.

History of art--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History of art.

History of art--Penn dissertations.

0323.

0377.

0729.

Physical Description:

1172 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 52-11A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This study focuses on the design of townhouses in Philadelphia from the late 1870s to the mid 1890s. It explores the dramatic shifts in architectural values that emerged with the adoption of the Queen Anne Revival at the beginning of this period, and follows the remarkable transformation of that style after the mid-1880s.

The urban domestic work of several architectural firms--those of Wilson Eyre, Frank Miles Day, R. G. Kennedy, Cope & Stewardson, A. J. Boyden, Brown & Day, and Hazlehurst & Huckel--receives particular attention, as they played a leading role in developing a distinctive brand of design in Philadelphia. Relatively little testimony regarding their intent survives from the time, but close observation of the exteriors and plans of their later 1880s townhouses reveals that, although they dismissed most of Queen Anne's characteristic classical armature and redness, they retained much of that style's picturesque coherence, informality, and domesticity. They turned instead to more pronounced ahistoric effects inspired by the Aesthetic Movement, including a thinned architectural membering, the use of fluid line, balanced asymmetries, relatively unornamented surfaces, and a new, lighter palette. This work is identified here as Aesthetic Lyricism.

Architectural journals, exhibitions, and local organizations, most notably the T Square Club, enhanced the interaction between these architects and spread their influence. This historical chapter drew to a close, however, in the mid-1890s, as the building of townhouses declined and these stylistic formulations were eclipsed by national trends toward a more academic historicism, typological legibility, and civic monumentality.

In addition to looking more closely at the focal architect-designed townhouses, this study places them against the stylistic and urbanistic patterns of other buildings in urban Philadelphia, and also against the backdrop of related stylistic expressions in other cities. There were occasional close analogues among Boston and New York townhouses by prominent firms, in several cases predating the Philadelphia work, but such self-consciously artistic design enjoyed a special flowering in Philadelphia. These townhouses, along with their Shingle Style suburban counterparts, were in many ways the central examples of Late Victorian architecture in the United States.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in History of Art) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1991.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 3752.

Supervisor: David B. Brownlee.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.