A fine bungalow of 1922 in Drehr Place

On the SW corner of Drehr and Wisteria

A bungalow is a genre, not a style

The true bungalows (by "true" meaning the ones that like those in Alexandria, VA, are called California bungalows) built when the opening of Drehr Place was still recent are uncommonly fine.  This one has an L porch at south and a nicely designed porte cochère north that are both continuous with the broad porch and both original (only an addition at the back, which reaches the NS utilities alley, is a later addition).   Its bungalow design governs all sides, not just that facing the street, bearing out what the Wikipedia article, s.v. Bungalow, says of the type (as of the Prairie House), that it does demand a lot much larger than the interior spaces of the house require, so that "Chicago bungalows" have bedrooms above in order to be crammed onto 40-foot lots (or even narrower).  Its spreading plan is true to its Bengali origin, and it is a perfect type for semi-tropical Louisiana.  After three months study, I realize that the Wikipedia article is actually the very best one.  It recognizes that a 'bungalow' is a genre, not a style, whether for its style it resorts to Craftsman brackets, or chooses to buy some "Colonial" Tuscan columns to give it perhaps a less suburban character; in adobe territory, it may even be heavily stuccoed with some "mission" traits.  On this corner lot, besides space for a garden, it has as large a footprint as most of the taller corner-lot houses in our Garden District.  So far, I haven't found another such "four-sided" bungalow here, though the blue-painted one facing it comes close.

Noteworthy is the very low gable (no need to shed snow here), which permits a full set of five sturdy brackets: permits, because they all can be anchored top and bottom, from the gable cap at the top to the center of the 3 windows, aligned with the center porch pillar.  All three pillars have brick pedestals splayed at the bottom.

The splayed profile of the brick chimney's base repeats that of the righthand porch pedestal.  The owners of this house (who, of course, as such possess the data given every time they are sent a property-tax assessment) informed me that the house was built in 1922.

A whole album of this house, 608 Drehr, is provided.

Two blocks to the east, at 2332 Wisteria is the Sanders house, already presented in the blog post of March 15.  Here the original parts of the house date from 1921.  Its splayed brick pedestals and general proportions are similar, though, besides the square brackets, emphasizing their sturdiness, its pillars (and their pi motif) are very short and the brick pedestals are taller, twice as tall as the pillars.

Blocks away, two lots south of the Reiley-Reeves house on Park Boulevard where we found the earliest Craftsman elements in Roseland Terrace, we noticed 840 Park Blvd nearly a twin to the Sanders house, with the same brick parts and splayed bases (as well as square brackets and short pillars) certainly date its design (and probably construction) also c. 1921.  I take these, tentatively, as the earliest Garden District bungalows, if the similarity of 840 Park to 2332 Wisteria is not partly due to restoration...  Or is it only the same brand of paint?

The house I added as "A-prime" at 2147 Oleander Street (see post of 10 February) combines the three-window vent in the gable with brackets that look like many early-1920s ones, but triangular (it is the square ones that as brackets are exceptional), but its roof is a little steeper and so deeper, so only three brackets are logical; the intermediate ones would not reach.  In any case, this house is a good example of assorted accoutrements.  

In its very low proportions and wide eaves, on the other hand, it is the picket-fenced house, no. 603, on the NE corner of Drehr and Wisteria, once grey, now blue (already posted in one photo on Mar. 15), directly opposite the the pale terre verte bungalow heading this post, that most truly resembles our 608 Drehr, though the blue house has neither an L shaped porch nor a porte cochère.  It is so truly a bungalow, notwithstanding.

By the way, turning the corner onto Wisteria, you see something original doubtless to many but usually enclosed now (for a kitchen toilet and shower), an open back porch.  Actually, I took the picture because I thought that Richard Diebenkorn would like to look at its composition and think about it.

Another bungalow, that same brand of blue paint (!), is up on Government Street, also less than a block away.  This has the same low, broad proportions and, this time, with an ample L porch.  I doubt that it every had brackets.  No need to have any.  But it has the triple-window vents in the low gable.

Finally, another repetition, but here in proper context.  Again, this house is not "in an Order" or "in Neo-Colonial 'style'", merely by using pillars with capitals.  Sitting right next to the blue one, you could build it on pretty much the same foundations and would have chosen  its suitability to our climate and lifestyle for the same reasons.  I guess that both of these houses are from the early 1920s, too.

********

Back in the years when I taught survey courses, I made the class memorize, "A capital does not an Order make" (so that when, on a test, I asked them to draw one of the orders they would know that I meant the total design system, or syntax, of Doric, say, or Ionic.  I never ventured asking them to draw Corinthian).

To make the point, I took a slide of a brick-faced block with white trim and some readymade columns disguising its front and said that jerrybuilt branches of local banks only advertise the respectability of our Nation's Founders, and a well operated branch in a cinderblock garage might well be equally honest.

By the way, let me add that there are many various bungalows in both Roseland Terrace and Drehr Place that are all or mostly original that I have not discussed.  An example is 632 Drehr Street, which has unique brackets (but whether 'Victorian' or Japanese I do not know) in combination with columns, though it is not a very large house.  However, I know that its owners are far better qualified to write it up than I am, and here I am more concerned with quasi-Aristotelian 'categories', such as 'style' and 'Order' and 'genre' than with trying to account fully for every single house.

Talking and thinking with the dead and virtual

Communicating without the palpable touch; learning on line

06 April 2013.  301 Napoleon at Louisiana; the converging Grandpré runs diagonally behind it, and the house, which is quite a large one, has the triangular parts as its yard.  Everything ED said about it is true; it is all original (unless the door has had to be replaced).  As I finally got into BRtown, battling I-110 and the RR, and one-way streets, I came up St Joseph from Gov't and HAD to stop on beholding it.  That protected porch-balcony is the nicest use imaginable of a manly four-gable plan.  Surely a named house by a named architect: simple TYPE, unique architectural thinking

As the caption describes, I was forced to begin looking seriously at Beauregard Town starting from the East side (there was an annual street fair on the West).  I was arrested, I was stunned, by this house, which is much larger than it seems in a photograph.  Though I'll try to learn more about it, the essential fact is that it told me what it is most forcibly.  Nothing I may read about it can add more than data.  It is like coming into the presence of a great person.  It is like reading the first page of a great book; like the Sixth Fleet walking up the Acropolis in Athens and stopping open-mouthed before the Parthenon; like looking at one of J.-L. David's paintings that you thought you wouldn't like.  So, before going hunting for Craftsman here, I took this picture.
This is not the first time that my mixed experiences have come all together and acquired new life.  One of my early blog posts tried to evoke for others how Edmund de Waal's memoir brought to life my memory of walking around his family's neighborhood in Paris, my friendships with those whom I studied Asian art with, my first visit to Vienna, and much, much more.  It is what a great university has made of the life of one child who was the first in her family to pursue graduate degrees.  These riches have rescued me repeatedly from what I might have been otherwise.
Recently there have been books and many panel discussions on whether learning on line enriches or deprives the children, and older students, who use it.  Now, all my own education is pre-digital.  Not only that, most of it pre-dated both the paperback boom and the wealth of richly illustrated books (as I recently discussed).  As one waited one's turn to have library use of Helmut Bossert's Alt-Kreta for a couple of hours, no one minded having to figure out the German captions, with or without having studied the language, since no other books contained nearly so much material.  I remember an almost romantic gratitude to the State that had brought together publications from the whole wide world just for us.  I mention Bossert's compendia (there were also Alt-Syrien and Alt-Anatolien) in particular, because they weren't at all pretty, all grayscale and gritty, but if one looked hard enough one could imagine being there, and, if you had ever held a pot, you could feel what it might be like to hold a Minoan one (especially since we did have some color slides in lecture).  That was in 1953.  The question this raises is the degree to which effort and craving helped us to learn and to learn permanently.  The lecture might address a couple of hundred students (and many more in other subjects), but the professor was usually awesome in some way or another.  How else could so many of us be taught almost free of charge (there was a fee to cover administrative costs, but no tuition to pay)?  I was there.  How could I mind if sorority girls had cashmere sweater sets?  Long before I retired I began to feel that many of my students disdained riches that came too easily; they were being deprived of hurdles.  I mean only that plenty can be a mixed blessing, sometimes.  Besides, though I finished my degrees hand to mouth, I also finished with a tenure-track position awaiting me and no debt at all.  There were no student loans (the Kiwanis Club might give you money for your textbooks), and there were no credit cards at all.  Nor did you get charge accounts when you still had no job and no one to sign for you.  Of course, poverty, even relative poverty, is itself a mixed blessing.
So much for that.
The real question is what kind of subject, and what aspects of that subject, and for which students one kind of teaching or another is best.
Many students, at all levels, suffer excruciating fear at being called on in class and are often so aware of what everyone must think of them (and already feel that everyone is looking at them) that they can barely think of what is being taught.  Computer programs that afford privacy in working through a topic, with no penalty for getting no solution without several attempts, allow inward students to learn through discovery by themselves with good software.  They should also be allowed to follow tangents (tangents, of course, by definition stay in touch with the main topic!).  This is not a question of different abilities but of different personalities.  It's a Mary-and-Martha difference.  Other students learn well, especially in subjects where speed and accuracy are useful, in open competition, in a classroom full of happily waving raised hands.  Often this means, also, that the latter group are more likely to go home and use their own computers for games...  Some good teachers, similarly, are innately theatrical, but shy, quiet teachers are just as effective.  There is nothing wrong, per se, with testing, but it should take into account the assortment of personalities and mentalities.  (One of the virtues of the traditional lecture format is that each student sees and hears the lecture uniquely, no other one in the lecture hall receiving it in just the same way, and of course with the same requirement that the graded material, including tests, should address various ways of grasping and mastering the subject).
As I thought of this question these days, it seemed to me that the devices used in teaching may be less important than they seem, and students, all else being equal, can adjust to any kind, granted only good will and reasonable sufficiency.  That would mean that the way children and adolescents are raised is what matters and that teachers should be allowed to cultivate and made to learn how to share what is uniquely theirs and to examine and grade the students intelligently.  They cannot be forced to actually learn more (cramming for tests is not much retained)
For no one detests and dreads standardized tests, making them and grading them, let alone teaching "to" them, more than teachers (from Kindergarten to the Doctorate) do.  And, no, this is not a matter of being easy or hard.  Rather, the punitive element is one barrier to teaching what one has been given and wants to impart and to continue to explore and to learning what one came to university for.  One must learn to be for the next generation of students and young scholars what one's mentors have been for oneself.
Nothing is more vicious than regarding teachers (or doctors, or parsons, etc.) other than as professionals.  We might as well regard parents as if they were social workers.

*****

And what has that to do with this series of blog posts?

In an earlier post, I mentioned getting the books required for my colleagues' courses which, generally, I couldn't even find the time to audit.  I did do Old English for most of the semester in Oregon and when I could sat in, if there was space, for Life Drawing in Louisiana.  But teaching up to 300 students at a time is not, by any means, just delivering well made lectures, and when one course was a research seminar I had to struggle to make sure that the graduate students got their full share.  Not only of attention.  In teaching a seminar one is taking it oneself and must keep learning and staying abreast with the graduate students.  There might be up to ten of us (though six is better, but some universities cancel courses with fewer than ten, even at the graduate level), and each must bring new questions and discoveries to each weekly meeting, besides getting the same share of office hours as the undergraduates.  The seminar course is the greatest privilege in teaching.  And it is where future scholars discover themselves.

So, when I had to retire at age 72, I had not been out of the educational profession, in one way or another, since I entered Grade One at age six.  To own a house outright I had taught far beyond the legal requirement (since my years in a religious order had been in education but not in the Social Security system or with a pension), and I no longer was able to sleep on trains or hike all over cities and sites as I had done before, and I had to stay in Louisiana.  But the library here had never permitted the research I had relied on in California or Greece.

So for myself I learned, too, to adapt my learning to what I had.  The nice, flat Garden District of Baton Rouge is full of bungalows that aren't even covered much in any of the books on American bungalows, and it is very close packed.  First I tried to identify all its trees and weeds, but that was really hard for me; it is not my attrait.  Houses proved to be fascinating.  Only to me?  Well, when I wrote up Archaic Greek pottery at an introductory level, people did read it.  Not thousands, but all over the world.  Whoever they are, I write up our houses for everyone else who likes them.  It is not as if this were New England or Missouri; before Standard Oil and before the university moved from downtown to its present site, Baton Rouge had not reached 20,000 population.  Unlike Natchez, for example, or Lake Providence (which existed for cotton), we have hardly anything before the 20th century and very little, really, before World War I was over.  

I cannot become a real scholar at my age in American domestic architecture, but neither can I say how much I have learned!  When I see that people even overseas are reading about our neighborhoods (and not, oh, heaven forbid, NOT from the realtors' point of view), it gives me great pleasure.  That is why, too, I have stuck with plain Picasa albums, all of them open to the Public on the Web.  Anyone, too, who wants to use my travel views for teaching, is welcome (though it would sadden me to see them commercialized).  There are many new colleges that have small libraries and hardly any collections of teaching images.  I wish, indeed, that I had more.  Google+ wants me to choose my Followers, to direct myself to whom I choose.

But such as it is, I want anyone who wishes to to follow how I tried to frame a seminar for myself, and to learn as I went—to see my vague beginnings and not mind if they, too, begin by knowing very little or nothing.  Someday almost anyone may be retired or arthritic or out of work or out of school and remember that the reason one gets an education is to be able to continue educating oneself.  Every day I find something I've talked of or thoughtlessly repeated that, in fact, I didn't really know at all.  You don't need to be pushing 80 to really enjoy learning all sorts of stuff.  And, of course, if Wikipedia makes some mistakes, we can't complain.  The famous encyclopedias contain mistakes, too.  Understanding others' mistakes, besides, is a way into understanding the minds of other persons and eras.  

By the way, when we meet other minds and learn others' knowledge from reading their books (poetry included, of course), that gives us, too, the privacy of learning on line.

"Mrs. Borck's House" Roseland Terrace's 1912 Craftsman

Best view of "Mrs. Borck's House", from the NE, showing wooden sidewalks on Camellia, at left, and Government, at right.  In the pale distance, that is surely the Reiley-Reeves house, at far left.
Cazadessus 1912 EBRLibr Baton Rouge Room

516 Camellia "Mrs Borck's House" from east.

"Mrs. Borck's House"

For about two months, after my friend dp had directed me to the Cazadessus collection of photos at the East Baton Rouge Library, to see the Reiley-Reeves house as newly completed (both the contractor’s record and the date given to the photos, in 1912), I had tried to find, after the “Boehringer”, the third rather distinctive one, “Mrs. Borck’s", which a scan of survivors facing Government St. failed to discover.  In fact, only when I went to take a picture of the beautifully restored, and gardened, pink house, no. 516,  facing Camellia Street at Government did I recognize “Mrs. Borck’s” and, with help from its owners, identify it as a true specimen of the Craftsman movement (otherwise not represented in Roseland Terrace).  For that matter, I haven’t seen real Craftsman in Drehr Place, either, not surprisingly since as a leading style it was being supplanted by 1915.  Knowing only the California masters, Greene & Greene in Pasadena and Bernard Maybeck, with his disciple Julia Morgan, in the Berkeley area, I tried to determine which representatives of Craftsman “Mrs. Borck’s House” represented.  But the domination of Chicago in this decade by the Prairie type and the small and smudgy photographs of houses in the reprints from Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman left me far better informed than from the McAlesters alone but hardly well enough.  The beginning of searches undertaken north of Government Street and especially in Beauregard Town, both north and south of Government, for comparanda related to any of the exceptional and early houses in Roseland Terrace, showed that the Craftsman movement was not unexampled in Baton Rouge, but “Mrs. Borck’s House”, pretty surely finished by 1912, remains unequaled by the following sequence of criteria, by which “Craftsman” needs to be understood.

(1) Inspired by European, especially U.K., work, and beginning rather with art mobilier than with architecture, American architects about the same time as F. L. Wright’s Robie House (1905) forged American styles of Arts and Crafts architecture (the epithet Craftsman seems not to have been embraced in the U.K.), especially when Stickley started publishing one each month in The Craftsman.  These were indeed Handwerke, using carefully chosen, often deliberately regional or (the inverse) exotic woods, each unique and expensive.

(2) Houses uniquely designed, or at least not sold as patterns, maintaining the intellectual and artisanal principles of the great “textbook” examples.  They show that the Craftsman type of house was established and understood by thoughtful designers and customers.  Good examples often also incorporate original ideas.  The house built in 1912 for Mrs. Borck seems to me to belong to this group.  I should think that men and women (this was an important period for female architects, as Stickley’s periodical shows, even allowing that Julia Morgan was exceptional) formed as draughtsmen in the masters’ studios spread this movement, in which contemporary arts and crafts accessories looked and worked so beautifully.  Also, like good post-1950s Modern, Craftsman provided a great setting for well chosen works of art in almost any ethnic or period style.

(3) Houses that at heart might be bungalows or almost any of the traditional house forms whose fronts, usually porches, have a whole suite of Craftsman motifs.  Yes, most of these are pattern houses and many were available as kits (not that coming pre-cut prejudices anything but the likelihood of error or waste).  Are these not part of the Craftsman movement?   Those illustrated in the post for March15 all seem to date between the end of WW I and the market crash of 1929 and are located on lots that in the Garden District were purchased relatively early.  Bungalows otherwise like them usually have no obviously Craftsman traits, except that they correspond to the useful chart in the McAlester’s book (op. cit., p. 455) with respect to porch supports and non-supporting gable brackets not derived from Late Victorian.

This house in the 300 block of Royal Street in the northern part of Beauregard Town, even on the ends of the gable rafters and certainly in the 'pergola architraves' properly jointed and supporting the shallow porch, to me is Craftsman-lite, so to speak.   Its flanks, however,  are generic.

But it is not confined to the heart of Beauregard Town.

A pair of houses on the east side of East Blvd and barely a short block south of Government have the same formula, though skimpy.

And one less than a block from the original Dufrocq Elementary of 1906, on S 19th, is obviously of the same kind:

For the tau motifs, see also the fine porch at 2147 Oleander Street, added as A-prime to the Feb 10 post, above.

These three all have the "pergola architrave" but all three also have full sets of tau motifs (like two of the houses on Wisteria Street, which latter, however, do not have the paired posts supporting the 

pergola architrave. [The term 'pergola architrave' seems indefensible, but throughout the 20c pergolas were made in this way––not like the Italian ones that gave pergolas their name]

Finally, under (3), there are some very fine bungalows of Craftsman character that have none of these earmarks.  Here is my favorite, on the corner of Drehr and Wisteria.  

15 Feb 2013 At Wisteria & Drehr.  This house is on a double lot, and in 1986, when I came here, the house was gray and south of it, in the otherwise empty yard, was a playhouse almost a miniature of this one, painted to match.  People spoke of a criminal tragedy here, and for years the house seemed to be empty.  No longer.  One of the nice bungalows with a porch of paired pillars.

(4) Ordinary bungalows without a suite of Craftsman motifs that would not be as they are absent the Craftsman movement.  Examples even include three-room single shotguns that not only are non-New Orleanian (with a tall rectangular false front) but have a gable shape and roof slope of a 1920s bungalow and maybe a single pair of rather plain brackets.  I have not seen one preserved in Roseland Terrace but on the eastern edge of southern Beauregard Town, one has been nicely restored, and many in neighborhoods in transition (meaning that the lot is worth much more than the house) simply disappear, or at least their porches disappear.

The neighborhood of the last does seem to be in transition, since there is evidence that the city is busy building new and more truly habitable houses than this six-roomer, which I think is about 90 years old.

*********

It would be foolish to say that Beauregard Town, both earlier and more varied and larger than Roseland Terrace, even including Drehr Place, will not yield another house such as “Mrs. Borck’s House”, since I have only begun to look at it in the light of what I have learned in Roseland Terrace.  Beauregard Town does have a number of houses with wrap-around porches that it is interesting to compare with Park Blvd’s “Boehringer House” of 1912, of which more later; it might even have a house like 1103 Park Blvd, my other “exceptional” choice.

Here I shall just discuss 516 Camellia, with some images of details, since “Craftsman” was not a predominant style of choice in the gulf-coast South east of Texas (and even there, and without plantation fixation, not in Galveston).

First, let us consider the evidence for the porch facing south at 516 Camellia, which in the intervening decades was substantially lost but for which primary evidence is conserved almost in situ.

Here, with the wonderful chimneys (barring different focal lengths of the old and new cameras) you see that only the south end of the house has been altered (the use of a pale color for the body of the house is well within the rules, especially since the matching cedar frames of the principal windows and the door are so perfectly within them).  I do not know what powder-post beetle, what storm or falling tree, what neglected leak compromised that porch in the half century between its building and the present owners' acquiring it.  What they preserved and showed me was the great cypress boards that once faced the four pillars, cleaned and dry safely used as wainscoting in the new room, as crisp as newly carved.  The relief is flat and consists of arrows pointing down, but as if bound (I think of flat metal) at the top, as if supporting the long pergola architrave above them.  The architrave ends in pergola (Japanese-like) shapes as on the Royal Street house above, and the gable (of this cross-gabled house) is 'supported' by Craftsman brackets.  As built, the south face was at least as "Craftsman" as the east face.  The arrow shapes do not really look like spears or like flat barn hinges; they are emphatically flat and straight sided.  They remind me of the equally flat and simplified reliefs on the front door of the Thorsen House by Greene and Greene in Berkeley (see the last post, but not all photos show the shapes very well; they look like cricket bats, but the ancestry of Mr. Thorsen was Norwegian and the house has a number of ship's-captain motifs, so they may be oars or rudders).  In the case of Mrs. Borck, we do not know if any family allusions are to be sought.  Personally, I read the big, flat arrows (of which the body is about 9 or 10 inches wide) just as they work effectively; they hold down the whole pilaster order wonderfully.

No doubt the joinery is real, since even on the cheaper houses above it is, and note the 'pergola' profile of the porch eave.  The metal capping (against end rot) is seen also on some Beauregard Town houses. 

These are not window boxes, but the row of little bracket supports to hold them visually can be seen on some Victorian antecedents.  I'm still looking for some under window-groups in Baton Rouge.

Suitably ornamented chimneys may occur on all arts and crafts houses, but, as with these, it was expected that they be specially designed.

The north wing from behind (with its slat-screened enclosure) itself has an architectural order,

of which here is a detail.

There are additional details in the album: image 331, ff. in the 2013 STUDY album.
This is enough for one post, and I still have work to do, but I thought it urgent to follow the preface post as soon as possible.
Please post comments (if you have a Google connection) or e-mail otherwise if I need to be corrected.

True Craftsman in Baton Rouge and in Berkeley

St John's Presbyterian Church, now (justly) the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts.
Completed in 1910, and better in period photo.http://berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_landmarks/st._johns_presb.html

I wasn't expecting true Craftsman design in Baton Rouge's Garden District.  In fact, it took me several days to realize what I was looking at, when also it dawned on me that the present owners of the house know exactly what they have.  And I haven't lived in Berkeley since the 1960s or even visited frequently (at any rate, not staying in my favorite neighborhoods).  I no longer have professors or former classmates or room-mates in my old neighborhoods, and when, in July of 2009, I wrote here of living in the 2600 block of College Avenue, between Derby and Parker,  I had to check to make sure that my darling city hadn't torn down everything.  They hadn't, and most of it is still there, indeed refurbished.
Now that even Baton Rouge is becoming aware of what distinguishes its own architecture, it is not surprising that Berkeley has finally moved heaven and earth to save not only Bernard Maybeck's work (and not only the First Church of Christ Scientist).  When I was young even Berkeley had not been so assiduous in saving residential architecture, even his and Julia Morgan's.  Now every brown shingle or related bungalow that is structurally sound and not entombed in stucco or aluminum is saved.  Even Mrs. Puerta's plain house where I had a room in 1953 is there, and so is the brown shingle box at 2308 Haste Street and the finer box on Atherton Street.  There are not quite so many brown shingles today; they cannot be seriously abused as rentals.
Now, St. John's Presbyterian, which barely escaped destruction, is only three doors from Mrs. Puerta's, and every time I walked down to get a few groceries or the like, or to catch the crosstown bus, I passed it.  I knew it and loved it before I'd even heard of Julia Morgan, but it was, I knew, the best Presbyterian church I'd ever seen (and the Presbyterians are pretty good in choosing architects).  Similarly, the Christian Science church was my favorite building, even before I knew that it was by the same architect as had designed the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.  When I learned that it was, no problem: all over Berkeley older homes and other buildings were idiosyncratic.
Arts & Crafts was not born in the San Francisco Bay Area, but after the 1906 Earthquake architects had a field day.  Berkeley even has one of the best Greene and Greene houses, the Thorsen House, now lovingly maintained and shared by the Sigma Phi Society, and lived in by male students who care for everything, who make replicas of its lost furniture (not all is lost), who show it to those who appreciate such a place.
Good as well as great Craftsman houses are honored and beloved.  I am ashamed to say that even, in time, when someone remarked to me that their house or the one, say, next to theirs was by Maybeck, or by Julia Morgan, or, unrecorded, probably by one of their associates, I just accepted the information.  I loved the houses that those of us who lived south of campus enjoyed being invited to, for some small party or for music, but it never occurred to me to study Berkeley.  For one thing, with a job and a graduate degree to tend to, and just enjoying being young, I took this place for granted, just as I took for granted that many of our professors were European—until that whole generation died and left us on our own.
I should love to discover more Craftsman houses here in Baton Rouge, but they are too early to be numerous here.  The house in the realtor's photo of 1912 with "Mrs. Borck's House" written on it seems to be one of only three preserved Roseland Terrace houses that are identifiable today (the others are the Boehringer House and the Reiley-Reeves house) and the only Craftsman one.  I might be able to identify more, but they will be smaller or plainer than these.  And downtown so much has been demolished!
To be sure, a number of the modest bungalows have brackets and porches that derive from Craftsman design, but then (it just occurred to me the other day) perhaps Sears named its woodworking tools line "Craftsman" as a deliberate evocation of the standards of workmanship that it suggests.
Becasue, of course, Arts & Crafts means Arts et Métiers, with strong suggestion of the prideful self-identification of the skilled workmen as the artisanat.  Japanese craftsmen place equal value on their skill and knowledge of it.  That is why the Arts & Crafts movements were attracted to the Japanese traditions, and most of all, perhaps, in wood and metal work.  Eugène Atget, indeed, sturdily insisted that his photography was of the artisanat.
Together with that, the California Arts & Crafts architects also had a thorough Beaux Arts training.  In this they resemble the first generation of modern painters, such as Cézanne and Matisse.  That sort of foundation affects the way an artist thinks, irrespective of his romantic bent or mysticism (and Maybeck is as near to being a mystic architect as any I know of).  To me that explains why Craftsman houses and other buildings work so satisfactorily as buildings designed in Orders.  I mean, that they have the syntax and logic (or logic used to express defiance of conventionality) that they share with Greek Orders or with High Gothic architecture, not that sometimes they use readymade Tuscan columns as supports.
I want to think more about this and try to find out if, ages ago, someone else already thought of their work in these terms.  As I said, I never thought of studying the places where I live until I thought it would be nice to try to take pictures of Roseland Terrace—and now look where it's taken me.

This is just a preface to the next Post.

After all those Bungalows

At the intersection of Drehr and Wisteria; the house in the center has a bungalow porch; the one at the right is a recent 'ranch' style that tries to harmonize

The Results of a Research Project involving Bungalows

I.

In memoriam, H. W. Janson 1913–1982

In  the year when, back at UC Berkeley, I was in my last year (to finish my dissertation and get a teaching position) H. W. Janson came in the Spring semester as a visiting professor.  I audited the course and still have my notes.  But Janson was very friendly with graduate students.  Once when he invited us to his rented apartment (in our own neighborhood, too) he had the page proofs of his new textbook, the famous History of Art (Prentice-Hall / Abrams, NY, 1962).  The first edition was reprinted through the 1960s, and I still have mine, good as new.  It was printed in West Germany and bound in Holland.  The page proofs were quires each wrapped in two sheets of plate paper for four colorplates; there were 79 colorplates, the 849 black-and-white illustrations being in the text.  The joint publication in half a dozen languages (many more later) also engaged preeminently the Hirmer Verlag (but they even had managed to get a couple of plates from Skira), and the “trade” edition differed only by coming in a box.  We had never seen such a textbook, and none of the succeeding editions was so well sewn and well bound; their history, being printed in various Asian nations and eventually with the availability of color offset printing with all the illustrations in color (but none full colorplates) is that of the death of the printer’s trade in the West, and a couple of them tended to fall apart after a semester in a book bag.  (If you want Janson, buy a 1^st editon, any printing, even ex-library, even well worn, not only for the plates and binding but because it is what Janson himself actually wrote).

It was not long before the textbook industry and instructors in some colleges pressed for breaking up the text into topic paragraphs with headings, also for less demanding extended reasoning: in other words for a typical textbook.  Janson had spent years creating a book lucid enough for a high school graduate and worth reading by his peers, a book to educate the reader.  For young people he and his wife Dora (who had also helped on the big book, but less substantially) wrote another book.  I still believe that the 1^st edition of History of Art is a masterpiece.  Succinctly but lucidly, seemingly easily, he develops and connects ideas, always based on the fewer than a thousand illustrations that could be allowed.  It is a book to re-read many times, and I assigned it for courses until, after his death, it was so compromised that for a while I went back to a boxful of University Prints and offset text, locally produced, to go with them.

All that to lead to the chapter most formative for me.  Part Four, the Modern World, pp. 453–464, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, unfolds the importance of considering them together, as the whole period c. 1750–1850, as fundamentally Romantic, beginning as a reaction from late Baroque, from Rococo.  Resorting to Nature, to Reason, to reform, to sincerity as ideals, to embody all of this any of the existing styles could be employed.  Latrobe’s idiosyncratic classical and neo-Gothic submissions for Baltimore Cathedral, Monticello and the Houses of Parliament and Labrouste’s expression of honesty in baring and managing cast iron in the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève, as Janson carefully elucidates them, do belong together.  And the music and literature of their time go with them, too (Janson assumes some literacy in his students).  You will have to read this for yourself.  It was the modern chapters, beginning here, that Prentice-Hall and the teaching profession had trouble with, especially, I daresay, in producing the Teachers’ Guides, with tests provided, that were demanded.  Wasn’t the big book a guide for the teacher?  If one disagreed with it, wouldn’t it be good to wrestle with it in discussion sections?

For all the years when I taught the survey end to end, a full year, I kept re-reading it and endorsing it to my students.

The other day I realized how deeply engrained it was in my own thinking.

A broadly sprawling beautifully maintained house with that broad, low arch that even in India is seen on bungalows and emphasizes their attachment to the ground.  But its details are neocolonial and as such the Drehr Place list labels it.  But I say that this is basically, by Los Angeles standards, a bungalow house.

II.

On the other hand, the books that I bought after I came to teach in the South, when I had more spending money but usually no teaching assistant and much less time, did all get read, but not as I had read two decades earlier.  I used to go to the LSU bookstore and buy the books ordered for courses that I wished I could take.  I did read the McAlesters, but usually only used it as a Field Guide.  When Barnes & Noble opened a big store here, I went and replaced all the books that I had not recovered from lending or had given away, and, as a new bookstore has a wonderful array of standard sets, I bought most of the World of Art books that I didn’t have already.  I did read Primitivism and Modern Art, (the Romanticism of the last fin de siècle) but (I tend to use sales slips as bookmarks) I had only looked at The Arts & Crafts Movement, by Elizabeth Cumming (for England) and Wendy Kaplan (for America).  Now, in the latter, when I went looking for something else, I found the approach that I had learned from Janson fulfilled.  I mean, Pevsner does just architecture and loves only Voysey, and the handsome coffee-table catalog from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, American Arts & Crafts: Virtue in Design is all mobilier, as if architecture itself weren’t an art and a craft, as Stickley and the whole arts and crafts movement realized, had tended to keep my mind in a rut.  From William Morris to van de Velde and Behrens and Wright finally that whole fulfillment of sincerity in workmanship and truth in design fell into place, that whole romance of society and its arts, the continuity of Revolution-born art, including most (all?) of modernism.  In this comprehensive picture I found a place for all the bungalows.

For the ones that I love best are indeed the California kind that are linked with Craftsman, but they aren’t the only ones.  Also, those English cottage kinds come from the Garden Cities like Richard Norman Shaw’s at Leyswood, and the neo-Tudor is analogous to pre-Raphaelite renderings of pseudo-medieval tales, not to mention Victorian fairy tales.  And so on.  My hands-down favorite Arts & Crafts house is (or was) McKim, Meade, and White’s Low House, Bristol, Rhode Island.  The McAlesters just call it Victorian Shingle!  It is not an accident that the little virtuously fireproof house that Wright contributed to Bok’s Ladies’ Home Journal has the same rooms in a square sort of plan as that woodcraft puzzle where you have to move the piano from one corner to the opposite one, which also little bungalows have that aren’t the two rooms by three rooms under a single gable, a single ridgepole.  Fireproof: that’s thinking like “green” today, and Pasadena’s Wilson touted concrete, too.  And there sits the prairie-hugging Robie House at the University of Chicago and a whole new suburb of flat-loving Wright-influenced houses in Amsterdam.  Our Garden District can be taken as the salaried man’s equivalent.  The japonoiserie of even our 1920s bungalows is the last chapter of orientalism, and other bungalows need not participate in it.  On the other hand, the array in Wikipedia Commons, if you go to it for bungalows, seems to have been culled from the Realty trade.  Some don’t even say what city the house is in, and some only use the name bungalow for sentiment.  Why, a couple of blocks from where I live there’s a cinderblock box called Honeymoon Bungalow, painted in pastel colors, and I think it may be practically a whorehouse. 

On our side (the south side) of Government Street I was surprised to see a large and healthy bottlebrush tree, so common in California, rare here, in full bloom

III.

So why keep the term “Bungalow”? 

First, though doubtless even in the suburbs of Bangalore itself, more than a century ago, there was the easy variety of styling that relatively expensive houses usually display; though certainly in Henry L. Wilson’s Bungalow Book there are houses that just look like sprawling Hollywood life style such as greeted expatriate Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s as much as like anything in The Craftsman (and the latter itself featured quite a variety of houses designed by Stickley’s friends, I daresay), though most of the one-storey houses or one storey with a bedroom dormer or a camel back in the Baton Rouge Garden District represent every variety of house we think of as bungalows, the fact is, no matter what kind of facing they have, they have an overall shape and character that we see and think ‘bungalow’. 

So what is the McAlesters’ problem?  Take the last seven lines on their p. 454 (overlooking the questionable assertion that they were inspired primarily by Greene and Greene and admitting the importance of ‘extensive publicity in such magazines as [most of them women’s magazines]’; thus familiarizing the rest of the nation with the style "a flood of pattern books appeared, offering plans for Craftsman bungalows; some even offered completely pre-cut packages of lumber and detailing to be assembled by local labor.”  How shocking!  It meant that even without adequate local resources you could build the house you wanted.  Just as Sears offered the same kind of children’s clothes as big-town children had, and the same kind of red wagons, and…you name it.  How shocking to build your home from a pattern book!  How shocking if you could even get an English Garden Cottage that way.  ‘High-style interpretations are rare except in California…One-story vernacular examples are often called simply bungalows or the Bunglaloid style”.  What can a Californian, like me, expect of an author who uses  a “speedometer” illiteracy like “bungaloid”? 

I say that a bungalow is a vernacular concept in the first place.  That salaried Americans like them very much.  That it is OK to like red roses (my grandparents had American Beauty red roses on trellises in front of their house).  That it is OK also to grow up in a Council House and call it by that name, if you live in England.  After all, honesty of many kinds was at the root of all Arts & Crafts, though the movements were founded by and driven by the classes that had the means and leisure for them.  Ask William Morris if that isn’t so.  If America can use its railroads and rivers and Sears and Roebuck entrepreneurial drive to ship Kit Houses, yea, even in Colonial styles, all over the country, that is a kind of exceptionalism that I can rejoice in.  Besides, my 85-year-old house cost very little and is still in good condition, and I like it.  I can use its spaces as my own life style requires, a claim that “Falling Water”, for example, cannot make.

With thanks to my friends in Missouri.

And on Park Blvd, here is a really pretty English Cottage, across Cherokee from the Reiley-Reeves house; most of ours with such a profile and massing are Tudorized.

Go to the album for other images, and click on an image here to zoom the set.

Bungalows, Pi, Tau, Brackets

A bibliographical note at the end.
Some more images in Picasa Album
See also addenda throughout the text, made on 16 March 2013

Consider Very Early Frank Lloyd Wright

(G) 2332 Wisteria. The additions to the sides date from 1936.

(G) 2332 Wisteris

(G) 2332 Wisteria

(F), below,  is as nearly a duplicate of (G) with pi rather than tau below the slab and even with brick pillars and a balustrade made of bricks, too, as I have found anywhere in the Garden District.  They also have that squared bracket with bevels making a sort of blunt nose.  We are reminded of all the publications of Japanese prints and studies of Buddhist temple bracket roofing that were available worldwide just after WW I (and since the Chicago Fair, 1893, which had a Japanese temple).

(F) 840 Park Blvd. (not 822)

(F) 840 Park Blvd. (not 822)

(F) 840 Park Blvd (not 822)

(F) 840 Park Blvd (not 822)

These put the houses with the most similar details, in the two blocks of Wisteria between Camellia and S 22nd (nos. 1968, C, and no. 2142, B), discussed previously only as "minimal", in a different light.  The tau motif houses also have smaller brackets, not of squared timber beveled to make blunt ends.  They are small houses.  The Drehr Place house (G) even has these square brackets on the side.
Since I could climb a bit onto house (B), I was able to show its porch pillars with the tau motifs on three sides and, in profile, looking indeed like tenons to secure the joint to the pillar of the slab that holds the bracket (though these occupy a different position at Horyuji).  You can see how the idea of joinery interested the designer (and presumably the contractor, too).  I think I have seen such a device if not in Stickley then in Roycroft and, I think, in some beautiful specimen in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (a museum for evryone who really loves furniture and cabinet work and photography, too—as you see I do, and, yes, they have pottery, too).

 (B) 2142 Wisteria

  (B) 2142 Wisteria

  (B) 2142 Wisteria

  (B) 2142 Wisteria

 (B) 2142 Wisteria

(B) 2142 Wisteria (details 

Though the brakets are triangular, they have their edges beveled in the same way.  And notice the little bar across the head of the main gable bracket.

(C) 1968 Wisteria (with Halloween decorations removed)

Both of the last two have transoms over their doors.  (C) seems to have the same floor plan but it may have been "simplified" as in series  that the MacAlesters show, pp. 18–19.  It is not so much changed as having lost some elements.  That is why when I say that only a few houses share traits, it must be remembered that like ancient coins that have passed through naive hands for cleaning and have been "tooled" many little houses have become hard to study comparatively.

Somewhat "exceptional" colors of paint can make a simple little house look strange.  I wondered whether this one's balustrade was Japanese-inspired, too, but, though probably meant as "oriental", I haven't found one in any of the Genji scrolls' illustrations or on a screen or in a print.  It is sad, though, how few Asian images I now have access to.  There are "oriental" oddments in Late Victorian, too.

(H) 1001 Park Blvd, at Olive

Some useful references on line and  in general books:

The bracket system came to Japan with Buddhism, but Japan which retained and evolved architecture in wood and joinery without metal as an aesthetic is the best place to look and a century ago was best known in the west (and well published).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dougong

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1984.397

Alexander Soper (for the architecture) in Pelican History of Art

Robert Treat Payne and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of Japan, Harmondsworth, 1955.

This is the 1^st edition, which I have at hand, in which Horyuji veranda is Figure 5 and other drawings, the Kondo Figure 7, details of other roof bracketing Figures 8–9.

Horyuji is what I thought of on seeing 2332 Wisteria Street, not that Horyuji is copied, but that I knew it was, along with Todaiji, the one that American architects, especially the Chicago school of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie” period, would be sure to have known.  The low profiles are shared by the Prairie House and the American Bungalow (California included), and Japanese prints were well published, too (though Wright had a lot of late printings of them), and the Japanese temple at the 1893 World’s Fair was probably influential, too.  To my shame, I don’t know if San Francisco had one, too, but Golden Gate Park has its Tea Garden (which during WW II we did not call Japanese, though it was).

By the time, 1923 ff, that the Tokyo Imperial Hotel was built, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture was in a different phase.

Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture, OUP, 1984.

p. 652 and p. 654, where with the title The Japanese House, we have plan and section and the established ratios based on tatami mats and then beautiful drawings of classic Japanese joinery.  That is how the 8^th and 9^th century temples were built, too, entirely without metal or glue.

The Craftsmen and those sympathetic with them understood, indeed adored, this Japanese aesthetic, but what we have on our bungalows is expressive of joinery; as in early Doric order in Greece the forms come from and express the wooden origin.  That is the only reason I mentioned it; the international Arts & Crafts, and specifically the Craftsman movement, is a tincture to the souls of all the early modern movements, in whatever form it takes.  Early 20c theories on the formation of the Doric and Ionic orders participate in it.  Craftsman pottery is just as japonais as the cult of joinery and the use of painted screens.  Just look at the Whistler room in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.  Compare Hiroshige's (themselves western-influenced) prints with Monet's famous Impressions that gave their movement its name.  Consider Mme. Monet's silk kimono.  Our brackets are the last echo of the movement for, at once, the foreign and the primitive.  Did Gauguin mind putting a Buddha in a Gallo-Tahitian painting?  So it doesn't matter whether the buyers of some of Baton Rouge's bungalows knew or did not know (or that the minor architects knew or not) the japonaiserie of bungalow brackets.
We tend to think of OUR age as the one of dissolving cultural boundaries.  Nonsense!  I wish I had a set of photos of all the sets in major opera houses of performances of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" in its first quarter century on stage.  More than screens and kimonos, I am sure.

For that little house with a green balustrade, see the porch of the Griswold house in Newport, RI; ibid., p. 646.  I think this belongs to Victorian stick style.  And it seems, if the limited repertory on line is not misleading, that this kind of balustrade was really Chinese.  A young architect drunk on folios of beautiful engravings of Asian temples and palaces and gardens may not have cared, just so long as it was "oriental".