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 ever 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.

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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.

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".

An Introduction to Roseland Terrace

Twenty-seven years ago I found a house that made me feel at home in a region quite different from those I knew best: coastal California, New York City, Athens (Greece).  Earlier, when I taught in Eugene, Oregon, I began noticing that ordinary churches, the wooden kind with a steeple on top (as in Grant Wood's "American Gothic") were much alike the full length of the west coast, and my colleagues at UO told me that they not only came from pattern books but were usually built from plans and specs bought by mail.  Also, where Oregon did have bungalows they were very like the ones I knew in Alameda or San Luis Obispo, CA.  Down around San Diego and Los Angeles there were already more of what was designated Mission Style.  Concrete slabs, A-frames, and (occasionally) the influence of European International Style after World War II affected even houses, but not, famously, the most influential ones.

I suppose it is unarguable that Levittown, NY, begun in 1949 (see the references at the bottom), together with the Interstate Highway system, changed American life.  I know that tracts, as we always called them, were always Siberia to me from the moment my family moved to one.  I was twelve years old, and what I valued was walking to the public library and to my own school and having concrete sidewalks for rollerskating.  It was not a large green yard that I craved.  I have never been tempted to live in even the most touted subdivision.

That first tract experience of mine was actually earlier (1946) than Levittown, but it was like it.  All the houses were so alike that we all knew where everything was in everyone else's houses, once you got beyond decorative trim.  They weren't as niggardly as Levittown's; they had a bit of overhang to the eaves, but they were (as we learned later in south-central Los Angeles) bound to become economic ghettos, as they aged uniformly and as families in the 50s grew out of them.

Somehow, Levittown itself escaped that destiny; there are associations of one-time Levittowners today.

I mention these because, though Roseland Terrace was a deliberately designed and zoned residential subdivision, buyers in the expanding economy of the 1920s bought their lots but then had built a house of their choice.  The corner lots were larger, at least to the extent of being square rather than rectangular, and larger houses were built on them.  Beginning after WW I, however, when the Humble (now Exxon-Mobil) petroleum refinery was built a bit up the river, and LSU was moved to its new campus. about 2 1/2 miles south of Roseland Terrace, the original tract was quickly filled.  Successive editions of encyclopedias show how rapidly Baton Rouge grew.  Today, where you see a slab-ranch house in Roseland Terrace, it marks the toll taken by a hurricane.  Only gradually have I come to realize how rare this midtown (really downtown) survival of a livable neighborhood is.  Houses like ours are everywhere, and ours, like everyone else's have been modified, and many of all of them were Kit houses (though none of them necessarily was: a contractor could just get the plans and specs and go to our own lumber yards).  But Roseland Terrace has had a charmed life, especially since most of it  is 4 to 6 room houses built on 50-foot-wide lots.  

So I thought I'd walk around and photograph and share it, without, of course, invading privacy.  Privacy relies on respecting other people, not on fencing!  

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Here are some basic references for these posts

 Levittown  http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown.html

Virginia and Lee McAlester

A Field Guide to American Houses

NY, Knopf, 1984

Garden District Civic Association

http://gdcabr.org

For its history, and for the only separate account of Roseland Terrace

http://gdcabr.org/history.php

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_District,_Baton_Rouge

There are several Wikipedia articles on house types found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house  (but mostly about those in New Orleans)1999

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungalow  The examples shown here have close cousins in Baton Rouge (though ours lack real basements) and are mostly of the same period.  As the article makes plain (and the editors of the Dover-Athenaeum book emphasize) Sears used the term “bungalow” very loosely—as realtors also do today.

Very brief but magisterial in its succinctness is the entry for June 12 in Kee Malefsky’s new almanac-type book, Learn Something New Every Day.  The author is the librarian for NPR.

Though Sears was not the only conveyor of pre-cut, pre-fitted houses, somehow Montgomery Ward (for example) never quite emulated Sears.  It is the Sears catalogues which are used on a number of web sites and made available in the great catalogue, Small Houses of the Twenties, one of those wonderful Dover (pre-pdf), 1991, unabridged reprints. 

From a different publisher, but more focused on design as such, there is Homes in a Box: Modern Homes from Sears Roebuck  Schiffer, Aiglen, PA, 1998.

All of these references will take you to many others.  This is not a series of blog posts on domestic architecture, nor yet on urbanism, nor any kind of a social statement (even when obvious observations are made).  It is not even a photographic essay, though initially it began as such.  It certainly is not Real Estate as such, either.  In fact, it was seeing that Drehr Place got more than its share of attention, with its slightly more ambitious houses, that I decided that Roseland Terrace was what wanted attention first; it was built first and prompted the expansions to the east and south of it.  Just studying houses, and churches, and banks, and the rest is interesting in its own right, but there is much more to America than Williamsburg, San Francisco, New Orleans, and New England (your choice of towns), to name four.