"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".

Not all Bungalow are ours

Back to Bungalows

November.  Not the right season for roses.

The literature on bungalows is huge, but ours are of the latest and, mostly, of the smallest.  Bungalows as a type do not really outlast the Great Depression (recent houses designed to evoke them only do so in the same way as mixed neo-classical ones do our Federal houses).
But, my own memory not going much beyond my childhood in the '30s, I did not realize how early the bungalow as a small family home, or a "starter home" really was.  Nor did I understand that California was one of the cradles of the type(s).
The stereotype of the small bungalow was enshrined not only in the earliest Kit catalogues but encapsulated on a Victor Black Seal 10" shellac 78rpm record that I got from someone's attic and have owned since the 1960s.  The refrain goes:
I want a little bungalow
Where the red, red roses grow
A tiny little home so cozy
Just room enough for me and Rosie;
Away from all the ice and snow
Where the warm, love breezes blow
We will live on love and kisses
Cupid he will wash the dishes
In our bungalow where the red, red roses grow.
Since the sound is pretty good,  I guessed it dated from the early 20s and I dug it out when I started studying the Roseland Terrace bungalows.  I was going to lay the disk on the scanner and post the label here, but now the Library of Congress has created the National Jukebox and provided matrix, date, etc., everything for us, including the photo and the sound    http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/3327.
Just listen: it really does say that Cupid will wash the dishes!
And it was recorded on June 6, 1913, in Camden, NJ.

Sears had a Kit house almost identical to mine, which was built in 1928, in its 1916 catalogue, and a similar plan appears in the 1910 edition of Henry L. Wilson's Bungalow Book.  That's California, and 1910 was the 4th edition.  Stickley, in The Craftsman,  published a number of wonderful bungalows, not cheap, by California architects and/or designed for California patrons.
My point in giving you here the whole refrain of Where the Red, Red Roses Grow is to show it as a stereotype of young salaried newlyweds.  The houses Stickley admired might be fairly small, or almost the size of Pasadena's Gamble house, but they oozed taste and, in a word, craftsmanship.  Like the knock-offs of designer dresses and furniture (not least Craftsman style) sold at Sears, et al., and in the furniture stores on small-town main streets, the 1920s bungalows built in response to the new refinery and the new university campus, in the decade of Boots and her Buddies, when Baton Rouge needed lots of family housing, and fast, are pared-down editions of the pre-World War I bungalows, for the most part.  Sears even sold pared-down whole craftsman interiors and furniture, and I cite only Sears because of their catalogues.

I was thinking: When I was in the 1st and 2nd grades I would curl up in an overstuffed chair and read the Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogues.  In particular, I was fascinated by things such as snowsuits and adult undergarments and varieties of cooking stoves and washing machines and horse saddles and stirrups, and I wonder how much reading vocabulary we actually got from those, relative to Dick and Jane or Sally and Jerry at school.

We do have some big bungalows here, and I'll try to photograph several when DST comes, tomorrow.  Anyway, now I'll get back to my core idea: how one needs to take all things together, not because they will be alike but because they are, when contemporary and in the same town or region,  part of one composite whole.

Two Exceptional Houses on Park Blvd.

From across Park Blvd. (once Goldenrod) just S. of Wisteria

614 Park Blvd

614 Park Blvd

614 Park Blvd

614 Park Blvd

(1) The Boehringer House.  614 Park Boulevard.  Substantially finished by summer, 1912.  No turret, but character is, as Mr. Cazadessus said, in this case the restrained "Queen Anne" of the early 20th century.  Every detail of the original porch balustrade, as well as the brick foundation, and the occuli and the stained glass and, for the moment, even the original layout of the kitchen, are preserved.  If the exterior weren't distinctive and well made enough, the semi-partition dividing the dining room space from the living room space is done with a reduced-scale Ionic order matching that of the front.  The major doors and windows all have transoms.  The siding also is plainly original (where storm damage did not require replacement).  The upper balustrade is waiting to be replaced (the mortices are there, too).  It also has a full-height, finished basement in the rear (and now I must ask whether some of the other large houses that sit high enough have a basement, too).  I can't imagine a finer house in what was then a town of about 20,000, when the old Capitol was the only one, when LSU was still downtown, and just look at the desolate looking field in the c. 1912 photos of what is now Roseland Terrace.

The Cazadessus collection photos labeled c. 1912 in the East Baton Rouge Library prove that it is indeed less than a year younger than the Reiley-Reeves house.  Only, the Boehringer house is perfectly up to date and handsome and normal for a Revival house with what came to be called Queen Anne elements, and the Reiley-Reeves is a truly idiosyncratic creation.
--ccc 030 is the best photo of the Reiley-Reese house (no one knows whom the label refers to)
--cc 031 shows the foundations of the Boehringer house in progress and the newly built Reiley-Reeves house two blocks to the south
--cc 049 was taken from Governmemt Street to S
--cc 048 was taken from "back line" (probably Olive Street) to N; it shows the Reiley-Reeves house but no evidence of foundations of the Boehringer.
--ccc051 shows the Boehringer house, much as it is today
--ccc038 shows the Reiley-Reeves, barely finished, not yet tidied up
These all are labeled 1912, and I judge that the one with the B. family on the porch in summer clothes is only months later than the laying of the house's foundations.

General as that "1912" for almost all the photos may be, the relative dating of the two houses seems sure, and the clothes are just right for the children and their mother, like those of early autochrome photos taken about five years earlier.
Would that we had such good dating for the next.

******

The front of the house, showing the importance of that anta defining the pedimented forefront and making the transition to the semi-hexagonal entrance.  And I guess those are real cypresses.

The front to the house partly shaded

The front entrance on the corner

The side entrance

(2) The really "Queen Anne"-like, superb house at 1103 Park Boulevard, at the corner of Myrtle, so probably to be accounted in the third part of the Garden District, though it is on Park and at least the north side of Myrtle is in Roseland Terrace.
Placing the entrance at 45° and so making a transition from the front block to the rest of the house, and placing a balustrade above it, continuous with that in front of the upper windows, while the plain, solid corner of the gabled front element of the house, given an anta capital makes a subtle but unmistakable colossal order, and the transoms of the front windows are aligned with the round pediment over the door make this the most enchanting and elegant house in the whole Garden District.  I like it even better than 717 Camellia, even perhaps better than the Boehringer at 810 Park.
Another note of interest is the side entrance, not an add-on but designed to go with the façade on Park Blvd., it is an independent entrance on 1912 and 1910 Myrtle.  I suppose it may be rented today, but it LOOKS like something rather rare here: it would lead to the kitchen (thence to the dining room) and to the kitchen stairs and up to rooms or small apartments for a cook and general servant.  Of course, it might be for an unmarried child or a maiden aunt—anyone who might want a private entrance, and in that case not necessarily limited in access to the rest of the house.
I really want to find a house with this plan!  The side entrance to the kitchen and servants above is seen on some pre-World War I house plans, but I don't know what the expectations were here.  Here, after all, persons who could help with the house and garden lived within a few blocks and could walk over to any house that needed 'help'.  Why, in my modest block one of my neighbors, who was about 80, was helped by Lucy, who came twice a week.  But Lucy had helped her since she was married...  I don't really know very much about Baton Rouge.  I do know about the laundresses coming up the alley; it was explained to me as the reason for having the stationary tubs in the garage before the days of Bendix washers and dryers.
Anyway, this house is itself discreet and almost severe, but that brilliant unification of the entrance and the gabled front and the continuous balustrade is, to me, more breathtaking than all they geegaws on the elaborate houses of the 1880s and 1890s.