Once again, Price regulates the picturesque qualities of the Shingle Style on a strict module and with intense symmetry. Two chimneys dominate the principal facade, which has a Richardsonian Syrian arch dead center, flanked with expansive glazing and shingled balconies on the sides, which top long portico-ed porches. The symmetry only breaks at the entry facade, where a small porch sits next to the stair hall.
Juxtapositions: the first square is further development of a project I featured some time ago, where the square is the internal volume (indeed cubic in it’s section), but flanked on two ends with large masonry walls that curve in to the entrances, and again to form corner towers, while opening to full-height glazed opening on the sides. The second square is a study of differing systems, where the primary axis is four-square, and the secondary is nine-square, all topped with a shallow central dome.
This small hall type has a basket-weave brick floor, the roof supported on pipe columns that float free of the brick walls. The exterior corners are Mies-inspired, while the window treatments are a take on Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard. Details of that window system are below: elevation/section, axon of the base, worm’s eye of the head. I owe you roof-ceiling information – but the question remains, bow truss or hammer beam? Or something altogether different?
A bay window topped with a full-width gable, leaving small triangular soffits at the eaves. I noticed this feature on my way to a site meeting in South Los Angeles, and since then have seen it recurring throughout my library – Richardson, Bruce Price, Peabody & Stearns, et al. So here’s my version: covered in shingles throughout, battered stone walls at grade, four-square windows, the gable becomes a full pediment, and the big reveal – a rounded interior wall.
I can be terribly repetitive. My sketchbooks will tell you that, where dozens of imperceptibly different iterations of a single project follow one another, page after page. Similarly, when I start down a trail of inquiry I’m soon immersed. And when I start drawing, I go on and on. So is my fascination with Henry Hobson Richardson – and I’ll share three different pieces from my studies: Top, von Herkomer Residence, 1886; Below, Ames Memorial Library, 1877; Bottom, Trinity Church Rectory, 1880.
Taking cues from Shingle Style residences mixed with a fair amount of Richardson (red mortar on Flemish-bond brick and rough-faced ashlar masonry much?) and a bit of my own preferences for industrial sash windows and rigid geometries, this little cottage is organized around a nine-square plan, with cramped interior rooms and no central ‘Hall’, thereby favoring the large screened porch at the rear.
I’ve been fascinated with the impluvium for some time now – a large roughly cubic room with an inverted roof that is open to the sky at the center, an essential feature of the Roman domus house typology. This project places a large impluvium at its center, with modern courtyards and bedrooms flaking it, and more traditionally-scaled living spaces at the entry. Formal echoes of Irving Gill, H. H. Richardson, Richard Neutra, and Michael Graves abound.
Two outer walls are traditionally detailed, while the porticos between them take on an abstract formalist language. The cubic volume of the villa proper is more Mies-ian, and is topped with large shingled hip roof (with the dormer I featured yesterday), while a round stair tower sits on the other side of the far wall (alla John Hejduk’s ‘Wall House’ series).
Between reading a biography on H. H. Richardson and glancing through one of Michael Graves’ volumes, I thought up this little dormer – taken from the cantilevered round dormers found throughout Richardson’s work (and the Shingle Style at large), and met it with a perfect circular window (divided into nine lites, of course) such as Graves was wont to use, and made into a lantern of sorts, having windows on two sides. My documentation of Graves’ examples follows.
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