In 1879 Cyrus McCormick had his Chicago mansion built by the local architect Adolph Cudell (1850-1910) and his partner Blumenthal in the form of a very corrupt Second Empire hôtel particulier. It is good evidence of the rapidity with which taste changed at this time that two years later he called on McKim, Mead & White to build for him in Richfield Springs, N.Y., one of the finest and most carefully composed of all their Shingle Style houses. This house is notable not only for the subtly Japanese character of the various sorts of veranda supports but even more for the way the composition is unified under the broad front gable by the long horizontal line of the veranda roof repeating that of the stylobate-like stone wall of the terrace below. It is most unfortunate that this house is now in a state of near-collapse.

Little’s contemporary Shingleside House of 1881 in Swampscott, Mass., has been mentioned already. Soberer than the Bell or the McCormick houses in its rectangular shape and almost total lack of exterior detail, this had a galleried two-storey hall with a window-wall as the principal living area. In the combining of different levels this house recalled a little Cloverley Hall, but it was completely Americanized in scale and in detail without being archaeologically Neo-Colonial.

By the mid eighties J. Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913) had introduced the Shingle Style to Chicago, and other Eastern architects were building good houses of this order in such Western towns as Cheyenne, Idaho; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Pasadena, California. In Philadelphia Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) developed the mode with a very characteristic personal difference, often eschewing the use of shingles. If his exteriors are rather English in their frequent use of brick and real half-timbering, his plans are most original. The long rooms of varied and irregular shape are strung out on either side of halls from which rise stairs within grilled enclosures of a sort that appeared in England only in the houses of the nineties by Voysey and his contemporaries.

The heyday of the Shingle Style was brief, even though it continued in use well down into the nineties. The Colonial Revival implications, present from the first, soon encouraged more and more comprehensive use of eighteenth-century detail, and this supported the general tendency of the mid eighties in America away from the irregular and towards more formal order (see Chapter 13). Something of this change could be seen in Richardson’s latest houses in masonry such as the Glessner house of 1885-7 at 18th Street and South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which still stands, and the contemporary Mac Veagh house, long since destroyed, also in Chicago, both of which were almost symmetrical as regards their front façades. The most drastic examples, of course, of this Academic Reaction were such houses as McKim, Mead & White’s Villard group in New York (Plate 109B) and their H. A. C. Taylor house in Newport with its formal Anglo-Palladian plan of central hall and four corner rooms. Despite its even tighter plan, however, their extant W. G. Low house in Bristol, R.I., of 1887—a year later therefore than the demolished Taylor house—can properly be cited again as a masterpiece of the Shingle Style (Plate 127). This illustrates very well how the loose massing of the houses of the early eighties could be organized into a carefully balanced composition without succumbing to any historical mode of design, whether Italian Renaissance or American Colonial.

Particularly interesting in this connexion are the small houses at Tuxedo Park, N.Y., which Price designed for Pierre Lorillard in 1885-6, some years before he began to build Renaissance skyscrapers (see Chapter 14). Lorillard’s own house has a rather tight plan of the Neo-Colonial sort; but the exterior with its paired chimneys on the front, a Richardsonian entrance arch between them, and the verandas and terrace treated as voids carefully related to the solid mass behind is still in the earlier tradition (Plate 125B). In such other houses by Price at Tuxedo as those for William Kent and Travis C. Van Buren, the loose open plans of the immediately preceding years were organized into T and X patterns, and the verandas and terraces were even more formally treated as important elements in compositions made up of well-defined voids and solids (Figure 28).

This brings us to the beginning of the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, already introduced as an important coadjutor of Sullivan from 1887 to 1893. Although Wright’s mature career begins only about 1900 (see Chapter 19), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than the work of Sullivan.

Born in 1867, Wright had had some two years in the Engineering School—there was no architectural school—at the University of Wisconsin when he came to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1887. He first found work in the office of Silsbee whom Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had brought to Chicago a year or two earlier to design All Souls’ Unitarian Church, of which he was minister. The young architect’s first work, nominally a Silsbee commission, was the Hillside Home School built in 1887 for his aunts near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was a rather provincial specimen of a Shingle Style house and was later demolished by Wright himself.

Shifting over the following year to the Adler & Sullivan office, Wright by 1889 was married and ready to build a house for himself on the strength of a five-year contract with his new employers. This house, at 428 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill., still extant but much pulled about, derives almost entirely from Price’s cottages at Tuxedo except that the plan is much less formal. In the interior, the wide openings between the rooms are not framed by architraves but seem to have been produced by pulling back the walls beneath the continuous frieze. In this treatment, rather Japanese in concept, Wright would seem to have been influenced by White’s handling of the hall of the Newcomb house, even though that is rather Japanese also in some of the detailing and Wright’s is not.

Wright’s next important work is the James Charnley house at 1365 Astor Street in Chicago, built in 1891-2. This was actually a commission of the Adler & Sullivan firm, but one of which he had entire charge. A city house built of tawny Roman brick like that used for the court of the Boston Public Library, this is as formal^[343] as anything McKim, Mead & White had yet designed. But there is no High Renaissance or Colonial reminiscence whatever in the external detailing. The Charnley house is rather a conscientious attempt to emulate in a modest three-storey residence the highly original design of Sullivan’s newly completed Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.

Wright was also accepting various private commissions on the side, mostly very small ones, by this time. The George Blossom house of 1892 at 4858 Kenwood Avenue on the south side of Chicago, however, is of more consequence. Externally, this follows rather closely McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house in the curved Ionic entrance porch and the recurrent Palladian windows, not to speak of the use of yellow-painted clapboards and white-painted trim of simplified academic character. Even the plan is for the most part symmetrically ordered. But behind the formal range of entrance lobby and two small corner rooms at the front the whole centre of the house opens up as a single great living-hall. In this living-hall a wide ingle-nook is lined up on axis with the entrance, the elaborate staircase rises in several flights across one end, and wide openings connect with the library and the dining room. The dining room, which ends in a curved bay with a continuous window-band, is almost a copy of the original library of Richardson’s Sherman house. In another Wright house of 1892, that for A. W. Harlan, also on the south side of Chicago, at 4414 Greenwood Avenue, which Sullivan happened to see, he recognized his assistant’s hand and this brought about the break between the two before Wright’s contract ran out.

When Wright set up for himself in 1893 there were two paths open to him. That he actually considered following the path of Academic Reaction, so heavily publicized by the success of the World’s Fair, is evident from his project of this year for a Library and Museum in Milwaukee (see Chapter 13). But when Burnham at this point offered to send Wright to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and then to the new American Academy which he and McKim were planning to start in Rome, in preparation for taking him on as designing partner, the young architect turned the opportunity down.

The W. H. Winslow house of 1893 in Auvergne Place in River Forest, Ill., always considered by Wright his ‘first’, shares many qualities with the Blossom and Harlan houses, but is altogether a much more mature and original work (Plate 128A). The front is completely symmetrical and as formal as that of the Charnley house of two years before.^[344] Broad and low, of fine Roman brickwork with a rich band of moulded terracotta the full depth of the upper-storey windows below the wide eaves, the general effect of this has usually been considered very Sullivanian. But as Wright himself was responsible for the Adler & Sullivan work that this house most resembles—the Charnley house, certainly; and the Victoria Hotel of 1892 at Chicago Heights, probably—it is more accurate to consider that the Winslow house represents a continuation of his own manner of the previous year or two. The plan is more axial and less open than that of the Blossom house, the still rather Richardsonian dining room with its rounded bay being placed here at the centre of the rear. The staircase, still so prominent in the Shingle Style way at the Blossom house, is here pushed out of sight between walls.

Wright’s next important house, that of 1897 for Isidore Heller at 5132 Woodlawn Avenue on the south side of Chicago, perhaps shows some Japanese^[345] influence in the succession of eaves-lines, one above the other. It is the development of the plan, however, that is most significant, as also the effect of the planning on the treatment of the exterior (Figure 29). The two principal living rooms are linked by a stair-hall into which they both open through wide apertures—no more mere doorways than in his own house of 1889, but tall breaks in the continuity of the walls. Although these rooms have ingle-nooks, they are not casual and cosy in the Shingle Style way but carefully ordered; both, indeed, are of regular cruciform shape. This shape, moreover, is given external expression in the plastic articulation of the external massing, an articulation that the multiple eaves echo above.

Two years later, in the Joseph W. Husser house, now destroyed, in Buena Park on the north side of Chicago, Wright’s personal development of domestic planning was carried much farther (Figure 30). Here the main living rooms were all raised to the first storey in order to have a good view of Lake Michigan, and the interior space was continued uninterrupted along the main axis of the house from the dining-room fireplace across the landing and through to the living-room fireplace. But the dining room was also articulated along a cross axis, extending outward into a large polygonal bay facing the lake, somewhat like the more Richardsonian bays of the Blossom and Winslow dining rooms.

Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front wing of this, built in 1898,^[346] showed a comparable maturing of his vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale. Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in the original spirit (Plate 128B).

In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the Ladies Home Journal ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February 1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate 142A). The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms, extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the uncovered terrace (Figure 31). Here the articulated but unified space of the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential internationally (see Chapter 22). Towards that new concept much of the development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.

The Ladies Home Journal project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated. In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the Ladies Home Journal house was intended to be stuccoed like the Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the porte-cochère on one side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.

In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses, the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different. So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses, the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.

Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)^[347] was ten years older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.^[348] In 1883 Voysey sold his first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were published in the British Architect; of these the one for a house^[349] at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.

By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field, rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known, but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an Artist’ that he published in his magazine The Hobby Horse in 1888 was of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant influence was probably abroad (see Chapter 16).

The existence of an earlier project dated 1888 for Voysey’s house for J. W. Forster at Bedford Park has led to some confusion. The executed house dates from 1891. Sometimes known as the Grey House, it is very different indeed from its neighbours, by this time some fifteen or more years old, by Godwin, Shaw, and their pupils. For one thing, its walls are covered with roughcast, already used by Voysey on The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington; for another, it is a three-storey rectangular box, severe and rather formal beneath its low hipped roof, not quaint and irregular like even the simplest of the earlier houses. The casement windows are arranged in bands between stone mullions, regularly but not symmetrically, and the eaves troughs are supported by delicately curved iron brackets. Otherwise there is no external detail.

The plan of the Forster house is also compact and regular, with entrance on the left side and living room across the front. In other words this house represents as much of a reaction against the picturesqueness of the earlier Queen Anne as does Shaw’s Fred White house, yet is quite without eighteenth-century reminiscence.^[350]

More interesting and more prominent than the contemporary storey-and-a-half house known as The Studio at 17 St Dunstan’s Road in West Kensington are a pair of terrace-houses, also designed in 1891 but begun only the next year, at 14-16 Hans Road off the Brompton Road in London. Here Voysey dropped the roughcast he had originally proposed and used Webb-like red brickwork with the windows characteristically arranged in bands between plain stone mullions. The elegantly original detailing of the projecting stone porches and the curved line of the parapets at the top are related to his contemporary decorative work and in notable contrast to the almost ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ treatment of Mackmurdo’s slightly later house next door at No. 12.

A moderate-sized country house, Perrycroft, Colwall, near Malvern, begun in 1893, may be considered Voysey’s first mature production, introducing in executed work the personal mode of design for which the Ward project of 1890 had already shown the way, and from which he never moved very far in later years. This is comparable, not to Wright’s ‘first’ house in River Forest of the same date, but to his more advanced work of the end of the decade, the River Forest Golf Club and the Hickox house. Roughcast walls, windows arranged in bands between plain mullions,^[351] a regular composition approaching but not quite reaching symmetry, these all follow from the Grey House and the Studio. But, being in the country, the house could spread out more. Moreover, the roofs were raised to a medieval pitch—45 degrees—so that their conspicuously heavy slating is as much a part of Voysey’s simple craftsman-like mode as are the off-white roughcast walls. The planning is closer to Webb’s than to Wright’s, the rooms being less symmetrically shaped and not opening at all into one another in the way of the Ward project.

A rather larger house, begun in 1896 on the Hog’s Back near Guildford in Surrey for the American Julian Sturgis, presumptive original of Santayana’s Last Puritan, has a somewhat less balanced composition with a prominent cross gable near one end (Plate 129A). The characteristic stone-mullioned lights of several of the rooms are here so extensive in their grouping as to constitute window-walls of the earlier Shavian sort.

In what is doubtless Voysey’s finest work, Broadleys on Lake Windermere, designed in 1898, the roofs are lower once more, and the window-walls are concentrated in three rounded bays along the lakeside terrace (Plate 129B). Here the hall in the middle is carried up two storeys, quite as Wright proposed to do in one version of his first Ladies Home Journal house (Figure 32). In its horizontality, its concentration of fenestration, and its avoidance of medieval feeling, this house represents the extreme point of innovation and originality in Voysey’s work.

His own house, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was completed in 1900. Externally this resembles closely his earlier houses, but The Orchard has two cross gables and hence a stronger feeling of symmetry. Towards this the more regular and carefully balanced spacing of the window bands further conduces. In studying the vocabulary of this house, a vocabulary destined to be parodied ad infinitum by architects and then by builders in the next twenty-five years, one can understand his feeling that he was a reformer not an innovator—the last disciple of Pugin, so to say, to whose secular work a line can be traced back via Webb, Street, and Butterfield. In Voysey’s special sense of continuity, which grew on him in later years, lies his great difference from Wright; for Wright was certainly determined, from the time he designed the Winslow house, to be as great an innovator—as much of an architectural creator—as was Sullivan in his skyscrapers. None the less, to look forward a little, such a house by Voysey as that now called Little Court at Pyrford Common in Surrey, built in 1902, is quite worthy of comparison with Wright’s masterpieces of that year (see Chapter 19). It shows little further development beyond his houses of the late nineties, however, except for a certain increase in horizontal emphasis.

Just before and just after 1900, Voysey’s work was very much better known and more influential in England, and increasingly in other countries,^[352] than was Wright’s either at home or abroad at that time. Moreover, many contemporaries in England were building rather similar houses. One of them, M. H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who also worked a good deal on the Continent, developed his planning much farther in the direction of Wright-like openness along the lines suggested by Voysey’s project of 1890 for the Ward house. The many houses, both executed and projected, that Baillie Scott published in Houses and Gardens in 1906 made his planning known to the young architects of the Continent (Figure 33). Characteristic is his Blackwell house on Lake Windermere of about 1900 with an enormous two-storey living-hall elaborated spatially by various ingle-nooks and so forth. The plan was published by Muthesius in 1904, and may well have influenced Adolf Loos in Vienna and other Europeans even before his own book appeared (see Chapters 20 and 21). After 1906 Baillie Scott’s work became quite ‘traditional’, and it is hard to believe that the projects published in the later version of his Houses and Gardens in 1933 are by the same man.

The name of W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), later the biographer of Webb and an influential writer on architecture, should also be at least mentioned here. When Lethaby left Shaw’s office, where he had been chief assistant, he began his career by building Avon Tyrrell in Hampshire in 1891, a large brick country house closer to Webb’s than to Shaw’s in character. But his main contribution was not in the field of domestic architecture.^[353]

Already by the mid nineties, the most successful English house-builder, more than rivalling Voysey in the quantity and occasionally even in the quality of his domestic work, was Sir Edwin L. Lutyens (1869-1944). Beginning like Voysey in the late eighties by building cottages, his first house of real distinction was the one he built for his cousin and frequent collaborator, the garden-designer Gertrude Jekyll, at Munstead Wood near Godalming in 1896. Several other good houses followed shortly, including notably The Orchards, Godalming, in 1898; but this early period of his work really culminates in Deanery Gardens at Sonning in Berkshire of 1901 (Plate 182B). In these houses are preserved all the best of the Shavian Manorial—the great timber-framed bay-window of the two-storeyed hall at Deanery Gardens is exemplary—simplifying and regularizing that mode under the influence of Webb and even approaching Webb’s standards of craftsmanship in the execution.

Like Webb in his later work, Lutyens used almost from the first a good deal of stylistic detail in interiors; he also turned back towards the ‘traditional’ in his exteriors considerably earlier than Baillie Scott when designing such houses as Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Tigbourne Court at Witley in Surrey, both built in 1899 two years before Deanery Gardens. Lutyens became from about 1906 the leading architect of his generation in England, and his later work will be treated elsewhere (see Chapter 24). His increasing material success after the opening years of the century, rivalling Shaw’s in the previous generation, is to a certain extent the measure, though not the cause, of Voysey’s decline in popularity.

C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942) and George Walton (1867-1933)^[354] were other domestic architects active in the nineties and the early years of the new century. The latter belongs to the Glasgow School, of which Mackintosh was the principal figure, and like Mackintosh he was more decorator than architect (see Chapter 17). One house in England, The Leys at Elstree of 1901, may be mentioned here. The interiors are fine examples of the Arts and Crafts mode, as it is sometimes called, more stylized than Voysey’s but less original than Mackintosh’s. The plan is organized symmetrically around a large two-storey hall rivalling Baillie Scott’s of the period in its complex spatial development.

Ashbee was one of the first Europeans to appreciate the significance of Wright, and was appropriately chosen by Wasmuth to write the introduction to his second publication of Wright’s work in 1911 (see Chapter 19). Three houses by Ashbee side by side in Cheyne Walk in London, No. 37 of 1894 and Nos 38-39 of 1904, represent the chronological span of his significant architectural production and illustrate clearly his characteristic progress from the Shavian to an originality at least comparable to Voysey’s. Closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Ashbee was like most of these men except Voysey^[355] and Lutyens generally more active in the field of decorative art than in building. Right through this period English decorative art exercised a major influence on the Continent (see Chapters 16 and 17). So close is Mackintosh’s tie with the Continent that his schools and even his houses are better discussed in relation to the Art Nouveau.

Of all these English architects who have just been mentioned, Voysey was the most creative in the field of domestic architecture and, except for Lutyens, the most productive down at least through the early years of the twentieth century; after 1910 he built almost nothing at all. Yet Voysey did not die until 1941, by which time a younger generation, to his confusion, had accepted him as a father of a modern architecture that he disapproved as strongly as did Lutyens. In 1940 he returned almost from the grave to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

From the Picturesque cottages of the opening decades of the nineteenth century to the early masterpieces of Wright and Voysey around 1900 is a far cry, further perhaps in the drastic revision that it represented of so old-established a building type as the dwelling-house than from Parris’s Market Street buildings in Boston of 1824 to Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago as completed eighty years later in 1904. Yet in Anglo-American domestic architecture, quite as was the case with commercial architecture, real achievement recurred all through the century.