The Tudor Houses of the Prairie School

Abstract

The Tudor Houses of the Prairie School GAVIN TOWNSEND University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Wherever American suburbs exist from between about 1890 and 1930, they are bound to include Tudor Revival houses. This is as true for areas around Boston as it is for those around Detroit, Houston, or San Francisco. In many cases the character of the Tudor houses in each of these areas is remarkably similar. Most have steeply pitched gable roofs, casement windows arranged asymmetrically, and usually some half-timber detailing. Nevertheless, there were indeed some distinctive regional variations on the Tudor theme. In and around Philadelphia, for example, a large group of architects working between 1910 and 1930 consistently designed all-stone Cotswold style Tudor houses (Figure 1). Such houses have given communities like Germantown and Chestnut Hill a flavor that uniquely reflects the heritage and geology of eastern Pennsylvania.1 Meanwhile, in California, Tudor motifs were sometimes combined with local traditions ofHispanic architecture to produce a Tudor type peculiar to the west coast. The Arthur Bent House in Bel Air (Figure 2), for instance, mixes the steep roof line and half-timbering of the Tudor style with the cantilevered second-floor balcony of the Monterey Revival. Yet another American regional variation of the Tudor style can be found in the suburbs of Chicago, a variation distinctly associated with the Prairie School. What forms this variation took, and how it came to be, are two questions worth exploring. Chicago's interest in the Tudor style may be said to have started with the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition. There one could have seen the headquarters building of the Royal British Commission to the exposition (Figure 3). Known as Victoria House, this structure was one of the most elaborate examples of Tudor Revival architecture in the United States, certainly one of the most elaborate to be built in the Midwest. To modern eyes this building looks perhaps more Victorian than Tudor, given its alternating bands of brick and terra cotta on the first floor, the odd central tower, striped awnings, shingled roof and cleanly cut chimneys. Nevertheless as the official guidebook to the exposition claimed, 1 The architectural critic C. Matlack Price recognized the distinctive quality of the Tudor houses in and around Philadelphia as early as 1912. See his articles, "The Pennsylvania Type, A Logical Development," Architectural Record 32 (1912), 307-327; "Building American Houses ofFieldstone," Craftsman 22 (1912), 407-16; "Architecture and the Housing Problem: Recent Work by Duhring, Okie and Ziegler," Architectural Record 34 (Sept. 1913), 246; "The Development of a National Architecture - The Pennsylvania Type," Architecture and Decoration 3 (Sept. 1913), 363-366; "The Country House in Good Taste," Architecture and Decoration 23 (Oct. 1925), 42-44, 95. ARRIS 3: 35-47. 1992 35 36 ARRIS 3. 1992 FIGURE 1 Mellor, Meigs and Howe, Robert T. McCracken House, Germantown PA, 1919-20. (From Monograph of the Work of Mellor, Meigs and Howe.) FIGURE 3 Robert Edis, "Victoria House," Headquarters of the Royal British Commission to the World's Colombian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. (From Johnson, A History of the World's Colombian Exposition.) FIGURE 5 Robert C. Spenser, Jr. and R. R. Kendall, House at 1012 Lake Shore Blvd., Evanston IL, 1894. (Photo: Gavin Townsend.) FIGURE 2 Gordon Kaufman, Arthur Bent House, Bel Air CA, ca. 1927. (From Architecture.) FIGURE 4 Robert C. Spenser, Jr. and R. R. Kendall, House at 1012 Lake Shore Blvd., Evanston IL, 1894. (Chicago Architectural Club, Annual Exhibition Catalogue.) FIGURE 6 Frank Lloyd Wright, Nathan Moore House, Oak Park, IL, 1895. The house burned in 1922 and was rebuilt by FLW with many modifications in 1923. (From Inland Architect.) TOWNSEND: TUDOR HOUSES OF THE PRAIRIE SCHOOL 37 "The structure is acknowledged to be the most perfect specimen of its class on the grounds. It is Elizabethan in style through-out, and is a typical example of the half-timbered manor house of the Tudor period, such as may be seen today throughout Warwickshire and around Chester."2 Actually, the most authentic Tudor qualities of the building were to be found inside, where there was a virtual encyclopedia of Tudor plaster ceiling designs, paneling, and furnishings, all directly copied from...