Domestic Architecture Of The American Colonies And Of The Early Republic

by Fiske Kimball

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1966

Reviews

[Justinian]

2008-11 - Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. Fiske Kimball. 314 pages. 2001

This book is a re-issue of a collected series of lectures given by Fiske Kimball in the early 1920’s. I checked this book out of the local library hoping for a focus on domestic architecture and design. I am interested in how space was viewed, developed, and thought of. The book is broadly divided into three sections; the 17th Century, the 18th Century, and the Early Republic which ends around 1830 or so.

The first section introducing various early and primitive houses by material, design, origin, and uses was one of the strongest aspects of the book. It did a very good job of setting the stage for frontier development and de-constructed many pre-conception that I had about early housing. Like most Americans when I envision our forefathers pushing inward from the coast and out past the Appalachian Mountains I pictured hardy settlers building log cabins. It seems given archeological, textual, and building evidence that this was not the case. Structures did tend to be single room houses but they tended to take advantage of hill sides, and brush structures not to dissimilar from the primitive shelters called wig-wams used by soldiers in the field during the American Revolution. This makes sense when you remember that all of those settlers came from somewhere and brought hose memories, familiarities, and norms with them.

The rest of the book does a nice job of discussing domestic architecture all along the coast and to a degree into the old Northwest. The text focuses though on those structures which are still available to see and because of this much of the common housing is lost. The focus of 70% of the text is on exceptional buildings, trend setters, and up-scale examples of design art. There are reasons for this and the author alludes to this occasionally in the text.

Each section is broken down into elements dealing with walls, floor plans, roofs and ceilings, stairs, windows, chimneys etc. The focal point is more on the history of the design from an academic point of view than on a user’s point of view. This tends to give us a very top down view and disassociates use and living from design and art.

This approach is great if you want to study say ceiling ornamentation and be able to walk into a building or a room and guess its era and influence, but it does little to decipher the transition from generic rooms/parlors to purpose built and adorned rooms. The era in question, particularly 1750-1830 represented a significant change in how people organized their lives and how they viewed things. In America this corresponded to Revolutionary underpinnings in Ancient Rome, the spirit of a Republic and the establishment of an upper class based on wealth rather than nobility. The later part of this era is of course the very end of the true Enlightenment Era of man and nature before the Industrial Revolution changes not just how we work but how and what we buy. Soon enough all Americans will be able to have dining rooms, and than we see dining rooms that look very similar due to mass production of style books, and the very furnishings, and decorations such as curtains, windows, wall paper, and etc. The great homogenization occurs.

In final reflection this book is a good attempt to relate the transitions and influences which occurred in domestic houses though mostly in the houses of the well to do. I felt that it bogged down in the details. I am not sure if it is possible to write otherwise but I suspect that it is. There are several other books of a similar aspect that I am reading which do a better job of presenting the facts, the trends, and even the details without bogging me down. Given that this book is a compilation of lectures it perhaps suffers as a book. Much of the material is well illustrated in black and white plans and photos.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiske Kimball (1888-1955)—the New England-born, Harvard-educated architect, historian, and museum director wrote this ground-breaking study of American colonial homes in the 1920s. It was praised for taking the little-before researched subject of domestic homes for an architectural subject instead of public structures. Naturally the private domestic structures were more difficult to research via traditional means as most architectural archives are kept by public institutions. He breaks American homes up into three sections: 17th-century homes, 18th-century homes, and post-revolution homes through 1830. [1] 17th-century homes more consistently seem to have developed in response to economic conditions effecting standard of living rather than artistic evolution (though English influences and existing community styles explain eclectic variations). [2] 18th-century colonial houses followed as nearly as possible the changing styles of England (much greater variety of forms for classification. Kimball was the FIRST TO FULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the existence of “hand books of designs” that were widely circulated among the builders of the day to inform construction and decoration). [3] the early Republic benefitted from architectural books of designs from continental Europe and wedded the ideal of the classical form (from Greek and Roman precedents, especially temples) and the ideal of modern convenience (from King Louis XV of France). Americans combined these two ideals, but Kimball stresses that classical forms triumphed, in order to push the evolution of the American house into a uniquely new form (145). The classical revival had as its prophet Thomas Jefferson but many (including Washington) adopted this classical “temple” ideal in their American home construction.

This book is surprisingly readable and astonishingly early. It has been widely influential on pioneering the preservation movement; architectural preservation got well-underway in large thanks to this book well before Penn Station went down and legislation followed in 1966 to prevent further cultural heritage destruction.