Joseph Lancaster Ball (1852–1933) was an English architect.
Born to a Methodist family in Maltby in Yorkshire, Ball was articled to the architect William Willmer Pocock in London in 1877. He moved to Birmingham in 1880 to set up in private practice after winning a competition to design the Handsworth Wesleyan Theological College, now the Hamstead campus of Birmingham City University. [1] In 1881, he built a range of offices, shops and warehouses at the junction of Cannon Street and Cherry Street in Birmingham. The Queen Anne revival style of the buildings marked one of the first signs of the new simplicity in Birmingham architecture that would emerge with the Arts and Crafts movement, in reaction against the heavily decorated terracotta style then prevalent. [2] During the early 1880s, he trained Robert England from Christchurch in New Zealand; England would become a prominent architect in his home town. [3]
During the 1890s, Ball emerged as one of the leading domestic architects in England; [4] he fully absorbed the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, designing a series of one-off houses that gradually abandoned his earlier classical influences, culminating in the exceptional simplicity of the semi detached pair of houses he built for himself at 17 and 19 Rotton Park Road in Edgbaston. [5]
In 1899, Ball collaborated with William Lethaby on 122–124 Colmore Row in central Birmingham, whose break with revivalism makes it a building of European importance. [6] In 1904, he completed Winterbourne House in Edgbaston, his most important individual commission and one of the finest houses of its period in the Birmingham area, comparable to contemporary work by other notable Birmingham Arts and Crafts architects such as William Bidlake, Charles Bateman and Herbert Tudor Buckland. [7]
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
The architecture of England is the architecture of modern England and in the historic Kingdom of England. It often includes buildings created under English influence or by English architects in other parts of the world, particularly in the English and later British colonies and Empire, which developed into the Commonwealth of Nations.
Prairie School is a late 19th and early 20th-century architectural style, most common in the Midwestern United States. The style is usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands, integration with the landscape, solid construction, craftsmanship, and discipline in the use of ornament. Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the wide, flat, treeless expanses of America's native prairie landscape.
Although Birmingham in England has existed as a settlement for over a thousand years, today's city is overwhelmingly a product of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, with little surviving from its early history. As it has expanded, it has acquired a variety of architectural styles. Buildings of most modern architectural styles in the United Kingdom are located in Birmingham. In recent years, Birmingham was one of the first cities to exhibit the blobitecture style with the construction of the Selfridges store at the Bullring Shopping Centre.
Tudor Revival architecture, also known as mock Tudor in the UK, first manifested in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture, in reality it usually took the style of English vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages that had survived into the Tudor period. The style later became an influence elsewhere, especially the British colonies. For example, in New Zealand, the architect Francis Petre adapted the style for the local climate. In Singapore, then a British colony, architects such as Regent Alfred John Bidwell pioneered what became known as the Black and White House. The earliest examples of the style originate with the works of such eminent architects as Norman Shaw and George Devey, in what at the time was considered Neo-Tudor design.
John Henry Chamberlain, generally known professionally as J. H. Chamberlain, was a British nineteenth-century architect based in Birmingham.
William Richard Lethaby was an English architect and architectural historian whose ideas were highly influential on the late Arts and Crafts and early Modern movements in architecture, and in the fields of conservation and art education.
American Craftsman is an American domestic architectural style, inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, which included interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and decorative arts, beginning in the last years of the 19th century. Its immediate ancestors in American architecture are the Shingle style, which began the move away from Victorian ornamentation toward simpler forms; and the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Herbert Tudor Buckland was a British architect, best known for his seminal Arts and Crafts houses, the Elan Valley model village, educational buildings such as the campus of the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk and St Hugh's College in Oxford.
William Henry Bidlake MA, FRIBA was a British architect, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement in Birmingham and Director of the School of Architecture at Birmingham School of Art from 1919 until 1924.
Joseph Edward Southall RWS NEAC RBSA was an English painter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.
Charles Edward Bateman FRIBA was an English architect, known for his Arts and Crafts and Queen Anne-style houses and commercial buildings in the Birmingham area and for his sensitive vernacular restoration and extension work in the Cotswolds.
Winterbourne Botanic Garden is a heritage site and botanic garden in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. It is owned by the University of Birmingham.
The Modern Style is a style of architecture, art, and design that first emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1880s. It was the first Art Nouveau style worldwide, and it represents the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement which was native to Great Britain. The Modern Style provided the base and intellectual background for the Art Nouveau movement and was adapted by other countries, giving birth to local variants such as Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession. It was cultivated and disseminated through the Liberty department store and The Studio magazine.
122–124 Colmore Row is a Grade I listed building on Colmore Row in Birmingham, England. Built as the Eagle Insurance Offices it was later occupied by Orion Insurance and was Hudson's Coffee House until late 2011, It is currently Java Lounge Coffee House.
Robert van 't Hoff, born Robbert van 't Hoff, was a Dutch architect and furniture designer. His Villa Henny, designed in 1914, was one of the earliest modernist houses and one of the first to be built out of reinforced concrete. From 1917 he was an influential member of the De Stijl movement.
21 Yateley Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, England is a house built in 1899. It was designed by Herbert Tudor Buckland as his own home, and built by his partnership, Buckland & Haywood-Farmer, which constructed some of the best housing in the Birmingham suburbs in the early 20th century. The architectural style is Arts and Crafts and the house is a Grade I listed building.
Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
The Cotswold style of architecture is a style based on houses from the Cotswold region of England, and is sometimes called the storybook style. Cotswold houses often have a prominent chimney, often near the front door of the house. Other notable features include king mullions and steep roofs. The Cotswold style uses local materials based on geology. This style is renowned for the use of local oolitic limestone.
The Homestead, 25 Woodbourne Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, England is a house built in 1897. It was designed by Charles Bateman, and built by James Smith & Son. The architectural style is Arts and Crafts and the house is a Grade I listed building. The garden wall and gate piers facing Woodbourne Road have a separate Grade I listing. The Homestead remains a private residence.