William G. Low House | |
---|---|
General information | |
Status | Demolished |
Type | Seaside cottage |
Architectural style | Shingle style |
Address | 3 Low Lane |
Town or city | Bristol, Rhode Island |
Construction started | 1886 |
Completed | 1887 |
Demolished | 1962 |
Client | William G. Low |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Charles McKim |
Architecture firm | McKim, Mead & White |
Known for | An extreme example of the Shingle style |
The William G. Low House was a seaside cottage at 3 Low Lane in Bristol, Rhode Island.
It was designed and built in 1886–1887 by architect Charles McKim of the New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White. With its distinctive single 140-foot-long (43 m) gable it embodied many of the tenets of Shingle Style architecture—horizontality, simplified massing and geometry, minimal ornamentation, the blending of interior and exterior spaces.
The architectural historian Vincent Scully saw it as "at once a climax and a kind of conclusion" for McKim, since its "prototypal form ... was almost immediately to be abandoned for the more conventionally conceived columns and pediments of McKim, Mead, and White's later buildings." [1]
Just before it was demolished in 1962, the house was documented with measured drawings and photographs by the Historic American Buildings Survey. [2]
Wrote architectural historian Leland Roth, "Although little known in its own time, the Low House has come to represent the high mark of the Shingle Style." [3]
The house was built for William Gilman Low (1844–1936), a lawyer and stepson of Abiel Abbot Low, and Lois Robbins Low (1850–1923), his wife and a daughter of Benjamin Robbins Curtis. Low died in the house at the age of 92. [4]
The Newport Casino is an athletic complex and recreation center located at 180–200 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island in the Bellevue Avenue/Casino Historic District. Built in 1879–1881 by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., it was designed in the Shingle style by the newly formed firm of McKim, Mead & White. The Newport Casino was the firm's first major commission and helped to establish the firm's national reputation. Built as a social club, it included courts for both lawn tennis and court tennis, facilities for other games, such as squash and lawn bowling, club rooms for reading, socializing, card-playing, and billiards, shops, and a convertible theater and ballroom. It became a center of Newport's social life during the Gilded Age through the 1920s.
Bruce Price was an American architect and an innovator in the Shingle Style. The stark geometry and compact massing of his cottages in Tuxedo Park, New York, influenced Modernist architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Venturi.
Vincent Joseph Scully Jr. was an American art historian who was a Sterling Professor of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject. Architect Philip Johnson once described Scully as "the most influential architectural teacher ever." His lectures at Yale were known to attract casual visitors and packed houses, and regularly received standing ovations. He was also the distinguished visiting professor in architecture at the University of Miami.
Norcross Brothers, Contractors and Builders was a nineteenth-century American construction company, especially noted for its work, mostly in stone, for the architectural firms of H.H. Richardson and McKim, Mead & White. The company was founded in 1864 by brothers James Atkinson Norcross (1831-1903) and Orlando Whitney Norcross (1839-1920). It won its first major contract in 1869, and is credited with having completed over 650 building projects.
McKim, Mead & White was an American architectural firm based in New York City. The firm came to define architectural practice, urbanism, and the ideals of the American Renaissance in fin de siècle New York.
The Isaac Bell House is a historic house and National Historic Landmark at 70 Perry Street in Newport, Rhode Island. Also known as Edna Villa, it is one of the outstanding examples of Shingle Style architecture in the United States. It was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, and built during the Gilded Age, when Newport was the summer resort of choice for some of America's wealthiest families.
Wilson Eyre Jr. was an American architect, teacher and writer who practiced in the Philadelphia area. He is known for his deliberately informal and welcoming country houses, and for being an innovator in the Shingle Style.
Russell Warren (1783–1860) was an American architect, best known for his work in the Greek Revival style. He practiced in Bristol and Providence.
Redtop – also spelled Red Top – is a historic Shingle Style house located at 90 Somerset Street, Belmont, Massachusetts. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its association with writer and literary critic William Dean Howells (1837–1920), a leading proponent of realism in literature. The Shingle Style house was designed by Howells' brother-in-law William Rutherford Mead, and it served as the Howells' residence from its construction in 1877 to 1882.
The William Watts Sherman House is a notable house designed by American architect H. H. Richardson, with later interiors by Stanford White. It is a National Historic Landmark, generally acknowledged as one of Richardson's masterpieces and the prototype for what became known as the Shingle Style in American architecture. It is located at 2 Shepard Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island and is now owned by Salve Regina University. It is a contributing property to the Bellevue Avenue Historic District.
The shingle style is an American architectural style made popular by the rise of the New England school of architecture, which eschewed the highly ornamented patterns of the Eastlake style in Queen Anne architecture. In the shingle style, English influence was combined with the renewed interest in Colonial American architecture which followed the 1876 celebration of the Centennial. The plain, shingled surfaces of colonial buildings were adopted, and their massing emulated.
The Kent County Courthouse, now the East Greenwich Town Hall, is a historic court building at 127 Main Street in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.
The Mary Fiske Stoughton House is a National Historic Landmark house at 90 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Henry Hobson Richardson designed the house in 1882 in what is now called the Shingle Style, with a minimum of ornament and shingles stretching over the building's irregular volumes like a skin. The house drew immediate notice in the architectural community, and was a significant influence in the growth in popularity of the Shingle style in the late 19th century. Richardson's masterful use of space in its design also foreshadowed the work of major 20th century architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.
Leland M. Roth is a leading American architectural historian who is the Marion Dean Ross Distinguished Professor of Architectural History emeritus in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture in the University of Oregon College of Design at the University of Oregon. His prodigious publication and teaching career began at The Ohio State University, then Northwestern University, and the University of Oregon, where he taught courses on U.S. architecture, eighteenth-century European architecture, Native American architecture, Oregon architecture, and the history of how music was performed and heard within architectural space. Roth’s studies of American and world architecture are among the most assigned and read books in university courses on the history of the built environment, and his admired work, Understanding Architecture, was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish. Utilizing skills he acquired while completing his bachelor’s degree in architecture, Roth drafted dozens of plans, sections, and elevations for his many publications, which include Choice Reviews outstanding titles. His publications are esteemed for their unique narrative voice, and also for their assertion that style and context remain important to the scholarly discipline of architectural history. While at the University of Oregon, Roth helped create the graduate Program in Historic Preservation and taught in the annual Preservation Field School.
Queen Anne style architecture was one of a number of popular Victorian architectural styles that emerged in the United States during the period from roughly 1880 to 1910. It is sometimes grouped as New World Queen Anne Revival architecture. Popular there during this time, it followed the Second Empire and Stick styles and preceded the Richardsonian Romanesque and Shingle styles. Sub-movements of Queen Anne include the Eastlake movement.
The Atwater–Ciampolini House, also known as the Charles Atwater House, is located at 321 Whitney Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut, at the southwest corner of intersection with Edwards Street. It is an important example of Shingle style architecture. It was designed by New York City-based architects Babb, Cook and Willard and was built during 1890-92. For many years the property had served as offices for Thompson and Peck, an insurance agency.
In the New World, Queen Anne Revival was a historicist architectural style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was popular in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries. In Australia, it is also called Federation architecture.
Joseph Morrill Wells (1853–1890) was an American architect, known for his contributions to the work of the notable architecture firm of McKim, Mead & White. Wells is said to have admired the architects of the Italian Renaissance, especially Donato Bramante, and to have been an important influence in the firm's transition in the mid-1880s away from the romantic and picturesque, and toward the classical.
Tranquility Farm is a historic summer estate located on Tranquility Road in Middlebury, Connecticut. The estate was developed in the 1890s by industrialist John H. Whittemore, with architectural design by the noted firm of McKim, Mead & White, and landscape design by Charles Eliot and Warren H. Manning. The main house was a rare inland example of Shingle Style architecture in the state. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The main house was demolished sometime after listing.
Ernest George Washington Dietrich, AIA was an American architect. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dietrich relocated to New York City in 1886 where he practiced for nearly forty years. His work included the design of churches, libraries, hotels, commercial and public buildings, but he is most highly regarded for his residential designs in the shingle, colonial revival, and arts and crafts styles. In cooperation with furniture designer Gustav Stickley, Dietrich designed the first "Craftsman House" published in The Craftsman magazine in May 1903.