The English House, 1860-1914: The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture - Hardcover

Stamp, Gavin; Goulancourt, André

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226770818 ISBN 13: 9780226770819

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1986

Synopsis

Ranging from picturesque cottages to Romantic manor houses, this illustrated survey of British domestic architecture in the Victorian era documents styles still popular today. André Goulancourt's superb photographs of urban, suburban, and country homes are combined with Gavin Stamp's commentary to unique effect. What emerges is not only a stunning visual record but also a lesson on the creative development of national and vernacular building traditions.

Stamp suggests that the characteristic features of British domestic design in this era were symbolic and interpretive as well as functional. Reacting against modern industrialism and materialism, Victorian builders, in tandem with the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, revived vernacular traditions. Emphasis was placed on the proper use of building materials found locally and on elements that would later recur in the American Prairie House: the heavy pitched roof and the oversized and centrally placed chimney and fireplace. A number of domestic styles that emerged during this period, such as the Shingle style and the Queen Anne style, were imported by American architects and clients who shared the Victorian reverence for home, privacy, and the family unit.

In addition to the interpretive text and catalog of eighty-seven buildings, The English House, 1860-1914 includes brief biographies of the sixty-three architects represented, including Pugin, Butterfield, Street, and Prior. Historians of both English and American architecture, as well as practicing architects and critics, will welcome this comprehensive volume.

About this title

About the Author:

Gavin Stamp is an architectural historian and journalist. André Goulancourt is an architectural photographer.

From Publishers Weekly:

This well-documented, though sometimes redundant, collaboration (Stamp, an architectural historian, wrote the text, which is generously illustrated with Goulancourt's photographs; a previous joint effort is AD London 1900 examines the revival of domestic architecture in lateVictorian Britain in light of the larger Arts and Crafts movement of the period. Stamp comprehensively explains how this simple, functional, indigenous, anti-urban, antimodern architectural form developed in reaction to excesses of the Industrial Revolution and mid-Victorian materialism, and how it was influenced by Romanticism and such writers as William Morris and John Ruskin. To his credit, he also reveals faults of the style, such as the use of traditional materials to suggest bogus antiquity. The work includes careful descriptions and photographs of 87many lovelybuildings, and brief biographies of 63 architects.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0226770818
• ISBN 13: 9780226770819
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254