American Houses, Spanish Styles
While English buildings were the font
of the Colonial Revival, Iberian- influenced houses seeded parallel
styles in the West and Southwest.
By James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell
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The umbrella term Mediterranean Style can
describe a house that blends Italian and Spanish influences,
such as this 1920s house in the Ludlow Park area of Yonkers,
New York. Most prevalent in the Southwest and Florida, such
houses are found throughout the U.S.
Photo Courtesy of James C. Massey
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American houses have generally reflected a strong bias toward
English-inspired styles—Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, or Arts
& Crafts, for instance. During the late 19th- and early-20th
centuries, however, builders in parts of the country with a Spanish
heritage began to follow quite a different vision—or, to be
more precise, several different visions. Influenced by the Arts
& Crafts movement, with its emphasis on simplicity, vernacular
building practices, and regional history, architects in Florida,
the southwestern states, and California began to produce distinctive
designs based on examples from each region’s particular Spanish
past.
The first flurry of national interest in Spanish architecture and
heritage appeared at the end of the 19th century in the wake of
some early examples, such as Carrere and Hastings’ 1888 Ponce
de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, and the Mission Style California
Building at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition by San Francisco
architect A. Page Brown. However, it was only in 1915, when the
Panama California Exposition in San Diego showcased Bertram Goodhue’s
stunning Spanish Revival designs that the Spanish craze began in
earnest. It intensified during the period between the two World
Wars, finally petering out around 1940. While the earlier revivals
were built mostly in Spanish-settled areas, the later ones (though
they often continued to have regional flavor) popped up all over
the country. Furthermore, while early revivals were rather free
adaptations of the originals, later revivals of, say, the 1920s
were likely to be truer to the historical styles, at least in architect-designed
buildings.
These regional differences, as well as changing architectural tastes
over 50 years, left the landscape with a number of very different
“Spanish” styles. These include the Mission (or Mission
Revival), Spanish Colonial Revival, Pueblo Revival, Territorial,
and Monterey styles. To that list we might add the Mediterranean
Style, which is a blend of rustic Italian and Spanish Renaissance
styles. In fact, all the Spanish revival styles are sometimes lumped
under the Mediterranean label. Taking them more or less in chronological
order, here’s a rundown of the most salient characteristics
of the styles.
Mission Revival
The first widespread use of Spanish motifs was developed from the
white-stuccoed churches that dotted the California landscape during
the Spanish settlement period of the 17th and 18th centuries. The
Spanish missions provided the general inspiration for these picturesque
structures with smooth, flat wall surfaces, shadowy arcaded promenades,
and curvaceous gables. Their most conspicuous features were most
often their shapely, scalloped parapets with heavily molded edges,
which might adorn not just the main roof but one or more dormer
and porches as well. They had low-pitched barrel-tile roofs, generally
with widely overhanging eaves. Ornamentation was typically of terra
cotta and was often vaguely Moorish in design. Quatrefoil windows
and cartouches appeared regularly. Windows and doors in myriad arch
shapes, from Moorish to flattened semicircles, were also often edged
with heavy mouldings of stone, brick, or terra cotta. Bell towers,
frequently in pairs, were common. Domes were less frequent. All
these details fit nicely within the Arts & Crafts movement’s
tendency to stress indigenous architectural forms and at the same
time presaged the eclectic European architectural revivals that
would prevail in the 1920s and ’30s. Irving Gill, the California
architect who would become famous for his cubic Modern buildings,
experimented first with the Mission Style’s simple lines.
After World War I, architects and builders abandoned Mission Style
buildings in favor of more academic European architectural revivals—though
not before a lot of lovable little Mission bungalows and cottages
with pseudo-stucco walls had left their mark on suburban developments
all over America.
Spanish Colonial Revival
Architect Bertram Goodhue began the trend toward buildings that
were more formal and historically accurate representations of the
Spanish Renaissance. George Washington Smith, Montecito, California,
architect and author of an early, groundbreaking book on Spanish
architecture in the American West, is considered the most talented
practitioner of the style in Southern California.
Spanish Colonial was the most decorative of the Spanish styles,
and its ornament covered a wide range of source material, from Moorish
to Renaissance and Byzantine. With hipped or gabled red-tile roofs,
it often featured twisted, spiral columns beside door and window
openings, with heavy, carved doors and decorative tile trim. The
intricate ornamental forms of Old World Spanish buildings, called
Churrigueresque ornament, were a hallmark of high-style buildings.
In Coral Gables, Florida, architects Kiehnel and Elliott designed
a gorgeous winter residence, El Jardin (1917), for a president of
Pittsburgh Steel using such ornament. However, the Spanish Colonial
was not all glitz and glamour, for it extended—in simpler
forms—to ordinary suburban buildings as well in every part
of the nation.
Pueblo Revival
The Pueblo Revival is a 20th-century adaptation of a building type
developed in the late-18th and early-19th centuries in New Mexico’s
Rio Grande Valley. It was, and still is, extremely popular in Spanish-settled
areas of the Southwest, particularly New Mexico and Arizona.
The Pueblo Revival employs thick walls made of real or fake adobe,
with soft, slightly rounded wall edges and a smooth stucco finish
mimicking the original mud finish. (Real adobe is air-dried mud
bricks covered with more dried mud; adobe-looking substitutes might
be concrete blocks or even wood-framed structures covered with smooth,
colored stucco.) The key words in the Pueblo Revival vocabulary
are “small” and “simple,” and these earthy
houses are low and ground-hugging, almost always a single storey
high. When there is more than one storey, however, the higher ones
are usually designed in a setback to look like the originals.
Heavy wood vigas (roof beams) that may be real or fake are embedded
in the walls and project through the exterior surfaces. The roofs
are flat, hidden behind parapets. In the authentic pueblo dwellings
still to be seen in Native American villages of the Southwest, canales
(hollow logs) carried the infrequent rain water away from the flat,
earthen roofs. Portales (porches) often opened off an interior patio,
taking the place of interior corridors to provide access to the
various rooms. Front doors might be heavily paneled or constructed
of vertical boards. Windows are generally small and few, and are
more often casements rather than double-hung sash.
Pueblo Revival is now the officially required building style for
new structures in the historic area of Santa Fe, and is routinely
used in new construction outside the historic area as well—which
has resulted in at least one gigantic “adobe”-canopied
gas station.
Interior features include plaster walls (again resembling smooth
stucco) and corner fireplaces of adobe-like material. Brick terraces
and patios are common outside amenities. Prominent architects who
worked in the Pueblo Revival Style include John Gaw Meem, perhaps
the best known of the lot; and Mary Jane Coulter, the architect
for the Santa Fe Railroad and the railroad’s affiliated Fred
Harvey restaurants. In fact, the popularity of the Pueblo Revival
style—and New Mexico’s economy—received a big
boost after World War I when the railroad instituted a highly successful
tourism program that brought thousands of souvenir-buying eastern
visitors to the Indian markets on breaks in their transcontinental
trip.
Territorial and Monterey Revival
New Mexico builders of the 19th century often chose houses in the
Territorial Style. The name, of course, refers to the days when
New Mexico was a U. S. territory. Architecturally, the Terratorial
Style is a slightly easternized version of the Pueblo. This rectilinear
building type features adobe walls, double-hung window sash, and
flat or low-gable roofs edged with a brick frieze.
In California, the Monterey Style also blended old Spanish building
characteristics with those of eastern houses of the same period.
The Monterey Revival, a minor 20th-century version of an earlier
style, featured projecting balconies on the front of the second
floor.
Some cities took their Spanish architectural heritage so much to
heart that they regulated new building to ensure that Spanish traditions
would prevail. For example, after an earthquake destroyed downtown
Santa Barbara, California in 1925, the city set up a planning commission
and architectural review board for that purpose; even today new
buildings are Spanish in design. Santa Fe, New Mexico, adopted a
similar approach, requiring new buildings in its historic area to
be in Pueblo Style.
A major aspect of the Spanish styles, like all the Romantic Revival
styles, was the imaginative use of the landscape to extend and enhance
the buildings. In the 1920s and 1930s an army of talented landscape
architects such as Olmsted and Olmsted, Lloyd Wright, and Florence
Yoch created near-magical settings for the homes of the wealthy
in every style.
From its beginnings in Florida, California, and the Southwest, the
Spanish craze swept across the nation like a tumbleweed, propelled
by the efforts of stellar architects, middle-class suburban merchant-builders,
and even catalog-house companies like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery
Ward. Though it faded away in most parts of the country with the
onslaught of the postwar ranch house and the split-level, to this
day it holds its own in the places where it made the most sense
to begin with: the Hispanic areas where it was born.
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