• Gothic Revival (1830-1875)



Identifying features:

Wall surface extending into gable without break
Steeply pitched roof; usually with steep cross gables
Windows extending into gables, often with gothic pointed-top) shapes
One-story entry or full-width porch, commonly with flattened gothic arches
Gables with decorated verge boards

Beginning in the 1830's and 1840's many architects grew tired of the restrained and simple qualities of architecture based on Roman and Greek examples. Tastes called for more fanciful, mythical-style buildings. Thus, the Gothic Style, which fed America's fascination with the romance of the medieval past, was born.

Gothic Revival, the first of the Picturesque styles, was a style that borrowed decorative elements from churches and town halls that were built in Europe between 1100 and 1500. It's appealing not as much for its stylistic embellishments as for its more organic approach to design. Gothic builders were less concerned with formal stylistic dogma than they were with the celebration of craft and utility.

While large Gothic structures, notably churches and some homes, featured picturesque irregularities and "asymmetrical" massings, many of the American Gothic Revival houses were built more simply. Their principal medieval characteristic is a steep central gable pierced by a decorative window of Gothic pointed-arch shape. The reason for this scaled-down Gothic look was because most American houses of the era were built with heavy frames of interlocking timbers rather than with the stone masonry of the medieval houses that inspired them. While easily adaptable to rectangular, box-like structures, this kind of heavy timbering was very difficult to adapt to the angular projections, nooks and crannies of the stone originals.

A.J. Davis was the first American architect to spread the Gothic gospel. His friend and fellow architect Andrew Jackson Downing also promoted the Gothic Revival in his books on "cottage villas" published in the 1840s. The Hudson River Valley, where Downing resided, was the perfect setting for the kind of picturesque, rambling "irregular" designs he endorsed. It was chiefly Downing's book that led to the flowering throughout rural America of some very picturesque wooden Gothic architecture.