Identifying
Oregon Architecture
PART TWO
By Matthew Hayes
During the last
quarter of the 19th century, England’s Arts and Crafts movement
sought to elevate craftsmanship to an art. William Morris, a social-thinking
designer, had called for a “new birth” of artistic idealism
that looked to nature and tradition for inspiration. His philosophy
espoused that furniture, textiles, and houses were all subjects of
artistic expression. The effect of this aesthetic movement upon style
was profound and far-reaching. A Craftsman-inspired design ethic dictated
national and local building styles for nearly half a century. The
ethos was still being felt well into the 1930s.
Gustav Stickley,
a Wisconsin native, first popularized Morris’s message in America.
Stickley’s widely circulated monthly periodical The Craftsman,
published from 1901 to 1916, advocated fine craft workmanship, structural
integrity, and the use of indigenous materials. He effectively introduced
a new architectural vocabulary and mindset into America’s mainstream.
More importantly, it is Stickley who is credited with romanticizing
and popularizing the Bungalow among a new generation of middle-class
homeowners. One staggering effect of his promotion was the proliferation
of the style throughout the American West and beyond.
The word “Bungalow”
itself is a corruption of a Hindustani word, bangla, which means “belonging
to Bengal.” The term was originally used in the 1880s to describe
the wide-porch, government-run guesthouses provided to foreign travelers
by the British military forces of then-occupying India. Though the
name refers to that country’s Bengalese region, the accommodations
were common to all imperial parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Now considered
a “purely” American style, the modern Bungalow’s roots
were planted right here on the West Coast. The earliest Bungalow is
believed have to arrived somewhere in southern California around the
turn of the century. With prominent porches and oversized brackets
supporting low-pitched roofs, the distinctive style was intended to
harmonize with its surroundings. Stickley suggested that a Bungalow
should be a home “reduced to its simplest form.”
The Bungalow trend
spread quickly among the new subdivisions and suburbs of America’s
expanding working class. The style’s simple and flexible construction
readily appealed to a working class uninterested in expensive ornamentation.
Since a Bungalow could be built of any local material, Sears and Roebuck
even offered several models in their mail catalogs. In direct contrast
to this form of mail-order utilitarianism, the Bungalow occasionally
aspired to more artistic heights, often incorporating European and
Oriental influences.
Portland’s
first Bungalow arrived on the flat former farmlands east of the Willamette
River sometime around 1904. For the next 25 years, the Bungalow was
replicated and reinterpreted by the thousands across countless Oregon
cities and towns.
Concurrent to
the Bungalow was a Midwestern style known as Prairie. In and around
Chicago, Illinois, architect Frank Lloyd Wright (like Stickley, Wisconsin-born)
was advocating for a fresh new building philosophy. His ethic of environmental
sensitivity and appreciation for the natural landscape was quickly
gaining momentum. Renouncing academic and classically inspired building
styles of the day, Wright’s Prairie homes were boxy, horizontally
inclined residences that drew direct inspiration from the vast surrounding
prairies and flatlands of the Middle West. These experimentations
with “organic architecture” were a bold revolution in design.
The style came to Portland with the noted architect William Gray Purcell,
who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and George
Elmslie in Chicago. Minnesota’s Percy Bentley and Illinois-trained
John Bennes followed, adding several fine examples of the Prairie
style to Oregon’s landscape.
After the First
World War, however, experimentation was superseded by utilitarianism
and conservatism. In our third and final installment of this series,
I will look at the wide variety of academically influenced Revival
Styles, including Colonial, Tudor, and Georgian. |
