MARCH 2006 »  book review

New England’s Legacy

North Shore Boston: Houses of Essex County,

1865-1930
By Pamela W. Fox, foreword by Jonathan Winthrop
Acanthus Press, New York, NY; 2005
336 pp.; hardcover; more than 300 duotone illus.; $77
ISBN 0-926494-28-7

Reviewed by John B. Tittmann, AIA

Neither an analysis nor a critique, North Shore Boston: Houses of Essex County, 1865-1930 surveys, through exquisite period photographs, substantial houses built north of Boston between the Civil War and the Depression. It is a welcome addition to any architectural library.

The houses that fill this book are like good theater: entry courts set the stage; vestibules and receiving rooms are the opening act; living rooms, dining rooms and drawing rooms fill out the plot; and the gardens provide an encore. Like the theater, they keep the extensive backstage kitchens and servants’ rooms discreetly out of view. Though these houses seem lost to a bygone era, they actually still contain lessons for contemporary practitioners.

The styles of the houses shifted with fashion during the 65 years covered in this book. The Civil War seems to have suppressed the Greek Revival, once known as "America’s Style," in favor of a Ruskinian view of the world. The Ruskinian picturesque – think Gothic made of red bricks – was succeeded by the Shingle style and the Colonial Revival. You’ll find further designs in Tudor, Palladian, Chateau-de-la-Loire-esque, Jacobean, Renaissance, Wall-Street-pastoral, Georgian and Federal Revival, English Arts and Crafts and Beaux Arts styles, and, well, you get the picture. The most artistic, and to this reviewer exciting, part of the period covered is the 1870s and ’80s. During this time, architects like Arthur Little, William Ralph Emerson, Henry H. Richardson and Robert Peabody and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead forged a truly American style. These designers were consciously looking for a way of making a connection to the history of the area. They sketched and studied the colonial architecture of New England and composed free and fluid houses out of the very elements in their sketchbooks. They also designed the houses as if they grew out of the rocky outcroppings that characterize this landscape. These architects seem to be the first to not just "make do" with New England’s landscape, but to actually love and revel in it.

Out of this interest grew what has come to be known as the Shingle style, named by the incomparable architectural historian Vincent Scully, for the tell-tale shingles that skin the buildings in a thin continuous membrane. This book includes three of these masterworks: the Loring House (1881) by Emerson, Grasshead (1882) by Little and Kragsyde (1883-84) by Peabody and Stearns with Olmstead.

The fine foreword by Jonathan Winthrop gives a sense of the stewardship that has preserved a sizable portion of the landscape and the architecture in Essex County. The social and cultural context is briefly but cogently argued by the author, Pamela Fox, in the introduction. Each of the 51 houses featured is given a brief history and illustrated with original photographs, all black and white, and an occasional plan. Included at the end of the book is a useful biography of each of the architects mentioned in the book, as well as a bibliography and an index. Of the 51 houses featured, one third have been demolished, one third remain standing but in the hands of institutions and a third are still in private hands, lived in as houses. The era of inexpensive servants and inexpensive energy is over.

For those interested in architecture today, and how we can learn from architecture of yesterday, this book offers a great deal. It also generates questions: what separates these large houses from large houses built today (apart from the obvious programmatic differences)? Were all those drawing rooms, receiving rooms, sitting rooms, living rooms and halls used fully? Though Modernist critics in the second half of the 20th century expressed disdain for houses like these, perhaps a new era of appreciation, without polemics, is in the offing. A once nearly universal concept that is being recovered by architects today, of all stripes, is that architecture is the art of shaping a space for human activity. The Modernists, in viewing "style" as inauthentic, ironically became obsessed with style, Modernist style, at the expense of space making. The value of books like this is in what they can teach us about this art.  

John B. Tittmann, AIA, joined Jacob Albert and Jim Righter in 1996 to form Albert, Righter & Tittmann Architects. Located in downtown Boston, the firm designs houses and projects all over New England. After Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1980s, he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and worked for various architects in Chicago.

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