Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic . characteristic, but others elsewhere, such as the Mortonhouse in Roxbury, by Bulfinch. The tendency, French in ultimate origin, was to 1 See the design, watermarked 1796, with his handwriting, published by Cousins and Riley, The Wood-carver of Salem, facing p. 23, and wrongly attributed to Mclntire. 157 AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE place the more important rooms en suite in a bel etage up one story, the entrancebeing at the ground level. This was the arrangement in the houses of great leadersof fashion such as that of
Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic . characteristic, but others elsewhere, such as the Mortonhouse in Roxbury, by Bulfinch. The tendency, French in ultimate origin, was to 1 See the design, watermarked 1796, with his handwriting, published by Cousins and Riley, The Wood-carver of Salem, facing p. 23, and wrongly attributed to Mclntire. 157 AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE place the more important rooms en suite in a bel etage up one story, the entrancebeing at the ground level. This was the arrangement in the houses of great leadersof fashion such as that of William Bingham, of Philadelphia (figure 170),1 built be-fore 1788, and of Harrison Gray Otis in Boston, built on Beacon Street in 1807, aswell as in such other aristocratic houses as that of Jonathan Mason on Mount Ver-non Street and those on Park Street. All of these Boston town houses were thework of Bulfinch. These tendencies to specialization and flexibility of arrangement were limitedin their application by the counter-tendency to ideal classic symmetry. When the. Figure 118. Plan of a mansion for a person of distinction From Crundens Convenient and Ornamental Architecture (1785). The prototype of McCombs design for the Government House exterior mass was the first consideration, convenience might have to be subordi-nated and some of its new possibilities sacrificed. Even then, however, the situa-tion was scarcely different from that of Colonial days. The four-square Colonialhouse was as schematic in arrangement as the revivalist temple. The interplay ofthe formal tendency with the practical we have now to trace. In form, the really significant houses of the new republic belong to several noveland distinct general types. Two of these were based on classical ideals, the moreimportant of them modelled on the temple: a simple rectangular mass with a col-umnar portico of its full width and height, crowned by a pediment. Its beginningsfall during the blackest days of the Revol
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectarchite, bookyear1922
