Foursquare By Peter Barr A Foursquare is a two-story house with a symmetrical square floor plan consisting of four square rooms on each floor, one in each corner. It has a prominent foundation that elevates the home—resulting in four square exterior walls that together form a cube, which is typically capped by a pyramidal roof. It often has a full-width porch supported by three or four columns. Essentially, the Foursquare can be thought of as the descendent of the cubic Italianate style. However, it emerged as a distinct form in the mid-1890s, following the Columbian Exposition, just as its ancestor faded from popularity. Lacking the predecessor’s decorative brackets, tall arched windows, high ceilings, small entry porch and cupola, it gained instead simple broad eaves, wider windows with large panes of glass, lower ceilings, tall foundation, a broad front porch and, frequently, a central roof dormer. The façades of the simplest Foursquares have two single windows on the second floor (one for each room facing the street) and either no dormer or a dormer with a single window. In more elaborate and expensive examples, windows were doubled or tripled and bowed outward to enliven the wall surface. The Foursquare, like the Octagon, is actually a form rather than a style, adaptable to the decorative elements from styles that were popular during the first third of the twentieth century. The oldest Foursquare houses in Adrian are the most elaborate and reflect perhaps, the lingering taste for Queen Anne-style complexity. Yet these earliest Foursquares are almost exclusively decorated with Classical Revival details. For example, the c. 1907 Albig House at 419 North Broad, features Ionic columns and dentils on the porch. Similarly, the 1913 Stevenson home at 311 Dennis Street, Adrian, features a Palladian window in the dormer. After 1910, Craftsman details begin to replace Classical Revival details on Foursquare structures. Perhaps the most obvious of the new details are evident at 112 South McKenzie Street, where tapered porch posts replace the classical columns and the rectilinear trim seems to frame the facade.
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