Romanesque
Revival Richardsonian
Romanesque Shingle
Style By Peter Barr Downtown Adrian’s most ambitious era of civic improvement took place during the period between the Civil War and the First World War, which coincided with the popularity in public architecture of the Romanesque Revival. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of modernization and industrial specialization, when Adrian and the surrounding community enjoyed both industrial and agricultural prosperity. As railroads wove together the nation, opportunities emerged for specialized industries to grow and meet the needs of consumers coast to coast. During this era, the primary industries in Adrian shifted from the construction and maintenance of railroad cars, which were relocating westward, to the weaving and distribution of durable wire “bounce back” fences for farmers and ranchers. In 1888, one of the country’s most important fence manufacturers, J. Wallace Page, moved his fencing operation from neighboring Hudson, Michigan, to Adrian, where he found readily available factory and warehouse space in buildings recently vacated by the railroad industry. Meanwhile the city was better connected to the outside world than ever with the addition of new railroad lines: the Wabash connected Adrian to Saint Louis and Detroit in 1881, the Lima Northern connected Adrian to Lima, Ohio, and Detroit in 1898, and the Toledo and Western connected Adrian to Toledo in 1901. The relative ease of transportation that these and other railroad lines provided encouraged farmers and food processors in the region to modernize and specialize, helping Lenawee County become by the turn of the century one of the top ten agricultural counties in the country, notably in the lucrative production of butter and cheese. Industrialists and food processors must have been attracted to the city not only because of its surrounding county’s rich agricultural resources but also because Adrian’s entrepreneurs were investing in their city’s infrastructure and updating its physical appearance. Private investors built the city’s municipal waterworks in 1883, installed electric street lighting in 1885, and constructed an electric trolley in 1888 (the first in Michigan). At the same time the city became home to a remarkable range of public and private buildings in the Romanesque Revival style. The term “Romanesque” (as opposed to the Romanesque Revival) describes a medieval style of European architecture found primarily on churches and monasteries built between A.D. 1000 and about 1250. Historians in the late 18th century coined this name, the “Romanesque,” because the half-rounded arches in these medieval buildings reminded them of structures still standing from the time of the ancient Romans—nearly a thousand years earlier. The
Romanesque style was first revived in America at the same time
as its more popular medieval cousin,
the Gothic Revival.
As early
as 1846, Romanesque half-round masonry arches appeared on
James Renwick’s design for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., a building that resembles a massive medieval church with
castle-like additions. This style of stone architecture was
subsequently adopted for other public buildings throughout
the country, remaining
popular until the middle of the twentieth century. The style remained popular for public buildings into the 1920s, when the Adrian Dominican Sisters chose the Romanesque style for the construction of several brick buildings with terracotta tile roofs on the campus of their women’s college, which they named Siena Heights College (originally St. Joseph’s College, now co-educational Siena Heights University) to honor the Italian, medieval home of the Dominican Saint Catherine of Siena. A distinctly different Romanesque Revival style, often referred to as the “Richardsonian” Romanesque, can be found in the Lenawee County Historical Museum, which was built in 1909 as the city’s public library. The style of this structure is named after the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, whose work was highly regarded and emulated by other architects following the publication of an influential book about Richardson’s life and work by Mariana van Rensselaer in 1888, two years after Richardson’s death. In the case of the Historical Museum, Richardson’s style was emulated by Paul O. Moratz of Bloomington, Illinois, who collaborated in its construction with Adrian contractor C. F. Matthes. The Historical Museum building is typical of Richardson’s style. Like the County Courthouse, it features Romanesque half-round arches, but otherwise presents a remarkably different appearance. While the Courthouse is highly symmetrical and decked out in contrasting colors and materials, the Historical Museum is asymmetrical and designed with greater material restraint that seems less applied and more integrated into the building’s structure. While architects rarely created Romanesque Revival homes in stone, several American designers adopted certain aspects of Richardson’s innovations to create a style of domestic architecture that historian Vincent Scully named the “Shingle Style” in 1955. In the 1880s, Shingle Style architects adopted Richardson’s boldly asymmetrical volumes for private summer seaside mansions for well-to-do clients along the coast of New England—substituting rough-cut cedar shingles in place of costly masonry. These Shingle Style homes were publicized in architectural magazines, which described them as “cottages with shingles.” Despite this favorable promotion, the style failed to become widely popular. Why? There are two main reasons. First, the style required irregularly shaped plans, which were ill-suited to most rectangular city lots. Second, the style also almost always required the services of a professional architect at a time when most Americans were accustomed to ordering house plans from mail-order catalogues. As a result, one finds relatively few Shingle Style houses outside of coastal New England. In Adrian, the vogue for cedar shingles at the turn-of-the-century is evident in the surface treatment of several homes—mostly on the second story. However, these shingles are applied to otherwise Queen Anne, Classical Revival, Colonial Revival, Foursquare or Craftsman homes—not Shingle Style homes. The term Shingle Style, as Scully defined it, only applies to those homes with asymmetrical plans, shingles, and no corner boards to divide the mass of the building into distinct wall-areas. Using this definition, the only truly Shingle Style house in Adrian is the 1897 Bowen House at 320 Dennis Street. On the first story, this home has a Richardsonian Romanesque structure featuring half-round arches, weighty masonry and an irregular plan of large geometric volumes. In addition, on the second story, this home has the Shingle Style’s taut skin of cedar shakes that are uninterrupted by corner boards. Romanesque Revival and Richardsonian Romanesque features to look for:
Shingle Style features to look for:
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