UTICA NY Walking Around,

STYLES & INFLUENCES:

The New American lifestyle, Foursquare House

Dec27/2018

You will always hear that architecture is much more than a style and, in the case of the
construction the popular bungalow houses, it was their capacity for the functional
requirements of their owners, both the rich and the middle class. That is why this type of
buildings reflected in North America a movements and architectural styles from the early
twentieth century until the 1940s.

With the beginning the 20th century, the expansion and consolidation of the railway
lines arose and why not in all the cardinal axes the City of Utica, due to its privileged
location as a center commercial exchange. The war economy, the First World War, caused
precedent the greater capacity of strategies and federal planning, without forgetting that
the American economy was (1914) in recession when the war broke out and, by 1918,
the internal economic boom it shaped the beginnings of a world leadership that put it
above a weakened Great Britain.

1
Page
New legislation in the New York State for improvements in the quality of life, social and
economic changes that were part of the three decades (1890-1920) with broad social
activism and political reforms throughout the country, for the problems caused by the
industrialization and urbanization among others. These changes resulted in the
expansion of the city and a new housing concept for the Progressive Era.
So in that last decade of the 19th century is when the old and pretentious models of
European influences were displaced by others of an informal nature more of American
way of life, resulting in American architecture of three variables according to the regions:
The Craftsman, Prairie style and in the northeast the Shingle style.

From the old publications of Victorian buildings, Americans have leafed through
thousands of catalogs and magazines with plans and details to build their ideal home.
The industrialization came to the woodworking with the exploitation of a resource as had
never been known, the diversification of products and materials for the construction of
new houses were incorporated with specialized factories that brought together all the
elements for a ready-cut house, a kit-house that reached a larger audience through
attractive advertising media, of course based on the concept of standardization, not only
from the design board, production, boxcar space on the railroad, but also in the efficiency
of its installation.

Although the term Bungalow has its origins in a simple and small house in India, it passes
to England and, during the 1890s to the west the United States. This concept quickly
became popular in the east of the country, with the Prairie Style, which is easily identified
by the strength of its horizontal lines as a complement to the landscape. The monthly
magazine The Craftsman (1901-16), the most important American publication of the Arts
and Crafts movement, interested in various topics such as architecture, furniture,
gardening, clothing and fine crafts, including ceramics, textiles, jewelry, and stained glass.
All this helped to produce an American visual concept as a way of life. In addition, he
was linked for more than 60 years at the State of northern area.

So it is no surprise to find two simple and discreet houses, of about twenty similar
throughout the city, in Newell Street, which reflect an evolution in the pursuit of such
simplicity in post-World War I American society, when he promoted widely that there
was no need to pay for services for an architect to build his house with drawings and
instructions from the catalog of a house-kit.
In particular, we refer to a typical American architecture, which emerges in the urban
2

neighborhoods of cities crossed by the country's railways, with economic attractiveness

Page
for middle class families and adequate dimensions for small lots in the expansion of the
country’s cities. This new style was called Box House, Cube, Double Cube for its
particular volumetric shape, symmetrical, square base with walls that rise two floors and
a half above the basement with cement floor, supporting its low hipped roof or pyramidal
roof with a gentle slope and characteristic attic-dormer. For its square footprint, its most
popular name was Foursquare, resulting in the latest evolution and improvements in
terms of the cost of housing that the American Bungalow, Prairie Style and Craftsman
Style.

In the vicinity of the old Faxton Hospital on Sunset Ave., more than 16 hectares were
urbanized, less two hundred lots was open, and in 1920 both Foursquare houses were
built with the same design, with an almost square proportional base of 26 x 32 feet,
evolved from the minimum model 22x22 feet. Its interior quadrants are strongly marked
with entrance hall, living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor to use the
wooden staircase in L (quarter-turn stair) to the three bedrooms and bathroom. About
20 feet from the sidewalk, a wide front porch on the entire front with a railing at 8 feet
wide, with three wooden columns that support it and its access steps, lead to the
centralized entrance with the same group of windows. They were constructions of the
wide use the wood, from the framing in yellow pine, cedar or cypress siding and shingles
on roof, in addition to the characteristic doors, windows, floors, and interiors; with
double-hipped dormers, but its chimney in brick. Its location on average solar 50x120,
though in a future rear expansion, in addition to taking into account a side road for a
future vehicle to the yard.

This typology, for urban lots of 40 feet, was widely promoted as the most popular of its
kind, with a prosperous and substantial appearance, free of large elaborations to maintain
its cost, had its variables according to the manufacturers but in essence the search for the
simplicity of pre-industrial times, where handicrafts showed the ability of workers, but
now its important purpose was to restore family values in a house in addition to leaving
the impression that there lived people the most desirable American type.

CESAR AL MARTINEZ
Forest Hill, NY
Dec 27,2018
3
Page