American Foursquare
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The American Foursquare or American Four Square is an American house style popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. A reaction to the ornate and mass produced elements of the Victorian and other Revival styles popular throughout the last half of the 19th century, the American Foursquare was plain, often incorporating handcrafted "honest" woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalogue). This style incorporates elements of the Prairie School and the Craftsman styles.
The hallmarks of the style include a basically square, boxy design, two-and-one-half stories high, usually with four large, boxy rooms to a floor, a center dormer, and a large front porch with wide stairs. The boxy shape provides a maximum amount of interior room space, to use a small city lot to best advantage. Other common features included a hipped roof, arched entries between common rooms, built-in cabinetry, and Craftsman-style woodwork.
A typical design would be as follows: First floor, from front to back, on one side, the living room and dining room; while on the other side, the entry room or foyer, stairway and kitchen. Sometimes a bathroom was also included. Second floor, front to back, on one side, bedroom, bathroom and bedroom; while on the other side, bedroom, stairway and bedroom. The bedrooms had a slightly longer dimension along the front and back of the house with side by side closets between the bedrooms. This gave a very efficient layout with a bedroom in each corner and a centralized bathroom and stairway. The top floor was generally just a big open space with one to four dormers. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace.
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[edit] Models
Foursquare Houses may be built with a variety of materials, including bricks and wood frames. Later models include built-in shelves and other amenities. Large tracts of these homes exist in older urban neighborhoods, particularly streetcar suburbs, but the design was used everywhere.
As with other styles in streetcar suburbs, it was tailored to relatively narrow lots, and was multi-story, allowing more square-footage on a smaller footprint. The American Foursquare style is occasionally revived in new developments, although its appeal is as a "traditional looking" style rather than a fully authentic one, often including modern 2-car attached garages and other features absent in originals, and typically build on larger lots.
[edit] History
The American Foursquare or "Prairie Box" was a post-Victorian style, which shared many features with the Prairie architecture pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. Many Foursquares are trimmed with tiled roofs, cornice-line brackets, or other details drawn from Craftsman, Italian Renaissance, or Mission architecture. Later Foursquares often had the same type of interiors as Bungalows with open floor plans, lots of built-ins, and fireplaces.
[edit] Mail-order era
The Foursquare was a popular mail-order era style along with the California bungalow. When one was ordered, it came in a boxcar with a book of directions and all the parts pre-cut and numbered for self-assembly. These homes are particularly common in neighborhoods near rail-lines built in this era. The largest mail-order house catalogue companies were Sears and Aladdin.
[edit] References
- Some pictures of Foursquares
- Riverside Manor, Everett WA
- Four-Square in St. Paul, MN
- An online diary of one family's efforts to renovate their 1901 Foursquare
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