American Architecture

I

Introduction

American Architecture, architecture that developed in the European colonies in America and subsequently in the United States. This development covers a period of almost five centuries, beginning with the establishment of Saint Augustine in Florida in 1565, English settlement along the Atlantic Coast in 1585, and Spanish settlement in New Mexico in 1598. Settlers from France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, and other countries arrived in the 1600s.

The full history of building in what became the United States reaches back 10,000 years, but European settlers almost universally ignored the many building traditions of Native American peoples. Over the five centuries after European arrival, transplanted European building traditions were gradually reshaped and redefined. They emerged as distinctly American building traditions by the early 19th century. Each of the European colonies in North America developed its own building tradition.

In the 1800s innovations in technology and the spread of railroads made possible the rapid growth of the Midwest and West. Mass-produced building parts, manufactured in the East, could be ordered from catalogs and shipped West by rail. A major fire in 1871 destroyed downtown Chicago, Illinois, and offered building opportunities for American architects, who over the next 25 years developed the first skyscrapers. This brand-new building type, devised in the United States, influenced architecture around the world from the late 1800s into the 2000s. During the 20th century architects and entrepreneurs vied to build the tallest skyscraper—a contest that continues today. Another unique building type developed in America was the single-family suburban house—a detached or stand-alone building, as opposed to the attached or semiattached suburban house popular elsewhere. It, too, influenced architecture outside the United States.

The emigration of European architects in the 1930s and 1940s brought European modernism to the United States, and in the second half of the 20th century America became a major architectural force. By the late 1900s and early 2000s American architects worked around the globe, while architects from Japan and Spain, to mention only two examples, received commissions for major public buildings in the United States.

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II

Native American Architecture

Conservative estimates suggest that at least 24 million indigenous people lived in North America, the Caribbean, and what is now Mexico when navigator Christopher Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492. The native peoples can be classified in large cultural groups that together spoke as many as 600 languages. Over thousands of years they had developed unique methods of building adapted to the prevailing cultural and climatic conditions of their respective regions. In nearly all areas except the arid high plains and the Great Basin of the West and Southwest, individuals lived as part of family groups in extended communal houses. The arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s brought the horse to North America. The plains tribes adopted a nomadic way of life as a result, following on horseback enormous herds of bison (also called buffalo) and basing their culture on coexistence with the bison.

In the Northeast woodlands, Native Americans built dwellings with light wooden frames made of saplings and covered with large slabs of bark, or sometimes with hides. They could easily remove these coverings for better ventilation in the summer months. West of Lake Ontario, the indigenous peoples made similar although slightly smaller dwellings. On the plains they built portable cone-shaped dwellings called tipis (also spelled tepees), which they covered with tanned buffalo hides. In the Pacific Northwest, peoples who based their existence on salmon fishing fashioned large communal houses from broad split planks of cedar or redwood. In the arid Southwest, villages of clustered, stacked houses were built of stone in higher elevations and of sun-dried adobe brick along major rivers such as the Rio Grande.

Nearly all of these house forms, intimately connected with the pattern of life of indigenous groups, were rejected by the new European arrivals. Such forms were retained only in the American Southwest and in Mexico, where indigenous structures tended to resemble buildings of rural Spain. In those regions, Spanish arrivals used Native American labor to build presidios (military forts), haciendas (large estates), and mission churches on a scale larger than the natives used for their own buildings. But Europeans favored their own building forms and practices in virtually every other area they controlled in America. European settlers thus gradually forgot the ways in which native building traditions responded to the local environment. See also Native American Architecture.

III

The Colonial Period: 1500 to 1783

In the 16th century, many European nations claimed portions of the North American continent as colonial possessions. First to arrive were the Spanish, in the islands of the Caribbean Sea and in Mexico. Soon afterward Spanish exploration led to settlement of parts of Florida and then in what later became Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Other Spanish exploratory expeditions ventured north from Mexico into what became New Mexico and along the coastal area of what is now southern California.

In the 1600s French expeditions penetrated the interior of the North American continent, moving down the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-17th century The Netherlands had established small colonies along the Hudson River (in what is now New York State), while the Swedes established a few settlements along the lower part of the Delaware River. The British founded several colonies along Chesapeake Bay in a region they named Virginia and farther north in an area they soon called New England. By the end of the 17th century the British had absorbed Dutch and Swedish colonies, so that a series of British colonial settlements extended from what was later South Carolina north to what became Maine.

Each group of colonists erected buildings reminiscent of those in their homeland, resulting in a highly regional architecture based on the vernacular building traditions (those of the common people) of Spain, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, and England. Moreover, two separate regional English colonial architectures resulted from the difference in social, economic, and religious objectives of English settlers of the northern coastal colonies and English settlers of the southern coastal colonies. During the colonial period, America lacked the kind of architecturally educated patrons who might sponsor the grand and formal styles of architecture then current in European countries. It also lacked the money to make that architecture possible.

A

The Spanish Colonies

Spanish priests carried with them the memory of elaborate churches in Spain and Mexico on their assignments to build mission churches in Texas, California, and New Mexico. Where possible, as around San Antonio, Texas, along the coastal road in California, and in southern Arizona, they built mission churches that attempted to emulate in their details and their arrangement of massive forms the churches of the 1600s and 1700s in Spain and Mexico. One of the most striking examples is the mission church of San Xavier del Bac (1783-1797) near Tucson, Arizona. This rather simple yet elegant church was under construction while along the Atlantic seaboard the newly independent United States invented its Constitution, created its new government, and tried to shape a distinctly American architecture. Mission Santa Barbara (1815-1820), on the southern Californian coast, was one of the last Spanish mission churches built in what became United States territory. The builders based its facade on a temple shown in a Spanish translation of an ancient Roman book on architecture by Vitruvius.

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