Liberty (general interest magazine)/Volume 2/Number 10/The American Home

The American Home

Early Americans built their houses after models with which they had been familiar in the old countries or as their skill, available building material, and climate permitted.

Two of the great discovering, conquering, and colonizing peoples, the English and the Spanish, got into regions not uncongenial to their home instincts.

This was more true of the English in tidewater Virginia than of the English in the rigors of New England climate. England is a land of estuaries.

It was even more true of the Spanish. They had been adapted at home for Mexico and southwestern America. They had recovered their land by fighting the infidels and they carried that zeal into the new country. They knew mountains, plains, and sandy wastes at home; how to campaign in them and build and live in them.

As the colonists became well-to-do or wealthy and able to gratify their tastes they built homes of distinction and they naturally modified their inherited models to conform to peculiarities of climate and mode of life.

American domestic architecture has a source to which it can go for inspiration if the people were wise enough to do so. Variations of climate and soil guided the founders of American homes. Nearly every region in the United States has a tradition of architecture. The colonial style of New England and of Virginia both responded to the climate. The Spanish in southern California were permitted by climate to continue their modifications of a Roman derivative. The Romans were an out-of-door people whose town houses even in such smaller places as Pompeii were on narrow streets, the equivalents of our alleys. The house walls gave them privacy. The inner court with its gardens gave them the sun and open air.

The English and French in South Carolina developed a type of architecture distinct and different from that of the Virginia tidewater and of New England bleakness. Some of the old farmhouses in the coves and on the slopes of the southern Appalachians with their conformity to use and climate, their grace of line, and their dignity in their surroundings rebuke the ugliness of the prosperous new subdivisions where well-to-do townspeople are pushing out into the beauty of the country.

American business architecture after years of experiment has found itself. The intelligence of the world now recognizes that the American work in steel and stone which recent years have given to the great American cities is an art fitly succeeding to that of the medieval cathedral builder.

But in the equally important work of giving the United States distinction, dignity, and beauty in homes the effort has mostly missed the mark. People put the French chateau in American valleys and the Spanish mission house on American hills or in the woods. They build conventional boxes or they take a type without thought of its surroundings.

The realtor says a Dutch colonial will sell and a Dutch colonial goes up.

Many of our millionaires have hobbies and enthusiasm. Mr. Ford once was interested in birds, Mr. Carnegie in libraries, Mr. Rockefeller in colleges, missions, laboratories. the hookworm, etc.

It could be wished that one would become interested in American domestic architecture and provide the money for a complete survey of original. American home building, region by region, and section by section.

That would produce a work of historical interest and a guide for intelligent and beautiful building with its roots in rich American traditions. It would help in the creation of the distinctive American nationality. The home would belong to the soil.