TRADITIONAL STYLES IN HOUSES 65

THE ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION

England has influenced our residence architecture more than
any other country. During the American Colonial period, Eng-
land underwent one of the few great European-wide style changes,
the transition from Gothic to Renaissance. English Gothic type
houses are now known as English Medieval, and the Renaissance
houses as Georgian. Both these types were in turn employed by
the American colonists, who faithfully copied English fashions.

English Medieval. The classification English Medieval covers
also such terms as Gothic, Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Cotswold,
or English cottage. Some of the houses were built of stone, but
most of them were made of heavy timber frames filled in with
brick, stone, or wattle, which was often plastered with clay or
stucco and then whitewashed. The thatched or tiled roofs were
steep in order to shed rain and snow. The small windows of tiny
diamond-shaped panes were irregularly spaced. The entire com-
position was usually picturesque as illustrated on page 73.

The old English style has been freely copied in the United
States, but it has now lost its popularity. Imitations of half-tim-
bered construction and thatched roofs are now understood to be
insincere and illogical, as well as unreasonably costly. Only free
adaptations of the style with plain stucco walls and larger windows
are at all feasible.

Early American. The seventeenth-century homes of the Eng-
lish-American colonists had the small casement windows of the
medieval style but the symmetrical plan of the Georgian style, with
a single room on each side of the central chimney, upstairs and
down, and a plain gable roof extending lower in the rear to cover
lean-to rooms. The second floor often projected over the first
floor so that occupants could shoot down at Indian enemies. As
the half-timbered walls suitable to England were too cold for New
England, a covering of weather boarding was applied over the
exterior walls. The low foundations were often made of boulders.
Many of the buildings were humble and crude, but they had the
dignity and restraint that come from plain, strong masses and struc-
tural honesty. See page 74. A few contemporary American
houses are based on the Early American type; the chief character-
istic employed is the overhanging second floor.