March 2009 » book review

Going Home

Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House
by Russell Versaci
The Taunton Press, Newtown, CT; 2008
265 pages; hardcover; more than 200 color and b&w images; $45
ISBN 978-1-56158-867-1

Reviewed by Jacob Albert

"Roots" and "home" are both words that evoke powerful feelings of belonging, security and identity. These feelings have attached themselves to traditional house forms. When we think of home many of us think, depending on where we come from, of the New England saltbox, the Creole cottage or the Pennsylvania stone farmhouse, for example. Even if we grew up in a suburban tract house we may still identify with one of the traditional types that the tract house refers to. But the vast majority of suburban houses, even some designed by architects, miss the mark and fall short of the original models. The proportions aren't right; the details are off; and the style may have no connection to the place, its climate or history.

In Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House, Russell Versaci demonstrates how to get it right. Principal of Russell Versaci Architecture in Middleburg, VA, and also author of Creating the New Old House, Versaci has been a leading advocate of authentic traditional architecture and a guide to how it can be done today. This handsome book will be of interest to architects, their clients and the general reader.

Versaci argues that we can raise the standard of house design today by reconnecting with the traditions of the past. He guides us through a careful study of early American houses and encourages us to emulate them to relearn their pleasing qualities of scale and proportion. Just as regional American styles evolved over time and adapted to changing conditions, houses today, even when rooted in older traditions, can continue to develop to suit modern ways of living.

Versaci's journey in Roots of Home traces the origins of familiar American house styles. He shows that the styles of early America were not arbitrary window dressing but were based on traditions brought by the colonists from their mother countries and adapted to the climates and materials they found here. The differences in the colonists' national traditions and in the natural environments in which they settled gave rise to the rich variety of regional styles across America.

The book is organized into sections exploring the Spanish, French, English and Continental (German, Swedish and Dutch) heritage. Within these broad divisions Versaci devotes a chapter to each of ten distinct "cradles of home" American regions: Florida, Southwest Borderlands, Alta California, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys, the Gulf Coast, Chesapeake Bay, New England, the Carolina Low Country, the Delaware Valley and the Hudson Valley.

The centerpiece of each chapter is a new or newly expanded or remodeled house based on the traditions of the region. These examples range from an expanded Dutch Colonial cottage on the Connecticut River by Donald Rattner to a new hacienda in Texas by Michael Imber and a new St. Augustine style house in Rosemary Beach, FL, by Jason Dunham of Cooper Johnson Smith. The new houses are found in the country, suburb, town and in New Urbanist developments. Versaci's exposition of what was good about traditional house design parallels the New Urbanist analysis of traditional town design.

Versaci also brings to light beautiful work by Colonial Revival architects of the early-20th century. R. Brognard Okie, who developed a synthesis of the Pennsylvania farmhouse and the Cotswold cottage in Bucks County in the 1910s and 1940s, is a particularly delightful revelation. The early to mid 20th-century revivalists, including Okie, Wallace Neff, A. Hays Town, Dwight James Baum and Lewis Edmund Crook, offer inspiration to present-day traditional architects and show how creative they can be designing in a traditional mode.

Many of the old houses illustrated are modest, since resources in colonial America were limited. By carefully emulating these early houses, the new ones avoid the bombastic pretentiousness of the "McMansion." In some cases, details and materials that were simple and modest in the past may come at a high price today. But the efficiency and scale of colonial houses seem ever more appropriate in our own time of economic contraction and dwindling energy supplies.

In each chapter, Versaci illustrates the roots of the new work with a well-chosen classic colonial house of the region in a two-page spread labeled "History Preserved." A few of these examples, like the James Pitot house in New Orleans, are famous, but most are lesser known. The chapters are also enlivened by two types of sidebars: "Telling Detail" and "Wordsmith." The former illustrates and describes features that define the styles, such as the "pent roof and eaves" of Pennsylvania farmhouses and the "Monterey balcony" characteristic of Spanish Colonial houses in California, while the latter explains technical terms such as "tapia," a Spanish term for a primitive form of concrete made of lime, sand, oyster shells and water that came to be known as "tabby" along the Florida coast, and "gambrel" – the word for a horse's hind leg, whose bent shape is similar to that of a gambrel roof.

The book is brimming with interesting tidbits. We learn that it was the Swedes, who in their short-lived 17th-century settlement in New Jersey, introduced the log cabin, that primal iconic house form, to America. One group that gets short shrift in this story is Native Americans. We are told that "the history of America began" with the colonial settlements of Spain, France and England. But it can't be denied that American house design did grow primarily from these colonial roots and that the sophisticated ancient pueblos of the Southwest were largely unknown or ignored.

In his search for roots, Versaci focuses on Colonial and Colonial Revival architecture and does not deal with the exuberant but impure efflorescence of the third quarter of the 19th century. He does locate the Modernist California ranch house within the tradition of the Spanish rancho.

After reading Roots of Home, one will have a sharpened eye for the features of each regional style, an understanding of where it comes from, and will know what the real thing looks like. In addition, the book fosters an appreciation of how skillful architects today, through careful study of the past, are designing new houses that are as good as the old ones.  

«BACK TO MARCH 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed