Colonial Architecture
Colonial Architecture
 
 
 
In the 17th and 18th centuries the Spanish colonists of the Southwest
encountered a developed native building tradition in adobe, which employed readily available materials suited to the region's climate. Spanish colonial churches in Arizona and New Mexico, and the chain of missions from San
Diego to San Francisco in California, represent an accommodation with
Native American traditions of building and design. In New Mexico, the
Pueblo peoples reshaped the colonial style in terms of their adobe tradition
to create the most striking and freshest form of early architecture in what
was to become part of the U.S. Outside the Southwest, native styles did not
exert a lasting influence on colonial art and architecture.
 

The history of architecture in the rest of the U.S. reflects the development of European architecture, in particular English architecture. A considerable lag, however, occurred in the introduction of English styles; so periods often do
not correspond. Seventeenth-century English colonial architecture most resembles the late medieval forms that survived in rural England. Houses
were built in a range of sizes, although only more modest dwellings have survived. The Parson Capen House (1683), in Topsfield, Massachusetts, is
typical of the two-story New England house of overlapping weatherboards.
Its gables, overhangs, and lack of symmetry lend it a late medieval flavor.
In Virginia and Maryland, brick construction was preferred for the typically story-and-a-half homes with chimneys at both ends and a more nearly symmetrical facade, as in the Thomas Rolfe House (1652), in Surry County, Virginia. The architectural style of the Senate House (1676-95), in Kingston,
New York, and the manor house, Fort Crailo (1642), in Rensselaer, New
York, reflect the Dutch influence on the colony of New York.
 

Aside from fortifications, the principal nondomestic structures in the
17th-century colonies were places of worship. In Puritan New England,
colonists developed a less ecclesiastical style for their meeting houses,
which are similar in appearances to their private houses.

 

                             Back to Architecture  Back to Colonial Era