William G. Low House

An icon of American architecture, the William G. Low House was a seaside cottage at 3 Low Lane in Bristol, Rhode Island. Designed in 1886-87 by architect Charles Follen McKim of the New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White, the house — with its single, exaggerated, 140-foot-long gable — embodied the tenets of Shingle Style architecture. These included horizontality, simplified massing and geometry, minimal ornamentation, and the blending of interior and exterior spaces.

The architectural historian Vincent Scully saw it as "at once a climax and a kind of conclusion" for McKim, since its "prototypal form ... was almost immediately to be abandoned for the more conventionally conceived columns and pediments of McKim, Mead, and White's later buildings."[1]

Just prior to its 1962 demolition, the house was documented with measured drawings and photographs by the Historic American Buildings Survey.[2]

"Although little known in its own time, the Low House has come to represent the high mark of the Shingle Style."[3]

References

  1. ^ Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (Yale University Press, 1955, revised 1971), p. 153.
  2. ^ "William G. Low House, 3 Low Lane, Bristol, Bristol County, RI". Historic American Building Survey. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.ri0006. 
  3. ^ Leland M. Roth, American Architecture: A History (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), p. 246.

External links