You are here

John F. Clark House

-A A +A
c. 1882, William Walker and Sons. 95 Broad St. (at Titus St.)

This nicely preserved Queen Anne house displays a typical mix of clapboard and cut shingle sheathing. Typically, too, its entrance porch, with turned columns and rondels in paneled friezes, nestles against a projecting gable with an exposed chimney. The chimney serves as a spine for an inventive stack of enclosing shapes, varied from floor to floor—polygonal for a downstairs bay, rectangular for an upstairs bay, triangular for the attic. This stack also inverts an expected order of size. Thus the gable at the top is the largest element, the polygonal bay at the bottom the smallest. Just so with the expansion of forms in front, from smaller to larger as the building rises, with an inset arc in the attic gable to increase its apparent swell. Unexpected in the normal order of architectural composition, such interaction among forms is typical for the Queen Anne style. Throughout, Victorian showiness is tempered by combinations of form which invoke domestic intimacy and informality.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.

If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.

SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.

,