Discovering Comfort

By Gordon Bock

Foursquare, Tudor Revival, Mission, bungalow. All are familiar terms today, but 30 years ago these houses were snubbed by architectural historians as unworthy of study.

It took a January 1982 article in Old-House Journal and a 1986 book commissioned by the magazine to put post-Victorian houses on the map. The article, written by OHJ editors Clem Labine and Patricia Poore, was Comfortable House, from a line in a 1914 book extolling the joys of warm rooms, hot water, tight windows, and dry basements.

In the book of the same name, published by MIT Press, author Alan Gowans notes that until the end of the 19th century, houses had largely been uncomfortable, whether grand palace or sturdy homestead. Even so characteristically American forms as the early 19th-century Classical Revival temple-house and the High Picturesque mansion of the 1860s and 1870s subordinated comfort to the making of statements about ideology and social status, he writes.

OHJ founder Labine and scholar Gowans, former chair of the University of Victoria history in art department who died in 2001, are credited with popularizing the label Foursquare. More important than coining any one term, however, was the idea that architectural styles shaped by Americans for Americans of average means were worth serious scrutiny.

A Canadian, Gowans gives Colonial Revival a particularly interesting analysis. He begins by defining colonial houses as visual statements of origin by settlers from throughout Europe. Thus he saw colonial as encompassing not only Georgian and Adam mansions, gambrel-roofed Dutch dwellings, and stuccoed Mission houses, but also the French Quebecois form, to be found in such scattered locations as Louisiana's Cajun country and Cleveland's Shaker Heights.

John Crosby Freeman, a former University of Victoria colleague of Gowans, called him a brave and sometimes solitary champion of art and architecture as cultural expression. The Comfortable House and his Images of American Living will remain popular among the real consumers of American culture, who are undeterred by academic fashions. 

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