American Folk Art Buildings
architectural imagination and storied places rendered small
TYPES
Houses
Evolution and insults for an early and likely real 19th century building are
clearly read in a rendering probably late in that century.
A pridefully impressive center hall house, surely one of the best in town around 1830, merges late federal and early Greek Revival architecture. Likely on a New England main street -- perhaps now less desirable because busier and offering commercial opportunity in a growing town -- it loses a corner room, formal measure, and residential dominance as it gains a plunked-down and up-to-the moment
new Atlantic & Pacific store.
The store, early before A&P naming and typographic standardization, is also likely late 19th century and forced a functionally clunky rerouting of the downspout.
Two additions over time, not uncommonly, busy up the rear. The likely first, outer, works for some consonance along the left side; the second, less visible and piecemeal -- Finally, a bathroom! -- is shed-roofed and jumbled. Ensuring architectural purity was not a goal.
Firemen in the Northeast are said to have rendered in the 1930s or 1940 -- always it seems in a particular stucco-y style -- the houses of their town, to fill time and to raffle as good works at Christmas. These twelve are from two different sets.
Pennsylvania Dutch folk art sensibility brought richly to domestic architecture. Lettering on bottom suggests
that it comes from, or perhaps represents a house at, the Schuylkill Pennsylvania, almshouse. 26" wide.
Seen with a second by the same maker on the Types - Two Schulykill page.
161 Main Street is a dazzling little world of unafraid style, neighbor-alarming coloration, and yard-filling fancies unsanctioned by the homeowner's associaton.
For unknown reasons, a diorama works to show so much about that South -- the big house and seated lady, riverboat, cotton fields and pickers, with sliced watermelons on the far right. Suggesting history rather than cultural judgment and perhaps a dusty local museum, the unknown maker curiously also made in the same format a diorama of a 12th century Norman manor -- and surely others as well.
The 1930s gained the Golden Age of Hipped Roof Garages, behind the house at the end of two almost parallel grass-infilled concrete tracks.
25" long
The east chimney is of brick and the west of stone.
18" high
6" high
Made in Dutch-settled Cohoes New York
11" high
Varied Pennsylvania-like places to live from America Wonderland, described on Known & Real page.
Architecturally graphic and bold nine building townscape -- these five houses as well as a school, rail station, church, and moderne gas station -- made in the 1930s and, seemingly then just packed away, well preserved.
Christmas tree nicely seen at bay window.