From Adobe Designs To Frank Lloyd Wright: The 250-Year Quest For a True American Architecture Style

After the United States was founded in 1776, leaders like Thomas Jefferson chose to emulate classical architecture when building its Washington, DC, capital as a nod to the democratic ideals of the Greek and Roman empires. Now, 250 years later, the style still feels like an American paragon to some: Last summer, the Trump administration released an executive order declaring its preference for “traditional and classical architecture” for American public federal buildings. Since then, it has attempted to erect a monumental arch on the National Mall and an oversized ballroom at the White House, both with loosely neoclassical designs. “President Trump seems to think that classicism in some form is truly American, but that was popular only at certain periods and among certain groups. There is no good reason why those have to typify an entire country,” says architectural historian and author Carol H. Krinsky, PhD. “It wasn’t the first or the only architectural style promoted in the lands that eventually joined as the United States.” In fact, the pursuit of a truly American design style—one that turns away from imitation and toward exploration—has been a focus for architects since this country was founded. What has resulted is not a singular vision, but rather a wide variety of technology-, culture-, and vernacular-driven movements throughout the nation’s architectural history. “When we’re talking about an American architectural style, for us, it’s less about one signature aesthetic, but rather a set of values that architecture projects reflect,” explains Aileen Fuchs, the president and executive director of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. “American style is innovation; it’s reinvention; it’s adaptation. Those things are more American than any one look.” Especially in a country as large as the United States, to synthesize the built environment into a one-size-fits-all look is futile. “It is impossible to characterize any architecture over 3,000 miles east to west, with a multicultural population from its beginnings, as representing the entire country and over more than two centuries,” says Dr. Krinsky. Instead, a series of architectural “archetypes” have come to represent distinct periods in America’s societal goals, values, and global reputation since its founding. And it’s these moments that have come to define American architecture. Adobe built some of the original homesteads Long before Europeans settled in the United States, Native Americans lived across its lands in homes built with local natural materials. These structures were regionally and culturally inspired, and largely destroyed during rapid and callous colonization. In the canon of American architecture, “Indigenous architecture has traditionally been ignored altogether until recently when we are trying to salvage what has been lost and to apologize for all the destruction in the past,” says J. Philip Gruen, a professor at Washington State University’s Pullman School of Design and Construction. However, one of the most physically enduring typologies is the prehistoric great houses of the Pueblo people in New Mexico. As the first permanent structures in this region of the US, these residences evolved from stone dwellings utilizing cave spaces to the extraordinary multistory adobe (clay, stone, and sod) settlements that still exist in Taos today. These flat-roofed, terraced structures are constructed around a central plaza, which traditionally hosted ceremonial events. In contemporary design, this architectural style continues to inspire the look and feel of many buildings in the American Southwest, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s own Taliesin West home in Scottsdale, Arizona. The rise of Chicago skyscrapers advanced architecture across the globe In the early 19th century, America’s urban cities were largely built of low-rise town houses and mid-rise apartment buildings. The tallest structures in town were often church steeples and clock towers. Much of this changed in 1835, following the Great Fire in Chicago that destroyed much of the city’s wood buildings. The tragedy prompted the city’s architects to explore a new fireproof technology: structural iron. Another benefit? Buildings framed with this material could stretch to new heights and hold an unprecedented amount of architectural weight. Paired with the invention of the modern elevator, a late-1800s building boom led to the invention of the skyscraper. “The skyscraper is a distinctly American innovation tied to ambition, technology, and power,” says Fuchs. The fact that developers, owners, and cities all strived to build the tallest building in the years that followed is proof to the statement. Today, modern metropolises with soaring towers and dynamic skylines have roots in America, but these original designs still pulled from the architectural fashions of Europe, reflecting elongated palazzos and classical principles in their façades, and the allusion to high society that came with them. In this aesthetic tradition, Chicago’s 1885-built Home Insurance Building by architect Willam LeBaron Jenney featured a 10-story stone façade with Corinthian pilasters and arcade windows in a classical style, while the 1888 Rookery Building, designed by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root, has a composite façade influenced by historic French, Italian, and Moorish architecture. A shingled American home While offices and boutiques occupied much of the original skyscrapers, other late-19th- and early-20th-century architects began seeking to define an American architectural style through housing. Architects in New England were perhaps the most successful at this task when they developed shingle-style homes. Clad in continuous shingles from the façade to the roof, these properties had multiple pitched roofs, asymmetrical volumes, and rambling open floor plans. They were first designed by Henry Hobson Richardson; McKim, Mead, and White; William Ralph Emerson; Peabody and Stearns; and Bruce Price in the 1890s. “At a time when everything being built in America was influenced by the work of the École des Beaux Arts, these shingled houses were totally original,” opines architect and author Stuart Cohen. The enduring cult of Frank Lloyd Wright Despite America’s legacy in vertical design, this isn’t often the picture of US design that comes to mind. “When people think of an American architect, they generally think of Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Gruen. “His prairie-style buildings from the early 20th century hug the landscape and have these long, cantilevered edges that mirror the flatness of the prairie, and therefore America, with all its space and openness. Nature in America has always been seen that way.” Wright was obsessed with the idea of a true American design style—and to some historians, he achieved it. “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School, which began in the 1890s but had all but disappeared by 1920, was one of the only totally original American architecture styles,” says Cohen. Wright’s concept of “organic architecture” required designs to be inherently local, inspired by the land on which they were built. Later, through his Usonian house designs in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Wright explored single-family homes that achieved similar “American” ideals for the middle class: ownership, togetherness, and flexibility. He even named this style after Usonia, an alternative named for the country originally coined by Scottish writer James Duff Law to eliminate the ambiguity that came with “America.” With more paired-back ornamentation, the homes were built on a budget but still with the natural materials and landscape connection that the architect felt all good design required. The “American Dream” of the suburbs Postwar suburbs like Levittown in Nassau County, New York, continued this conversation, with rows of identical abodes offered to white soldiers and their families without requiring a down payment and for very low monthly mortgages. While suburbanization of the US purported the creation of more inclusive neighborhoods, this (and most) program’s exclusionary, racist policy furthered urban segregation. Non-white families continued to live in divested cities while their white peers fled en masse to these newly created suburbs. Across the country, the designs of these new tracts of suburban homes were largely ranch-style, with pitched roofs, minimal ornamentation, and L- or U-shaped plans to allow for a modest back garden on a small lot. On the West Coast, however, designs differed. Developed by Joseph Eichler, Eichler houses (one of the only postwar suburb programs that allowed Black folks to purchase), emphasized on indoor-outdoor living and open-air atriums, taking their design inspirations from California weather and European modernism. Disneyland, Googie, and Las Vegas One of the most defining features of many American cities, towns, and villages is that their design centers around the car. In the American West, cities like LA were rebuilt to support the invention’s widespread use. Highways allowed drivers to easily traverse far more of the country than ever before, sparking the inception of the road trip. Beginning in the 1940s, Southern California was overtaken by Googie architecture, Space Age–inspired designs that presented the region as a shining beacon of futurism through its oft-exaggerated geometric forms. Much of this architecture was designed to catch the eye of road-trippers from the highway, enticing them to stop for a bit of shopping or a meal at a roadside café or diner. “What we might be able to say is that an American architectural method is the notion of the inauthentic,” says Gruen. “I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all, but something like Disneyland or Las Vegas is arguably an American phenomenon because of the culture of consumerism they represent.” The most-American architecture has multiple histories What is perhaps most authentically American about any of the nation’s architectural styles is it melting-pot nature. Our buildings, cities, and space plans borrow from cultures all over the world, often influenced by regional vernacular, materials, and lifestyles. And as society has experienced 250 years of change, so too, have the meanings of these works. “When we ask, ‘What is American architecture?’ we’re asking: ‘What kind of society are we building?’” says Fuchs. “How do our build and design choices reflect that over time?” Suburbanization was once the most progressive design in the US’s architectural canon, she adds, whereas now, architects are exploring how to “break them open” and create mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods in its place. “Distinctly American architecture is not a single style,” says Fuchs. “It’s a spirit of experimentation and, honestly, a reflection of an evolving and often contested national identity.”