In next month’s edition of The Beautiful Home, we visit American homes of the Greek Revival, the architectural style suited to Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Phidias and many of you, a style of thought and form from which we ascend. “Greek Revival” … well, there have been many “Greek” revivals in American architecture, all of the 19th Century, and much of the 20th Century is considered by some scholars a slow, revolving reinvention of Greek Revival. Lately, architects of the first rank have enlivened the Greek style, have strengthened its archeological vining, have relaxed its sacred strictures. In this, Thomas Gordon Smith led the vanguard, and his book, Classical Architecture: Rule and Invention, has been a guide for all who practice the craft of architecture.
We will visit the source of the style, Greece, its progenitor, Crete, and we will observe how a Greek house lives and how a Greek house learns, both in the four millennia of Greece, and in the 250 years of this nation. Though likely you know, the Founding Fathers chose the republican, Roman style of government and of design over the Greek democratic because republics are conducive to mediated development, while democracies invite desperate, often violent revolution, as Athens proved. In the years of our republic, the oldest of the world’s constitutional republics (and, arguably the world’s oldest nation state), our adopted Greek identity has subtly altered its fashion from temple style to domestic style, a change in fashion alike the change from honorable top hat to scrubbly jeans, you know, that long fashion of farmer drag.
Knossos Palace, Crete. image cedit: M. Curtis
Also next month, updates of The Beautiful Home series premier, and perhaps a video segment, possibly a home tour, probably of a Mid-Century Modern—several MCM tours already filmed are being polished.
Too, November will initiate this addition to The Beautiful Home: a subdivision of TBH styles into separate, numerous articled chapters, in truth, into separate zines, each zine an evolving treatise on a regional or period style of American domestic architecture. The “Jeffersonian” will be the first of 36 zines. Soon, readers will be invited to receive occasional updates to articles concerning an architectural style, the “Mid-Century Modern”, for example. Upcoming Mid-Century Modern articles include a brief history of the kitchen, a delineation of MCM regional variations, the top 5 MCM pools, an appreciation of The Rat Pack, a memoir of growing up in an MCM home, a visit with a practicing MCM architect, a travel guide to Palm Springs, et cetera … and of course, the series which traces an MCM house renovation.
Greek Revival Farmhouse. image credit, M. Curtis
We look forward to our next visits where you will be welcomed into Greek Revival temple homes of the American plain.
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Featured image: TravelView
