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| Early Architects and Builders | Styles and Descriptions |
| Bay Area Tradition | Classical Revival | Colonial Revival | Craftsman | Medieval Revival | Mission Revival |
| Prairie | Spanish Colonial Revival | Streamline Moderne | Tudor Revival | Victorian Queen Anne | |
Can You Find These Style Setters?
All of the buildings pictured on this page are in Palo Alto. Many are homes, so out of deference to their owners privacy, we show only the street part of each address. But can you find them nonetheless?
Admire these homes as you locate them, but quietly please. And, as you search, experience our town's richly varied architecture, look around you for its many unpictured gems, and have fun!
Queen Anne
Originally an English style formulated by Richard Norman Shaw in the 1860's, which bore little relation to the architecture of the time of Queen Anne. It went through many transformations before it arrived in California about 1885. Less formal than earlier Victorian styles, it sought to be picturesque with an asymmetrical plan, complex roof line, corner tower, and gables. Frequently displaying a variety of textures and colors in bands of different siding materials including brick, clapboard, and shingles. Having bay windows of various shapes, porches, and balconies, and a variety of predominantly classical ornamental details.
Craftsman
Easily confused with the Shingle Style, it is most often found in bungalows and in combination with the Colonial Revival. Its concern is with the handmade character of the construction and the use of natural materials, while Shingle Style structures are more concerned with form and texture. The Craftsman mode is the architectural manifestation of an early 20th century movement which fused English Arts and Crafts attitudes with an appreciation of a life lived close to nature. Craftsman buildings use materials in their unpainted wood. If bricks are used, they are usually clinker bricks, as if the man-made material had been subjected to forces of nature. The forms are generally ground-hugging with pronounced horizontal lines and shallow-gabled roofs with wide, sheltering overhangs. In Palo Alto, the Craftsman style merges into the Shingle style and the Colonial Revival.
Mission Revival
The Mission Revival style is a combination of exterior and interior features which varied as the style developed. Inspired by the romantic turn of the century California rediscovery of an hispanic past, the Mission Revival style combined varied exterior and interior features that changed somewhat as the style developed. Normally characterized by arches, hipped red tile roofs, shaped curvilinear parapets or gabled ends, and white stucco walls. Ogee arches and quatrefoil windows are typical details.
Streamline Moderne
A style focused upon the combining of simple curved and rectangular building forms, designed and ornamented to express the motion and speed of transportation modes that inspired its evolution.
Classical Revival
The revival of interest in Classical antiquity, dating from the mid-eighteenth century and especially notable in architecture.
Derived from Midwestern architecture, notably that of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is often found in combination with other styles. Horizontality is a primary emphasis of the mode. Design elements include ribbon windows with wooden casements, massive and rectangular supporting roofs of porches or verandahs, low, often hipped, roofs with projecting eaves, suppressed heavy-set chimneys, low terraces, and a distinctly horizontal flare to eave ends.
Tudor Revival
A Period Revival style that reflects and reinterprets the English Tudor architectural mode, in a twentieth century expression.
Colonial Revival
A phase of late nineteenth century American architecture which revived Georgian plans and forms, especially in domestic building. Characteristics include symmetrical facades with hip or gambrel roofs, classical detailing, pedimented entrance porticos, Palladian windows, and swag details. The style often uses Queen Anne or Classic revival stylistic details.
Bay Area Tradition
The Bay Area Tradition is a design philosophy which integrates in a playful and mannerist fashion fragments of the real or imaginary local past, current fashion, and whatever predilections the designer may have. In its first phase (1890-1920), its practioners were Bernard Maybeck, A. Page Brown, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, A.C. Schweinfurth, John Hudson Thomas, and at least in some of her work, Julia Morgan. The second phase, which began in the late 1920's, was established by William Wilson Wurster, Gardner Dailey, and Mario Corbett. In the middle 1960's, designs by Charles Moore, Joseph Esherick, and others signaled a new, third phase of the tradition.
Spanish Colonial Revival
The style is characterized by red-tiled roofs of low pitch, flat roofs surrounded by tiles parapets, occasionally by arched forms, and stucco or plaster walls. There may be carved or cast ornament of considerable elaboration, usually concentrated around the openings. Doorways may be flanked by columns or pilasters. Balconies, with railings of wrought iron or wood, are common features. So are window grilles, rejas, of wood with turned spindles or of iron. Windows often very much in size in a single elevation, when they are asymmetrically disposed with broad expanses of wall between. Structures are oriented inwardly to garden patios with pergolas, arcades, etc., rather than toward the street.
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