Italianate architecture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In the course of the history of Classical architecture, an Italianate style of architecture was a distinct nineteenth-century phase, in which Italian sixteenth-century models and architectural vocabulary, which had served as inspiration for both Palladianism and Neoclassicism, were now synthesized with picturesque aesthetics, to create an architecture that, though it was also characterized as "Neo-Renaissance", was essentially of its own time. "The backward look transforms its object," Siegfried Giedion wrote of historicist architectural styles in Space, Time and Architecture ; "every spectator at every period—at every moment, indeed—inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature."
Elements of the style
Key visual components of this style include:
- Low-pitched or flat roofs; roof is frequently hipped
- Projecting eaves supported by corbels
- Imposing cornice structures
- Pedimented windows and doors
- Arch-headed, pedimented or Serlian windows with pronounced architraves and archivolts
- Tall first floor windows suggesting a piano nobile
- Angled bay windows
- Attics with a row of awning windows between the eave brackets
- Glazed doors
- Belvedere or machicolated signorial towers
- Cupolas
- Quoins
- Loggias
- Balconies with wrought-iron railings, or Renaissance balustrading
- Balustrades concealing the roof-scape
- About 15% of Italianate houses in the United States include a tower