File:Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic (1922) (14595655308).jpg

Identifier: domesticarchite00kimb (find matches)
Title: Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: Kimball, Fiske, 1888-1955 New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Committee on Education
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic Architecture, Colonial
Publisher: New York, C. Scribner's Sons
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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Figure 195. Stairs of the Gore house, Waltham. Between 1799 and 1804Courtesy of Miss N. D. Tupper Stairs in the Colonial period had been composed exclusively ot straight runs ofsteps. On the eve of the Revolution had appeared a tendency to curve the land-ings or the hand-rail. The new style involved curving the runs themselves, moreor less sharply. Although this brought winders, or wedge-shaped treads, againinto use, they did not now, as in the seventeenth century, taper to nothing against 235 AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE a newel post, but surrounded an open well of greater or less size. The first stairsof this sort in America seem to have been those of the Bingham house in Phila-delphia, where the self-supporting broad stairway of fine white marble . . . gavea truly Roman elegance to the passage. 1 At the Woodlands (figure 109) and in many later houses the staircase hasstraight runs part-way but makes semicircular turns at the ends. Bulfinch, who
Text Appearing After Image:
Figure 196. Vestibule of the Woodlands, Philadelphia. 1788Courtesy of Ogden Codman had, in the Barrell house, ingeniously fitted a double stair, chiefly with straightruns, in a hall with semicircular ends (figures 120 and 194), used, in the ThomasRussell house, Charlestown, a stair about a broad central well of this form. Mcln-tire sketched it, and imitated it in the Hasket Derby house. Latrobe used it inthe Markoe house in Philadelphia and the Van Ness house (figures 111 and 113).In these and other houses the well was kept of regular form, whether steps sur-rounded it on all sides or landings intervened. 1 Griswold, The Republican Court (1856), p. 262.236 HOUSES OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC A staircase itself semicircular, without any straight portion, and with a semi-circular well, was used by Bulfinch in the Hersey Derby house (1799), and elsewhere.The other side of the well might also be rounded to make a full circle, as in theManigault house in Charleston, the Gore house (1799-1804, fig

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