Tudor Revival architecture
Tudor Revival architecture, also known as mock Tudor in the UK, first manifested in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture, in reality it usually took the style of English vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages that had survived into the Tudor period.
The style later became an influence elsewhere, especially the British colonies. For example, in New Zealand, the architect Francis Petre adapted the style for the local climate. In Singapore, then a British colony, architects such as Regent Alfred John Bidwell pioneered what became known as the Black and White House. The earliest examples of the style originate with the works of such eminent architects as Norman Shaw and George Devey, in what at the time was considered Neo-Tudor design.
Tudorbethan is a subset of Tudor Revival architecture that eliminated some of the more complex aspects of Jacobethan in favour of more domestic styles of "Merrie England", which were cosier and quaint. It was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.
Identification
Today, the term 'Tudor architecture' usually refers to buildings constructed during the reigns of the first four Tudor monarchs, between about 1485 and 1560, perhaps best exemplified by the oldest parts of Hampton Court Palace. The historian Malcolm Airs, in his study The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History, considers the replacement of the private castle by the country house as "the seat of power and the centre of hospitality" to be "one of the great achievements of the Tudor age". Subsequent changes in court fashion saw the emergence of Elizabethan architecture among the elite, who built what are now called prodigy houses in a distinctive version of Renaissance architecture. Elizabeth I herself built almost nothing, her father having left over 50 palaces and houses. Outside court circles styles were much more slow-moving, and essentially "Tudor" buildings continued to be built, eventually merging into a general English vernacular style.When the style was revived, the emphasis was typically on the simple, rustic, and the less impressive aspects of Tudor architecture, imitating in this way medieval houses and rural cottages. Although the style follows these more modest characteristics, items such as steeply pitched-roofs, half-timbering often infilled with herringbone brickwork, tall mullioned windows, high chimneys, jettied first floors above pillared porches, dormer windows supported by consoles, and even at times thatched roofs, gave Tudor Revival its more striking effects.
History
Although the Gothic style remained popular in Britain well into the Renaissance and Baroque periods, by the end of the 16th century, it had subsided completely in the wake of classicism. While domestic and palace architecture changed rapidly according to contemporary taste, few notable churches were constructed after the Reformation; instead, old gothic buildings were retained and adapted to Protestant use. In contexts where conservatism and traditionalism had great value building additions and annexes were often designed to blend or harmonize rather than contrast with the archaic style of the older work. Christopher Wren's steeple of St Dunstan-in-the-East and Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, and Nicholas Hawksmoor's Codrington Library and Front Quad at All Souls College, Oxford are the most notable examples of "Gothic survival" in the Baroque period.As the last and most recent phase of the Gothic period, the Tudor style had the most secular survivals in 17th and 18th-century England; many older buildings were rebuilt, added to, or redecorated with ornament in the Tudor period. As such, the Tudor style had perhaps an over-sized influence on the image formed by the Georgians of their medieval past. Before the various phases of medieval architecture had been well identified and studied, and designers such as A.W.N. Pugin and George Gilbert Scott had advocated for the use of the Decorated gothic rather than the perpendicular, Tudor elements figured heavily in the early examples of the Gothic Revival. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House at Twickenham features elements derived from late gothic precedents.
In the group of nine cottages at Blaise Hamlet, built around 1810–1811 by a Bristol banker for his retired employees, John Nash demonstrated a remarkably forward-looking selective appropriation of Tudor vernacular architecture such as fancy twisted brick chimney-stacks to make picturesque and comfortable middle-class homes. Several have thatched roofs, some at two levels in a completely unnecessary but very picturesque way. Nash published an illustrated book on the group; this was a formula with a future. In contrast with Nash's Blaise Hamlet, Dalmeny House near Edinburgh, built in 1817 for Archibald Primrose, 4th Earl of Rosebery, is a large stately home in a revival of the early Tudor palace style, drawing in particular from East Barsham Manor in Norfolk, built. At this time the style was known as "Old English", and considered especially appropriate for vicarages and rectories, partly because they were usually next to the church, which was likely to be Gothic, and because the larger windows patrons wanted were easier to work into the style than into a "pointed" Gothic. At this stage it was essentially a style for the country rather than houses in towns. Tudor style was "almost infinitely adaptable, particularly to low, spreading houses", After about 1850 "Old English" came to mean a rather different style based on vernacular architecture, although some Tudor features such as tall brick chimneys often remained.
Examples of the Tudor or Perpendicular Gothic period also influenced new institutional buildings beginning in the 1820s. The architect of Dalmeny, William Wilkins, followed the precedent of Wren and Hawksmoor in designing new quads for various Cambridge colleges in a historic mode including New Court, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge ; Front Court, King's College, Cambridge ; and New Court, Trinity College, Cambridge. In a similar vein, Henry Hutchinson & Thomas Rickman contributed the New Court and Bridge of Sighs at St. John's College, Cambridge. St. Luke's, Chelsea by James Savage is one of the finest early revivalist church buildings in England and shows the influence of Perpendicular Gothic design.
20th century
In the early part of the 20th century, one of the exponents who developed the style further was Edwin Lutyens. At The Deanery in Berkshire, 1899,, where the client was the editor of the influential magazine Country Life, details like the openwork brick balustrade, the many-paned oriel window and facetted staircase tower, the shadowed windows under the eaves, or the prominent clustered chimneys were conventional Tudor Revival borrowings, some of which Lutyens was to remake in his own style, that already predominates in the dark recessed entryway, the confident massing, and his signature semi-circular terrace steps. This is Tudorbethan at its best, free in ground plan, stripped of cuteness, yet warmly vernacular in effect, familiar though new, eminently liveable. The Deanery was another example of the "naturalistic" approach; an anonymous reviewer for Country Life in 1903 wrote; "So naturally has the house been planned that it seems to have grown out of the landscape rather than to have been fitted into it". An example of Tudorbethan architecture was that seen at Greaves Hall, which was built in 1900 as a mansion house for the Scarisbrick family. Many of the features of the original building could still be seen until it was demolished in 2009.Later came Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and Blair Imrie who made their names as Tudor style architects. Lutyens though took the style away from what is generally understood as Tudor Revival creating a further highly personalised style of his own. His buildings coupled with their often accompanying gardens by Gertrude Jekyll, while in a style thought of as "olde world" would not be recognisable to inhabitants of the 16th century. Another noted practitioner was George A. Crawley. A decorator and designer, rather than an architect, Crawley greatly expanded the original medieval hall house, Crowhurst Place in Surrey, firstly for himself and latterly for Consuelo Vanderbilt. The result, "remarkable in its own right", saw Crawley add extensions, chimneys, gables, linenfold panelling and large amounts of half-timbering. Martin Conway, writing in Country Life, considered Crawley's reconstruction gave the remains of the original manor, "a beauty far greater than was ever theirs in the days of its newness". Ian Nairn, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, in the 1971 revised Surrey Pevsner Buildings of England, note the sense of escapism which inspired much of the Tudor Revival, calling Crowhurst, "an extreme example of the English flight from reality around the 1914–18 war".
File:Saitta House Dyker Heights.JPG|thumb|upright=1.1|Tudor Revival features on the 1899 Saitta House, a Queen Anne Victorian, located in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, New York
Following the First World War many London outer suburbs had developments of houses in the style, all reflecting the taste for nostalgia for rural values. In the first half of the 20th century, increasingly minimal "Tudor" references for "instant" atmosphere in speculative construction cheapened the style. The writer Olive Cook had this debased approach firmly in her sights when she attacked, "the rash of semi-detached villas, bedizened with Tudor gables, mock half-timber work, rough cast and bay windows of every shape which disfigures the outskirts of all our towns". It was also copied in many areas of the world, including the United States and Canada. New York City suburbs such as Westchester County, New York and Englewood and Teaneck, New Jersey feature particularly dense concentrations of Tudor Revival construction from this period.
Brewery companies designed "improved" pubs, some in a mock Tudor style called Brewer's Tudor. The style was captured in John Betjeman's 1937 poem Slough, where "bald young clerks" gather:
The late 20th century has seen a change in the faithfulness of emulation of the style, since in a modern development it is common to have only a few basic floor plans for buildings, these combined with variations in interior surface treatment and in the exterior in rooflines and setbacks to provide a visual variety to the street view. Owing to the smaller lots employed in modern developments, Tudor Revival may be placed directly next to an unrelated style such as French or Italian Provincial, resulting in an eclectic mix. The style has also been deployed for commercial developments; the architectural historian Anthony Quiney describes the Broadway Centre in the London borough of Ealing, "dressed out with brick and tile, arches, gables and small window panes, all to put a smile on a friendly face - the mask of tradition".