Tudor Revival architecture: Difference between revisions

Architectural style

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.

Identifying Tudor Revival[edit]

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.^[2] Elizabeth I herself built almost nothing, her father having left over 50 palaces and houses.^[4] 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 (overhanging) first floors above pillared porches, dormer windows supported by consoles, and even at times thatched roofs, gave Tudor Revival its more striking effects.

Beginnings[edit]

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 (e.g., within the Church of England and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) 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 (London,1668–71) and Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford (1681–82), and Nicholas Hawksmoor‘s Codrington Library and Front Quad at All Souls College, Oxford (1751) are the most notable examples of “Gothic survival” in the Baroque period.^[a][7]

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.^[8] Horace Walpole‘s Strawberry Hill House at Twickenham (1749–76; designed in collaboration with Richard Bentley, John Chute, and James Essex) features elements derived from late gothic precedents.

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