"This Old House" features the Italianate style

A scene from "This Old House" this week.

I was channel-surfing tonight and was pleased to see an episode of "This Old House" that focused on Italianate-styled architecture. As I have mentioned several times on this blog, Tuscaloosa certainly has buildings constructed in this style, among them the Jemison Mansion. Receiving inspiration from the Italian Renaissance era, this style is a lot fancier than the conservative, more flat-faced Federal style dwellings built during the late eighteenth century.  Builders had to rely on local timber to construct such Federal buildings. Italianate buildings announce the growth of industry and the arrival of the railroad in mid-nineteenth century America, which permitted the transportation of materials and resources from elsewhere.

The episode of PBS' "This Old House" that I saw showed a restoration of a plain Italianate house, but also a fancier one with lusher embellishments like the tower pictured here.

One postscript: I'll be learning more about the Federal style as I prep for my American Civilization to 1865 course over the summer. I'll share some of what  I discover with students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City," too, because few concepts exists in a vacuum. Speaking to this point are words heard from the docent on my recent Chicago architecture river tour: "Architecture is a way for generations across time to learn more about one another." She was quoting architecture historian Vincent Scully. His words resonate with my ongoing interest in buildings. I think now about humbler structures like the shot gun house my grandparents occupied in South Florida when I was a child (so named because the rooms were lined up in such a straight line, you could point a gun through the front door and shoot out the back door). To see such a house across time during the 20th century was to know the residents were likely poor as to see an Italianate during the nineteenth century was to know the occupants were likely wealthy.

But wealth is not the only thing that determines how and where people live. The arrival of apartments in nineteenth century America, as Gunther Barth writes, owed greatly to a lack of space. We will learn more about this and other topics this fall.