Centre County Architecture

The Victorian Age was an age of romanticism – a time of fascination with the whimsical, with the long ago and far away, and it soon caught the fancy of an increasingly confident society of Americans. Freedom of expression combined with imagination and nostalgia to create a lively, unconventional, complex series of architectural designs. Texture, color and asymmetry replaced the simplicity and the balanced symmetry of earlier architectural styles. The term "Victorian" refers to several styles rather than just one and reflects an entire period, roughly from the 1850s to the early 1900s in Centre County.

Because of an increased interest in architecture, house building became a subject of fashion. Prospective home owners could choose from a growing number of design options in illustrated pattern books and journals that sold like magazines. Centre County residents were no longer isolated by the mountains from the newest fashions; instead, aware of the latest in architectural styles they could use them for their own homes.

Gothic Revival

Architect Alexander Jackson Davis with his book, Rural Residences, and influential landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing with his enormously popular books, The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening and Rural Architecture, and The Architecture of Country Houses, set the stage for an increasingly picturesque selection of housing types, villas and cottages specifically designed for the middle class.

A new method of construction – balloon framing – provided a strong skeleton on which walls could be hung. Lightweight wooden studs, joists, and rafters, supported by a foundation and sill, and fastened together with nails, were tightly woven together with each component strengthening the other. Siding was applied directly to the frame. Freed from the strict rectangular Georgian form used in the heavy framing technique, it was possible to construct complex, rambling houses using the balloon framing method, and by the end of the nineteenth century a balloon frame house was judged to be virtually the only kind of structure for a proper home.

Downing's writings promoted national pride in America's progress, and increased an American awareness of luxuries and refinements, domesticity and stability, architectural beauty and the beauty of the landscape. He specifically favored an architectural landscape that followed or promoted the modern or natural style of design over the formal and geometric arrangements of earlier styles, because he felt that turrets, towers, peaks, and the irregular form of the building and roofline blended better with the natural style – a landscape "where nature assisted in the creation of beautiful homes and gardens."

The "pointed" or Gothic style that he advocated introduced buildings that were taller, narrower, and less symmetrical. Steep roofs, peaks, often tall and pointed (lancet) windows, and sometimes board and batten siding were used to emphasize this vertical look. With the introduction of the jigsaw, and with millwork catalogs offering a variety of designs to select from, mass produced or sawn-to-order fanciful trim became available from lumber mills and local carpenters. Intricately cut decorative wood scrollwork, wood tracery, imitated the stone tracery of European Gothic buildings and took the name Carpenter Gothic. Gingerbread patterns varied from county to county and town to town, and similar patterns can even be found in iron fences and other iron work.

Gothic Revival became a popular choice for churches also, replacing the earlier Greek Revival style, built with tall steeples that "reached to heaven".

Italianate

Victorian architectural pattern books offered a wide variety of Italianate or Italian Villa examples – rambling asymmetrical houses with generous porches or verandas, balconies, and often towers to simulate an Italian bell tower. Oversized decorative brackets placed under wide eaves, were made to look as if they were supporting nearly flat roofs. Arched or rounded tall, narrow windows and decorative corner quoining (large blocks used along the corners of the building) are other clues to this style. The Italianate style was often used for commercial buildings, such as the Bush House in Bellefonte.

Sometimes bracketing was added to older buildings, including ones built in the Georgian style, to "modernize" or decorate them.

Mansard - Second Empire

Victorians continued to experiment with architecture and by the 1870s introduced America's version of a style from France. Called Mansard or Second Empire, it was named for its originator, French architect Francois Mansart.

The Mansard roof has a steep pitch, usually curved, and is flat or nearly flat. Dormer windows with pediments, used to light an attic story, often were inserted in the curve of the roof, and sometimes wrought iron tracery was added. Heavily molded entranceways, arched or pointed doors, and elaborate chimneys are other features of this style. A Mansard roof was often added to an Italianate style building along with balconies edged with ornate wood or cast iron railings, gables and eaves hung with gingerbread, rambling porches, and a variety of cupolas, towers, or turrets.