The Progressive Architecture Of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr

7. The Artistic House

7 fi5 The Artistic House I N T U R N - 0 F - T H E - C E NT U R Y America, the growth of the middle class dramatically altered the urban landscape, not only with the introduction of apartment buildings and group housing, but also with the construction of ever increasing numbers of freestanding single-family dwellings. In a common scenario, Pittsburgh's East End filled rapidly with houses devised with an economic rather than artistic rationale. Basic plans were used over and over, and familiar details were more or less randomly applied. A typology of basic house types can account for most dwellings. Even Kiehne! and Elliott's Stengel house (fig. 75), one offew Pittsburgh houses that aspired to be progressive, was a reworking of a standard Pittsburgh house type. It staked any claim to be progressive on its Wrightian detailing and Arts and Crafts interior, not on innovations of plan or massing .1 In this context, Scheibler's houses were consistently the exception. In the early years of his new manner, Scheibler's freestanding houses were quite modest.2 Part English Arts and Crafts, part Olbrich, and part Scheibler, they would have fit comfortably in an English Garden City, or perhaps an everyman's Darmstadt. Projects such as the Miller house (fig. 76), the Wright, Hoffman, Vogeley, and McNall houses, and a series of houses for William Ebberts (fig. 77), all designed and Fig. 75· Kiehne! and Elliott, Stengel house, ca. 1915, exterior and living room. Highland Towers 83 Fig. 76. Miller house, 1905. Fig. 77· Ebberts house, 1910, front elevation. 84 The Artistic House built between I905 and I9IO, typify this work. Composed of one or two simple volumes, they are either brick on the first story and stucco above, or wholly stucco. Half-timbering sometimes appears as a simple sequence of vertical timbers in a window bay or a small gable end, emphasizing strong edges and the play of black against white.' Roof forms include clipped gables and various combinations of gable and hip roofs. Decorative detail consists largely of art glass. The Miller house, for instance, has art-glass window transoms that comprise a triptych of pastoral images, and the Ebberts houses have art-glass irises on outside entry doors and on inside cupboard doors.4 In I9IO Scheibler designed two houses of this sort for Ebberts, to flank two other houses built a year earlier for the same client. The earlier houses are atypical , tiny and red brick, each with a street-facing gable end-they look rather like row house segments that have been detached from their neighbors. The four houses together formed a near mirror-image grouping around a central court, reflecting Scheibler's group housing practice.1 As early as I907, however, Scheibler was also producing a more sophisticated domestic architecture, and after I 9I 5 his practice turned almost exclusively to the so-called artistic house. Red House, designed for William Morris by Philip Webb in I859-I86o, is generally considered to be the first house "made artistic ." For the first time, the small house became a legitimate forum for lofty architectural ideas. A later generation took up the banner of the "artistic house" about I89o, and architects such as Olbrich, Mackintosh , Voysey, Baillie Scott, Wright-and Scheiblerattained a unity of purpose and style in their concentration upon the architectural possibilities of the small house that opposed conventional practice at nearly every turn. Still, Scheibler's mature houses are a disparate bunch. There are houses influenced by works of Baillie Scott, Mackintosh, and Voysey, and houses more freely conceived. Different economies and different aesthetic goals differentiate these houses from Scheibler's earlier houses, apartment buildings, and group cottages. Away from the demands of disguising or differentiating multiple units, Scheibler could concentrate on the whole and design in the round. He laid less emphasis on linear definition and the manipulation of solids and voids, and instead created more evenly textured sculptural objects. Without the requirement of replication, he could opt for asymmetrical compositions and more freely devised interiors. English architect M. H. Baillie Scott (I865-I945) specialized in small country houses and made extensive use of vernacular materials and techniques.6 But he freely added his own imprint as well. According to Muthesius, Baillie Scott conceived of the house as "an organism which is thoroughly unified and interrelated internally and externally. Here the architect and the interior...