Charnley House
Built in the early 1890’s, the Charnley house was designed by Louis Sullivan, with help from a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright. The first thing that struck me about the Charnley house was the simplistic nature of it compared to other houses from that timer period. I was able to understand the layout of the floor plan with only a few laps around the interior of the space. Unlike the Queen Anne, this floor plan was straight forward and fairly symmetrical. There was a less noticeable division of the service and the served. The simplicity of the space made allowed me to focus more on the details of the building. The first detail that caught me totally off guard was the sky light in the center of the house. Much like a commercial building, the skylight opened up the center of the space allowing natural light to flood the main level. This architectural move also helped define the remaining floors by creating a void to work around. A similar building that comes to mind is Milwaukee’s City Hall, only their skylight is done on a much grander scale. On the exterior of the building there were several elements that drew my attention. The first would be the heavy stone base of the building. Typical of the classical revival style in America, the heavy stone bases paid homage to classic Roman and Greek structures. The visual weight served to ground the structure and give it a more dominating presence among the other structures within the neighborhood. Another element that made me do a double take was the style of brick the was used on this house. The bricks that were used were referred to as “Roman Style.” This meaning that were we longer than a standard brick, but still had a similar height. This allowed the facade of the building to have fewer vertical mortar lines, thus adding to the linear quality of the building. The columns that were used on the second story porch were a derived from traditional Italian columns. The have almost no ornamentation or capital details on them. It seemed as if Sullivan wanted them to flow in the rest of the building with relative ease. The roof was a bit of confusion for me. Before this house, I had not seen a low roof line like this one. It almost seemed to verge on the beginnings of prairie style. This made me question how much influence Wright had into the overall design.
Built in the early 1890’s, the Charnley house was designed by Louis Sullivan, with help from a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright. The first thing that struck me about the Charnley house was the simplistic nature of it compared to other houses from that timer period. I was able to understand the layout of the floor plan with only a few laps around the interior of the space. Unlike the Queen Anne, this floor plan was straight forward and fairly symmetrical. There was a less noticeable division of the service and the served. The simplicity of the space made allowed me to focus more on the details of the building. The first detail that caught me totally off guard was the sky light in the center of the house. Much like a commercial building, the skylight opened up the center of the space allowing natural light to flood the main level. This architectural move also helped define the remaining floors by creating a void to work around. A similar building that comes to mind is Milwaukee’s City Hall, only their skylight is done on a much grander scale. On the exterior of the building there were several elements that drew my attention. The first would be the heavy stone base of the building. Typical of the classical revival style in America, the heavy stone bases paid homage to classic Roman and Greek structures. The visual weight served to ground the structure and give it a more dominating presence among the other structures within the neighborhood. Another element that made me do a double take was the style of brick the was used on this house. The bricks that were used were referred to as “Roman Style.” This meaning that were we longer than a standard brick, but still had a similar height. This allowed the facade of the building to have fewer vertical mortar lines, thus adding to the linear quality of the building. The columns that were used on the second story porch were a derived from traditional Italian columns. The have almost no ornamentation or capital details on them. It seemed as if Sullivan wanted them to flow in the rest of the building with relative ease. The roof was a bit of confusion for me. Before this house, I had not seen a low roof line like this one. It almost seemed to verge on the beginnings of prairie style. This made me question how much influence Wright had into the overall design.
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