Building & Brews LIVE: Federal Style

jersey i want to thank my sponsors keuken lumber new jersey guys did you ever deal with them there i've never dealt with them there but that's how i found your instagram page and learned about this nice okay so shout out to keuken and then uh windsor mill uh windsor one these guys are great partners they care about design they care about quality and so they're awesome partners so i'm brent hull i have a company wholemillwork hull homes we do architectural mill work we do custom home building and i'm a historic geek and so we are doing these uh buildings and brews just to get together talk about building an historic building in general just uh i love it and so i'm going to talk about it and if i talk too long get more beer um trying to think if i forgot anything um all right so today we're doing the federal style what's that oh yeah i i am on uh the instagram wholemillwork hull homes and also if you're on youtube you can do the uh subscribe button so we're always pushing out new content and stuff like that um the uh we're doing the federal period okay and if you that's your first time we did the georgian period last time the uh and it's on youtube live and you can actually go back and and watch that again um we are kind of in here now okay so this is my american architectural history deal we talked about the georgian period last time we're now moving forward into the federal period um the federal period is kind of after the revolutionary war into the 1820s so we're early 1800s you know we got the war of 1812 fight with britain that has some consequences we've got the louisiana purchase you know right happens in 1803 our country grows by a ton and so there's a lot of cool stuff happening here and uh you know we're gonna we're gonna talk about all that named after federalism kind of the main governmental body at the time the federalist papers if anybody hamilton fans here uh i was going to sing a hamilton song i won't the but that was kind of the federal style it's really neo-classical okay and we're going to talk about what neoclassical is and why it's new classicism adam esque we're going to be talking about robert adam the english architect who kind of launches all of this and why it's launched thomas jefferson not really federal and styling but certainly parallel here going along here he's a very important person in the architectural history of america at that time and so he's definitely someone we need to study and talk about his buildings aren't necessarily federal but they're built at the same time jeffersonian architecture you may have heard of uh it's all part of this period the builder each time we do one of these we talk about a famous builder the famous builder this time is going to be a guy named samuel mcintyre last time we talked about william buckland out of maryland this time it's samuel mcintyre a wonderful gentleman and uh really just a class act and then as far as the building trade the law started building last time we talked about masonry and so this time we're going to talk about woodworking joinery carving all that kind of stuff so should be awesome um america what's happening in the 1800s right you've got population swelling the country's really growing part of it's growing because we just you know purchased half of it of what the united states is today in louisiana purchase the first the top city now is new york remember last time in 1760 is philadelphia new york is just exploding in growth we'll look at that we also have an interesting thing going on in this period washington dc right washington d.c is a new city uh it's the new capital of the country uh after the revolutionary uh war we we decide we're going to have to uh you know have our own capital and so we have a lot of commercial building we never talk about that the rise of the architect in this period there are still regional differences um essentially our country is a really young country in 1760 it's a more mature country in the 1800s it's getting even more so but we're in growth pains and you'll you'll see some of that the regional differences aren't as pronounced we're still in a handmade era you know industrialization really doesn't come into building 1840 maybe you know steam planting mills are 1840ish that kind of thing where it starts to introduce industrialism it's a building so it doesn't really happen yet and uh building skills are growing more specialized at this time and we'll talk about that population now in 1800 is 5.3 million it was 1.5 so we've tripled in growth look at new york you know it was 14 000. now it's 60 000. philly kind of doubles in growth baltimore is now up in the top five or 10. boston doesn't grow that much we're going to talk about salem kind of an interesting story talking about salem mass what's the difference between georgian and federal okay so as we transition from this period of looking at georgian architecture and then going to federal what's happened what's going on um which one's georgian which one's federal it's a coin flip 50 50 chance who's gonna guess richard you're right the ride is federal attaboy get a free beer the uh uh this is georgian right this is federal okay uh we'll talk about why this is but it's all this dainty little detailing up here there's more of it in this uh in this fireplace heavy bold you can see that right uh the moldings are pre that project more carvings are are richer and fuller um it's it's a different aesthetic it's a different feeling to show you why that happens and what's going on uh same thing here this is a 1760s pennsylvania philadelphia wonderful house this is another samuel mcintyre house just more refined more dainty more careful georgian versus federal um federal architecture looks like this right you're not going to see a huge difference in a georgian house versus a federal house except you begin to see fan lights over doors this palladian window this kind of webbing over here uh this kind of restraint in the in the in the facade here it's all very federal i'm talking about a guy named charles bullfinch out of out of boston he designed the state house there i've talked about thomas jefferson monticello of course the masterpiece of uva and the the lawn there there's a great house in baltimore we're going to look at briefly it's called the homewood house has this kind of detailing almost looks like wedgwood furniture or ridgewood pottery right and then this crazy stuff right um this is robert adam okay now where did he get this idea why is he doing that we're to talk about all that and then this is the you know if this is the english version of the high style right this is the american version right much more restrained not as over the top uh then this is samuel mcintyre we're going to look at a few rooms for winter tour um and so you know this period if you want to walk up to a house you're wondering whether it's georgian or federal you can look at things like the fan lights leaded glass around the doors um you'll notice that the architectural features are more dainty and not as heavy and bold we'll talk about why moldings change from these thick heavy georgian moldings to these very fine federal moldings everything's still handmade this is a typical federal house this is homewood house this is john hopkins in maryland um notice okay that it's still very classical very symmetrical still we've got this main body we've got the wings right remember talking about the pilation plan where his main body the wings that go out we looked at drayton hall and kind of the original plan for that mount vernon has the same thing with the wings that go out right so it's still very classical but it's when we get up into the details and we look at the columns and uh this this kind of fan light is so typical federal it's just you know it's uh it it is right notice how dainty these details are up here uh this kind of decoration is very different from the kind of things we saw from the william buckland house in uh in annapolis um the the moldings down the hall right looking at this area and kind of a tighter view of it these these very very uh small you know the the size and scale has really shrunk down but this kind of detailing is uh all very typical federal the colors too you'll see these blues and pinks and these kind of crazy colors in that historical era it's all part of that uh what are carpenters doing what are craftsmen doing at the time the carpenter's company is something we studied last time they started in 1724 we talked about them kind of during the georgian period they're still active they're still very involved after the revolutionary war they they incorporated with a quaker group that uh um so that was the second group that they joined with uh this is kind of the last era of the carpenters guild okay this is the last era of when that um has when they have this kind of influence um you know we looked at the articles this was the article in the book i was explained last time this is still uh 1786 and so it's still in that federal period but they were more of a georgian company we looked at their plan books we're going to talk more about those details and so uh and then of course commercial construction right i mean the whole point of this whole series is to study what construction looks like its buildings right and and what carpentry looked like and how it how it occurred um commercial construction the rise of washington dc there was a design competition a nobody you know a gentleman architect guy named william thornton designed it and won the competition so it's kind of crazy um so uh you know so so that's that's that's what's going on that's the world of 1800 right that's that that's the kind of there there's buildings still going on we've come out of the revolutionary war there's growth happening the country is exploding some parts are growing faster than others and so are you texting me because the texts keep coming up on my screen are they coming up here no they're not the uh i was like are they seeing that um okay so we're gonna talk now about design influences right and so um you know and what neoclassicism is okay and so i've got this kind of this family tree that his family twig of of architects and designers that kind of make up what neoclassicism is now the 800-pound gorilla in this thing is this guy robert adam it's called atomesque okay and so over here we have builders okay samuel mcintyre who will study asher benjamin probably the most famous guy he wrote pattern books he was uh we're going to actually study him in the greek revival era even though his first book 1796 um his most famous books that are are more greek revival so we're going to talk about him there uh on the architect front right robert adams is very famous very well paid very prestigious in in england charles bullfinch is the american version okay very talented guy very tragic guy but the two architects who try to make it as a professional architect in america in the early 1800s or these two guys uh benjamin benjamin easy for me to say benjamin latrobe and charles bullfinch benjamin he is in virginia and then in uh and then in baltimore build some very famous buildings there he ends up working for the capitol in washington dc overseeing the works charles bullfinch takes his place okay ben the guys that work under latrobe robert mills will strickland those guys end up doing a lot of the design work in in dc the washington memorial things like that and then there's these weird guys like thomas jefferson and william thornton and so we're talking about you know who who uh drove design right it comes from a lot of different areas and a lot of different deals they're still very influential english pattern books james's gibbs book from 17 25 or 17 40 maybe it's a little bit later is what inspires samuel mcintyre and much of his work right so all these guys are connected right uh bullfinch and samuel mcintyre know each other and work together uh bullfinch takes latrobe's job in dc is very influenced by how professional he was samuel mcintyre learns to draw by looking at bullfinch's drawings right all these guys are learning from each other now and we talked about in the georgia period that there really weren't plans okay uh or the plans were kind of one sheet that was passed around we don't have a lot of plans in this period we actually have a lot of plans we have a lot of drawings with very um know refined drawings right you know real careful details and real careful drawings of what these things should look like so um it it it's kind of interesting how all of these guys know each other and this is kind of the cream of the crop as far as design goes and we'll talk more about each one of them now any questions about that no uh neoclassicism okay we talked about that that's what this is uh did i talk about the grand tours last time um the grand tour okay was what you know men of high station and stuff like that went to in europe they would they would you know start in england england's the most powerful country in the world this time they uh these young men it was a finishing school and they would go uh to paris uh they would learn about you know courtly manners they'd learn about dress perfumes all this all this kind of french stuff they would come down to italy they go to milan they go to venice okay and vasencha where palladio was they go to florence and rome and then down here is naples and then that little circle thing is uh pompeii so uh grand tours were you know things that guys went on thomas jefferson went on a three-week grand tour um he one of his one of the things he fell in love with was in france and that's what was based on the uh the state capital in in uh virginia as well as monticello so he went 1-1 bullfinch went on a grand tour where he went around traveling over europe so if you wanted to be a serious architect if you wanted to be a serious designer you had to come see florence venice platio rome and see those things so all these guys in the 18th century are doing that now what happens is is that down here in pompeii there's all these new discoveries taking place here and one of the discoveries they they find is pompeii now i don't know if you know the story of pompeii but basically that's mount vesuvius in the background it basically explodes in you know a thousand fifteen hundred years ago um the have you ever seen these things okay they're basically in the ash when they were discovering pompeii they would dig down there these be be these voids and they're like what are those voids and so they filled the voids up with plaster and they found that they were the human bodies okay and it's thought that when the when the volcano blew up that this heat of like 400 degrees just came rushing through the town and that's why everybody's just kind of collapsed and falls down so literally they have dogs like tied up to the leash on the on the next to the house they have you know women with their children it's just kids playing and falling down it's just everything was stopped in time when this when this volcano burst well what happened was the whole town got covered in ash and disappeared just from the face of the earth just disappears well if you remember that this is right near naples and when the king of naples was actually trying to get a a spa for himself or one of his villas he they discovered pompeii and they started they started digging started figuring it out and they found this whole roman town that was you know covered in ash for thousands of years and so they began to look at it and go oh my gosh and realized that what they had been studying in rome and the things that they had been practicing probably weren't accurate okay and so they started going you know what all those moldings all those details we've been copying and putting on the interior of our houses those are really exterior moldings and it's really interior moldings that should be much different than the exterior moldings and so when i talked earlier about georgian moldings being big and beefy is because they were copying more exterior moldings than interior moldings and so what you find when you go through this is this kind of coloring in this kind of detail and so robert adam he was on a five-year grand tour okay he took his very seriously hi welcome um the uh and so he goes down to pompeii to check this thing out and he begins to see details like this right he sees the colors right the reds greens oranges pinks and he sees walls like this and he's like oh that's what they did okay so as as you know england at the time thought that they were the new rome right and so they had to inherit this roman this this you know world conquering attitude and so their houses needed to be you know this this roman model and so this changes everything so this this is what the reason why they look at these the why those designs and why his stuff ended up looking so crazy is because he's looking at details like this this is a bath in pompeii i don't know how many pictures i have but you see some of the blues and the pinks and some of this you know this modeling and decoration that's taking place here and you're going to see almost this exact kind of thing this kind of detail all of these little uh um each motif right each little design thing becomes an inspiration point for how they decide to design design later so he's the one who goes to pompeii and pompei's just kind of newly discovered and and they go he was the son of an architect so he came from a design tradition like i said this five-year grand tour he goes back to london and it just creates an incredible stir um he writes this book and by the way i'll announce all my books now the uh uh there's probably five or six key books will you go get that uh that building craftsman book on my desk there's five or six key books that kind of make up this talk one is the winner tour book if you want to understand the difference between georgia and federal rooms it's back there it's for sale that's a really good book of american cross section of federal and georgia rooms that's a that's a really good book to look at when we talk about samuel mcintyre there's two books there's a book like this kimball and then there's this book and then this is a reprint of robert adams book the works of robert and james adams and i'll show you some of these pictures he's gotten here because they're crazy but um but you know all of this detailing all of that you know you can almost see where it came from and kind of what he was doing there and where he got his design ideas i think there's interior pictures but this kind of detailing was almost came directly from you know that kind of stuff right up there in the corner right where you can see these designs and these layouts and all the intricacy of this kind of stuff all comes from okay this is a complete departure yeah that one complete departure from what they had been designing what they had been doing no this one thanks and then this is a if you want to understand what building was like in america uh in that 18 period this is called making houses builders in philadelphia 1790 to 1850. a fascinating book about how craft worked how you know speculation worked and all these different things and so uh that's my bibliography um back to robert and adam he's very influential okay he he has the court with the king he uh his designs the whole period is called oftentimes called adamesque it isn't called that here um we call it the federal style but but it is he's the major influence and so we're just going to look at some of the the details and some of the things that he was doing this is one of the ones from his book you know this is the way it was executed at the sign house this is the austerly park a lot of the things he did were remodels okay so someone had already built the great house but they wanted the latest fashion so he comes along and starts introducing stuff like this underneath right he goes into this house there's the ceiling of that right and all of these little details are things that he would have picked up it's a it's like a complete new vocabulary of ornamentation right it's just like oh my gosh we've got there we haven't been doing this right at all and so they they start you know expressing themselves very differently but you know this kind of the the grecian and early you know motifs this you'll see in america the swag detail right come into into play with uh um in mantles and things like that it's all coming from uh that inheritance right and his colors i mean uh that's kind of crazy right and so uh in this room right this room compare it here i mean you can almost see where the detailing comes from in this room and kind of why it looks the way it does because these are the walls from the pompeii houses right and so it's pretty fascinating to me that what an inspiration it was right these touring this grand touring stuff going on um and kind of what happens now uh if you ever go to the philadelphia museum they've got a they've got a sami mcintyre room and they've got a robert adam room but this is this is that room um i mean it's crazy and then and then this thing here this is at the victorian albert museum this is glass okay and glass flex i mean it's like a mirror looking into this thing this was done in one of his houses that's also at the victorian albert museum the crazy colors and different details like that so robert adam is super influential okay now realize that design moves pretty slow in this era because he writes his book in like 1758 right we're still in the georgian era and we don't really start this kind of design until the 1780s 1790s and so it arrives in america pretty late now the guy it arrives with is charles bullfinch and benjamin latrobe latrobe actually does a lot of greek revival stuff and so we're going to talk about that next time but these both greek revival and neoclassicism are in federalism are neoclassical right they're they're both a discovery of what was really going on and them practicing these things now you know last time we talked we were talking about how there really weren't architects in the georgian period um that you didn't really have practice and architects this is kind of the very first period of practicing professional architects now they didn't make any money but they were practicing professional architects now i think bullfinch represents that uh he's a tragic figure um and he is the uh um he's kind of an example of the whole architectural profession in the 1800s he was extremely talented uh he was flawed because uh he was a dreamer i guess is the way i would say it he he had grand visions for uh for design and for buildings and for other things but he didn't have the experience or the savvy okay the business savvy to to make it happen some of the things were stacked to get him to that the other reason we're going to spend a little time in him is because speculation was part of the building trade in this period um if you read this book on the building craftsmanship it seems like uh i think because the country was growing so fast speculative building was the way a lot of people made money and so it describes in this book a number of different builders who uh were you know buying houses renting things building things hoping to buy rent hoping to do things now this is during a period where you couldn't get a 10-year or you know 20-year loan i mean these were one to three-year loans and so what happens to bullfinch is that the jay treaty for any history nuts um it gets stalled in england so so that trade kind of slows down and he gets caught unluckily in a in a financial pinch okay basically uh well we'll talk about a little bit but he is um anyway it's kind of it's kind of crazy he builds three houses for his guy named harrison otis gray or gray otis um this guy was the classic developer okay he developed beacon hill okay uh beacon hills like the most expensive place in boston maybe back bay or something like that and otis uh harrison saw what bill finch did with his developments learned a bunch of lessons and basically built his developments learning from bill finch's mistakes bullfinch we talked about the original faneuil hall being a commercial building in the georgian period he's the one that redid faneuil hall and made it this right so he did these commissions he did the state in the state building in boston he was the guy okay if you were going to build an important building in boston bullfinch was your guy but he didn't get paid anything okay uh you know the the the going trade in europe at this time was for an architect to get five percent of construction costs two and a half percent for design two and a half percent for overseeing the construction um in comparison good architects today get you know between 10 and 20 percent right some of them get might get a little less than that but the top architects in america today can get you know i know a guy gets 25 percent of construction costs and so uh a lot more than these guys get so the european model was five percent uh bullfinch over his career maybe got one percent maybe maybe less than one percent um he has this development called a taunting crescent okay now the time now basically what it was is uh his family had money and they had they had real estate uh around in different places and and he had gone on a grand tour and of course he was in bath and he saw this okay i don't know if you've been anybody been to bath and seen this it's the crescent the royal crescent this is the circus here and this is the crescent it's beautiful right it's huge it's this wonderful uh collection of town homes that uh that all kind of look onto this lawn and we believe that bullfinch saw that and kind of came up with this design and and it was town homes which wasn't real common at that time and uh it was this very you know federal design that was very pretty um basically he kind of made every mistake you could make uh in a development and uh took on all the debt himself uh bought out his partners completely um you know had no room for you know error and then they didn't sell right so he finished the first half and none of them had sold and so before even figuring out how to do this this first half and getting straight with everybody he started this the other side and so and he owed he owed builders all this money and anyway it's just it's tragic and so over a number of years uh probably about five years he lost everything uh and he lost his parents money too i mean his parents were invested in them and they had to sell all their land to help them pay back everybody he did he was whole he paid everybody back but after this development he uh which was common to do right but the laws weren't set up to protect a developer depict investors it was just if you owed money and your investors got impatient they could call your note and as soon as they called your note everybody started calling your note and you were kind of screwed and so he kind of got screwed and what's ironic is is that harrison learned uh he him and harrison had grown up together right they weren't friends but they they certainly were acquaintances and harrison helped him settle all his debts and part of him settling his debts was to sell his portion of beacon hill which was about 20 stake now they were calculating if he had held on to that for about 10 years he would have been you know bank right he would have mismade all this money um but he didn't and he couldn't and he was he was forever poor so for the next 15 years right it's a tragic story you'll feel terrible for the guy but for the next 15 years he he has to get it he has to wait and get a job of the city which is basically it's a police job but it was basically like a a city inspector and so he was getting paid 600 bucks a year as a city inspector which allowed them to live he was getting between a hundred and two hundred dollars a year in in uh in architectural fees and so i think he averaged they said right at 100 a year in architectural fears luckily in the 1815 he got hired to go to washington and become the surveyor of works for the capital they got paid 2 500 a year but kind of typical bullfinch the story i read was that they offered him 45 4500 a year and somehow he worked himself down to only get 2500 a year i don't know what happened but he's just you know wasn't a good businessman right um anyway so he supremely talented guy right he just it was uh a wonderful designer had great taste um tragically it wasn't the time to make it as an architect yet thomas jefferson there's a fantastic book called mr fisk and thomas jefferson i think it's all about the story about how fisk kimball discovered that thomas jefferson was actually the architect for monticello and the state virginia state building and uh and all the stuff that happened in virginia now thomas jefferson uh obviously wrote the declaration of independence i mean he's supremely talented guy at the same time i would call him today this pro consumer okay uh we call today a pro-consumer someone who is uh uh she's a professional consumer they understand the the they they do do all their research we we work for one right when geothermal is coming out she knew more about genothermal than the geothermal expert right and she just had read it researched and done all this stuff that was what jefferson was he was he was a he was not just your typical homeowner monticello took like 47 years to build okay it was a long project remember he goes to paris he's the ambassador for a long time um but he was a micromanager like a homeowner right he it was ted that his workmen wouldn't nail nails into the board because they didn't want him to show up and go no we got to pull that out and do it again right he had nailing patterns that he wanted them to do on their boards and so he was that kind of micromanager part of the reason why it took so long to build but he was supremely competent um he went on a three-week grand tour okay so typical jefferson fashion he was very busy he didn't have a lot of time but he did travel and uh and do a mini grand tour and and saw some the roman built buildings and things like that and ended up designing things monticello went through two design phases and the design that we have today is after his travels and things like that the story is that he elevated the quality building there's a famous letter he wrote in 1780 saying there is nobody around here that knows how to build with any kind of design or any kind of quality and by 1820 the legacy that he leaves is there's five or six or seven great builders in virginia in that area who have learned how to build because thomas jefferson basically taught them how this is monticello uva campus is down there he built it so they could see uva this is the rotunda this is the back side we're on the we're on the non-lawn side here's monticello right thomas jefferson said a number of times that palladio is my bible what he meant by that is that whenever it came to building he had a mini copy like a pocket copy of palladio and he had you know numerous big copies uh you know he went into debt uh tons of times buying books uh ended up kind of getting out of debt by selling his library to the library of congress when it was starting because he had such a good library but he had numerous coppers of palladio and so you look at this and go well that doesn't look like a palladian villa there's a drawing in this hall i think his name is jackson where it shows and if you've been to monticello you know that there's this work level down here and if you remember when we were studying palladio that there's there they're raised up country homes and that the work levels all on one level and then the piano no blade the the where the family lives is up here more formal and that's basically how this is laid out where this work level you can see the the walkway underneath there is all underneath there that's the work level and then his up his you know home and stuff is up there so he really was a paladio file if that's a word and um you know but his designs and his buildings they're very symmetrical very beautiful this is poplar forest which is kind of his retreat um this is the uh uva campus has anybody been to uva seen the lawn okay that is your next trip the uh that that lawn okay is one of the most fantastic places in america it is uh it was voted i know 10 years ago the most beautiful architectural thing in america by all these architects it's a magical space basically what he's done is he's got these houses where it's called the academia village and he has all these houses where the faculty lived and taught and then in between are all these uh dorm rooms where people live now the the rooms are really small i mean they're like 15 by 12. there's no bathrooms and there's a little fireplace you have to go to the bathroom you actually have to go out back into these bathrooms where these bathrooms are but it's very prestigious your senior year you get chosen to live into these into these original houses and i mean it's just magical the houses are beautiful the symmetry the proportion it's a magical space and you need to go there if you haven't been there but that but that was his invention right and so many schools since then have copied this smu right over there they have a very similar thing where they've got this main building and then the the houses that line the side and so a number of things have copied this is genius in conception right and thomas jefferson is basically a homeowner he's not a professional builder uh he loved design but it speaks to how talented he was and what he did here you see a little bit more palladian design right again this doesn't look federal right this is you know jeffersonian uh classicism but you see that main body the wings on either side uh laid out very much like palladio this almost looks more like greek revival right and so um but this is jeffersonian architecture and part of his genius okay any questions allowed me to get a drink okay so the builder this month this bit this time is samuel mcintyre samuel mcintyre is one of my heroes i've got like three building heroes okay william buckland samuel mcintyre and palladio okay and asher benjamin okay i've got a lot um they these guys are uh they're my heroes because they're multi-talented okay they're builders craftsmen and designers okay i think that's the model that i want builders to attain to today right that it's not just you know go design something i'll build it but let me help you craft and build something that makes sense uh samuel mcintyre is from salem he never leaves salem he doesn't go on a grand tour salem is kind of a fascinating story in himself remember i said that it was the number nine this size town basically when the uh when the revolutionary war starts boston can no longer be boston because all the redcoats are there and so they move the capital up to salem right and so salem becomes this bustling port and uh his one of his clients alaska elias derby uh ends up becoming one of the wealthiest guys pirateering right privateering uh basically you know having these ships that run uh and are very fast they can beat the british ships and they're bringing in they're doing importing right and so they are the ones that are beating the british blockade and coming in and actually bringing things to america so salem explodes okay and for this unique little period of time salem becomes one of the richest cities in america and samuel mcintyre of course benefits from that now he his dad was a builder and so he trains under his dad um 1780s he's listed as a carpenter house right okay a housewright was someone who basically is a framer today right uh in the 1790s he's known as a joiner okay joyner is basically a trim carpenter and um and then a car in the by the 1800 1800s he's a carver okay and most of his work is carving so he does design work he does drafting he does uh he's self-taught completely in all of these things uh he wrote and played music he built a pipe organ um i mean there's not really much he didn't do you'll see that from his drawings he had classical models that he was trying to figure out the proportions of people he even had a uh uh when the nation's capital was being built and there was a design competition sammy mcintyre actually entered that and so um he was very accomplished it was one of his houses in salem if you want to just go on a fun trip there's a federal street in salem that you can walk down and you can see all these great houses two of them are samuel mcintyre this is another one um and we'll get into these details and showing you blow this up um showing do you see um kind of this detailing in here and there's there's that kind of detailing here but all of this stuff that's going on here is is you know he is basically learning from uh robert adam he is friends with very wealthy men very well traveled men and they're all sharing books sharing details talking about how to build and so he's really practicing in this bustling little town these these much finer details right these are these are federal details notice the the fan light over top with the leaded glass right um just all of this kind of detailing in here is dainty and light and and federal he is a carver okay obviously these capitals here this is the uh um his famous house there in that he was carving by his later career he's no longer building he's just designing and carving this is a room of his from the philadelphia museum now we're going to talk more about this ornamentation and how he did it he carved everything but later in this period you'll see or also in this period for people who didn't have his talents they were making composition moldings and so that's more common uh for some of the designs we'll see but uh this this kind of tasteful refinement of what he was doing uh and how he would design these rooms and how we put them together uh is the reason why he's called him an architect today but he's really just a master builder this was his design for the state state capitol or or for the u.s capitol these were some of his designs for one of his one of his projects where i mean what does that look like right that looks like a robert adam design this dainty fretwork these swags that go around there but the ability of him to lay out a cornice like this with the proportions and the carvings and the moldings right he was just a learner he was v he was self-taught looking at looking at books looking at great examples he looked at charles bullfinch's drawings always learning fairly sophisticated remember in the georgian period we're talking about these guys you know there are no plans right and so in this period as america becomes more mature as clients become more refined this is designed for a streetscape the reason it's shaded more over here is because that actually takes a curve around the corner so uh you know he had a real designer's eye of how things should look and how things should go together and and then he was most famous for probably today his furniture and his carving and you know he studied the human figure i think i've got slides of that this little fruit basket is kind of his claim to fame uh that you see on his stuff but i mean someone else built this furniture and then he did all the carving and that's pretty common in his later career he did carving for ships uh and ship busts and the other things that were going on there this is one of his carvings notice that little fruit basket there again down here kind of his his mark and then this is one of my favorite things it's the derby tea house that he designed tons of details in this i've done a study on this in my book where it shows all the proportions and all the details of how this all came together that it was it was very wonderfully laid out this is a church steeple he designed he had one of james gibbs book so we talked about the the the books and how they still had influence in this period uh you know he was incredible and so he did he did so much the lessons i want us to take from him um is is they talk about him always learning okay and uh the books that he was reading and the books that he was he died when he was 54 he had just ordered some books that were kind of university level books trying to figure out um the human figure trying to trying to become a better artist um so he was always learning you see his growth right um that that greatness right some people want to be a master craftsman tomorrow right and and they they don't go through the steps and you think about him starting as a carpenter in the 1780s going to a jointer in 1790s becoming a carpenter and carver in the 1800s and that's 30 years of work right dedication to the craft so you know that greatness takes time he was always practicing sketching and drawing right and so i tell my girls that our eyes faith here the uh yes there she is uh the uh they have a 15-minute sketch at the beginning of the day every day i got the it's not my idea historical concepts uh the architectural firm they start each day with the kind of voluntary 15 minutes of sketching it's vital to learn be able to move your hand and draw and sketch things and and make things beautiful so uh it's very important and then be kind apparently he was just the nicest guy okay and everybody loved him and he had more work than he knew what to do with but there's there's a lot to be said for reading his story and reading how uh his letters to his clients were so gracious and kind anyway he was he was just a wonderful human and uh uh you know a great model for us to to go forward um all right so studying woodworking and joinery in this period um this has anybody been to sturbridge village you've really traveled you're really you always raising your hand that's good so they have a water uh powered uh sawmill there and so saw mills in in new england were actually fairly common fairly early even into the 1600s uh that they had configured and when i watched this thing cut it's pretty fascinating basically have a big water wheel and this this this uh saw goes up and down and it lurches forward kind of cuts forward as this saw moves through it and it's cutting boards in kind of one inches and two inch thicknesses so think about them when when they're you know we think about uh two by fours one by fours all those things that started because these guys are basically cutting boards into lengths that can dry okay so these are wet logs they cut through them then they have to dry for sometimes a year sometimes two seasons and so getting wood was not just a matter of going out to the forest and cutting wood but put letting it dry for a long period of time and so watching these things work this is how things would have been cut in new england in the south they had pit saws and of course a pit saw is a saw where one guy's in a pit and you you set a log up one guy climbs down into a hole and they sit there and they saw and one guy's getting rained on with all the sawdust and the the the the uh the boss is on top right um the but when i was at north benning street we would actually look at how those logs were sawed to know that they are pits on or know if they came from a mill and then later with circular saws because that isn't an invention until later uh in the industrial period how things were sawed and so it's very important we're kind of going to go through all this stuff shops were small okay this is the domini shop at winter tour have you been to winter tour yes of course you have do you want to teach this thing no yeah okay the domini shop is basically this shop that they discovered in the 1940s three generations of families had grown had gone in this shop and it's very small right you can see that this small thing they were cabinet makers furniture makers clockmakers they did joinery um three generations the first guy was a cabinet or a furniture maker and in like 1780 is that right well basically ready-made furniture became a thing and he kind of lost his job then another guy was a clock maker for a long time but then mantle clocks became a thing and he kind of lost his job the last son was a joiner but they kept this same shop over time and they have basically uh found they they basically found this thing it's kind of mothballed it's a little bit like pompeii right where they found this this shop thousands of tools and it's just this excellent example of what a shop looked like during this period um notice there's there's there's not really any machinery this is a a lathe that that is coming from a wheel so as a hand powered lathe that that they used so they stopped in about 1840 1850 so right before industrialization so everything was handmade um and uh you know and if you look back at ditterod his study of the trades in the in the 18th century this isn't too far away from uh how shops were right having this kind of shop is wasn't even a thing right most shops were very small you know probably as big as this office right in here right uh you know 22 by 12 by 15. there would be a bench this was a this is french and so this is be a big production shop but in america you might have any have even these things outdoors if you've been to colonial williamsburg the uh have you been there um the uh if you go there you'll see outdoor sheds outdoor shops indoor things they're very small that's you know how woodworking and how building happened uh when they were making things like this when you were building things this is the gidley room winter tour notice the back of this these boards right they didn't bother spending time you know roughing down the back side of the board which still has right this would have been made in a saw mill you don't pits on you'd see those saws those saw blades go back because the guys are doing this and then he stands up and does this right and so those those saw blade marks are different but that's very uniform so most likely that came from a sawmill water powered sawmill but the front side is obviously beautiful well crafted well made the backside is all rough lumber right that they wouldn't spend the time we don't think about when we have planers and joiners and things we run things through there we're we're always making four smooth sides right they never did that when they're making things like this they are uh um there is in this kind of uh in this kind of arrangement right georgian versus federal it's a different set of moldings a different set of uh of way of how how they're going to approach things there's a ton of carving in here now this is william buckland he was a carver and he was trained so this could get laid out like this this is much different these are more moldings and then some of these moldings might be applied we know that samuel mcintyre carved them but we begin to get there in the 1800s where the specialization of of craft with builders means that uh you're buying your sash from the sash maker you're buying your doors from a door maker you're not making everything by hand it begins to get a little bit modernized here and you would just like samuel mcintyre would sub himself out as a carver you were hiring those things out just looking at a georgian room okay this is the port royal this is 1760s at winter tour i mean the beefy nature of these moldings right they're huge this molding here sticks out from the wall and that casing three inches right three inches i mean that is a massive molding right and so these would have these moldings would have been made with what's called hollows and rounds and we'll get into that um this is a federal room okay and you know the the change here is you know the this change in this this crown of course has this fluted top here the moldings are much more refined much simpler notice the shape of the moldings one of the things that happens during the federal period is we change from this this uh round based moldings to an elliptical base molding and so this shape and then uh you know in here especially is egg-shaped right reflects light differently it isn't as bold and heavy and you know look what's happening to this cornice this is kind of a typical difference between the george and the federal because they're looking at pilation books in the 1780s and looking at how that stuff's done it's very canonical this is a 45 degree angle from top to bottom the georgian period become much more expressive they see these moldings flow out onto the wall this is more like a 60 degree angle and so moldings begin to express themselves very differently the size the moldings change i told you that this architrave sits out from the wall three inches this is like an inch and a half right this molding these architraves are huge they're you know six seven inches wide these come down to kind of more relative sizes uh you know four inches five inches we uh you you begin to see this is a line we did for keuken the differences in these moldings and in these shapes this is a georgian molding right and this is a federal molding i don't know if you can see that but the reason this george this projects out right and this is cut away do you see that so the in the in the federal period you would have removing of wood which would reflect light differently the georgian moldings are very around projecting right and so i can walk up and go yeah that's a georgia molding now it's the federal molding just by looking at those shapes the size its massiveness and things like that moldings were made either with custom planes like this right this is a crown molding here right these would be these this is the kind of tools these tools are very finicky okay obviously if you get all the humidity you got a lot of different stuff you you've got different uh um it they're hard to use basically what's happening is is there's a wood wedge which is right here and a metal blade okay right and so it's pretty crude right it's just this piece of metal with this with this this cutness shape and you are wedging your um your blade in here and so i'm looking like this i'm pushing that pushing that knife up in there just enough so that i can you know it's going to catch some wood right and then i'm pushing my wedge down in here right and hoping it doesn't move right it just did and then there's little bumps you'll do on the back side to loosen it up or pop it down a little bit they're very finicky tools is the point and then you have these moldings and oftentimes there was a line right i don't know if you can see that but there's a line baked here to show you where level is and so sometimes i would approach a board and i might approach a board like this because that's the way that that knife is going to work through that board right none of this you know the way way a knife would hit today because the way we're cutting it with these metal blades it's very different and then you might have custom planes like this which is a a sash blade right that's a for making sashes and these would be custom all these would be custom but that would be something very specific the other way to do is what's called with hollows and rounds and basically hollows and rounds did you buy a set normally there were 16 and they were all based on a different radius and so you see these different radiuses here they're paired by their radiuses and if i wanted to cut this shape right here i'd find out what radius that is i would get this blade and i would cut it through here and when i want to you know cut that i get the down here and so you can make custom moldings with this thing right this was your custom molding kit and how you would make moldings the other thing is that if we look back at that the book on the philadelphia carpenter's company and there they have these price lists okay and these are for door jambs and window jams okay there's a window jam with a track right well you notice that there's these little beads on here and there's this little rabbit okay that what's going on is basically the rabbit okay here and here is for a door and so what you would do is you would actually frame your walls okay with you know these studs and you'd put a bead and a rabbet on your stud okay this plaster would come in here and die behind it and then oftentimes moldings were covering that gap okay and so our shape that we end up with today like this is really a combination of that bead and then this cap because we don't do this the same way today right and so they are one of the shapes we end up with one of these things we end up with is because of the tectonics of how this is being built right and this would have been a one-inch door right and so there's different scales here but that's what's going on here when you know they're actually making the back band there what we call a back band there into the into the frame and then they would dye the the plaster up against that so different ways of building and and the moldings that we use today sometimes come from uh weird places if we were making this right today um you know this would be there's that bead maybe on the frame right and then this might be your molding back here okay and you would make you might have this shape this back band shape if you use it a lot if you're and so and you might have this shape right so you would begin to collect um you know these these shapes that you would use more often sometimes you'll still see those shapes over here sometimes you know you figure it's you know 1760 1770 and then by 1790 you're using a completely different set of moldings okay so maybe that's normal maybe that's not a big deal i always kind of felt bad for the guys that had this great set of tools and then the styles change um it's not like for us today where we we can our tools are more disposable uh this would have been made with a little uh uh hollowing or a little gouge um that would that would have been planed and so you know these all these would have been separate moldings that would have been applied these short these carving pieces would have been uh made pre-cut and then a carver would have come in and carved them so anyway each different molding is made specifically and differently like that um and then as far as carving goes there's one thing i've learned by having vossel here this master carver is learning how to look at moldings very differently and so this is an early samuel mcintyre carving and basically what he's done is is that i don't know if you can see it very well but there's not very good dart there okay so if you look at an egg and dart like this um that molding is basically it's a classical molding that um you look it's a classical molding that you know and it's based on this this this uh kind of idea that if there's an egg here there's a dart okay and then there's an egg in the dart and it's kind of life and death that the egg is this new life and this dart is death and so um there are different ways of carving this in doing this and so what i've learned in watching is is that there's good egg and darts and there's bad egg and darts and so what happens is on the good ones is that they are carefully laid out so that where's my example oh put it over here wherever there's a corner okay there's a leaf okay and so that there isn't this okay where someone's made a long sheet of egg and dart and then they just cut it on a 45 at some point and hope it kind of comes together all right but the right ones would actually make this out so that there's a leaf here and leaf here kind of like in this little corner here and so that this would all have to be carefully laid out so that and if you'll notice that this way this egg lines up with the middle of that bead this leg lines up here and so all of a sudden it ends up being very carefully laid out very carefully constructed and when you get a whole bay of these things laid up together and you see them done well all of a sudden there's this this orchestra of of shapes and details that are all speaking to one another and it's really quite wonderful we actually to make this we were copying this and looking at the past laying out these leaves and everything else so that it looks right when you look at something like this this is a incredible house in salem i mean in uh charleston their leaf and their corner detail is even more expressive okay their egg and dart is is is richer and fuller um if you look at this one here copied this one too we're great copiers um there's out it's it's not even a dark detail it's a little bud detail so there's like there's this little uh leaf coming down and opening up kind of looking like a dart but having more of a leaf detail and so all of a sudden you realize that there's many different ways to express this and many different ways to do this and you can pass these around that are really beautiful and wonderful now when you compare those to what you can get at home depot it's not really fair and so but sometimes i feel like we've forgotten how carefully these things were crafted and how carefully these things were done and we end up looking silly today and forgetting that these were handcrafted and handmade um the other thing that you'll see and we've we've made some federal moldings and so in the federal period we talked about the the dainty detail in here these were just some we worked up for a client but this is you know these are very federal shapes right you see that egg shape right there and these are pretty moldings too and so when you just look at these things right almost no dart no planting there versus this kind of thing um or or how expressive these are and how deep and rich these are there you can see a better that little bud detail that's so pretty um it ends up being pretty magical so compos yeah what's that when you go to paint this yeah yeah and then you have your coffee running under something like this well that's that's one unit you'd only have a cockpit at the top and the bottom yeah we'd nail it together so you wouldn't have that in that space any other questions on any of that this would be one one unit you're saying yeah at this time what's that um like when they go to a job site how would they how they measure it storyboards so they would you know a storyboard is so um they you know this was not the age of the the stanley tape measure um and so they would actually go in and make physical storyboards that would collapse down where they would take their measurements into a room so i'd take a measurement i take two sticks and i'd spread them out i mean this is a huge room for that period i'd spread them out i'd lock them together and i make pencil points on each one so i can measure the room out samuel mcintyre had some drawings where he was actually drawing the room out taking the measurements sometimes they might walk it off right if the room's really big but it's typically storyboards for height and width uh to determine you know the size they take it back to their shop yes alice like today or like back then well um because like the the federal moldings that we designed for keuken um uh are smaller right and so they would naturally be less expensive there's less wood um the one challenge we hear and one reason we didn't go totally historical big it's because they're so big they're hard to miter and they're hard to cut and put together and guys were complaining so um we're still trying to raise the bar and so uh the uh so the quick answer is yes because there's more but the long answer would be if they're the same size they shouldn't be more yes um well we hired a carver from the ukraine uh or we brought him over here i've known him for 10 years and um we're doing more now and so uh it's more common for us but before it was two or three times a year like i'm wondering is wouldn't that be more expensive yes that's more yeah yeah have you had oh it's a lot more yeah well so with federal moldings thank you for the segway young lady um you're very cute um so composition moldings in this federal period kind of looked like this right there was uh there was two or three guys just reading this great article the university of chicago about george andrews or is it george anderson yeah george anders robert welford they were kind of more famous they had catalogs of moldings that they that they made these are composition moldings today that like decorator supply uses is a combination like molasses and animal hide glue and you know sawdust okay back then it was a there it was partly plaster like lime like whiting it was uh it's a little bit of resin in there um and so uh they there's been a little bit different composition but base they're made the same way in that someone would carve this little detail into a wood or metal you know shape and then that they do is they take their very fine uh compo molding and shove it in there and press it in there it would dry they'd drop it out of the mold and they can make them over and over and over again and so a federal molding when it's like this is less expensive than a georgian molding when it's hand carved going back to your question but the uh but the compo moldings there's you know decorator supply is still the place to get them uh they do a wonderful job they have original molds and original details but um that's how this would have been made and this really starts because robert adam saw that stuff in pompeii goes back and redesigns how we decorate a room and so these moldings end up being very faint i mean if you look at that chair rail they're not real heavy and thick they're very faint and dainty and so that's kind of how that federal molding looks but compo really starts this period and some people will say well that's not historic actually it's very historic it's not a victorian thing okay got picked up in the queen n area kind of overblown again but it's very historic going back to the 1780s early federal period and then you can see this kind of stuff here all of this shape in here and so when i federal to me is very easy to pick out because there is common themes especially in america and you realize there's only two or three guys in the country that were that had a catalog that were showing this off everybody's basically buying from the same catalog so you see the same things over and over again there's a very famous one the battle of lake erie which was the famous one that would be right in the middle of a of a mantle uh and i've seen it you know 20 times this kind of this kind of swag detail is pretty typical and so very very easy to pick out this is a george andrews again we see the swag sometimes another one that's very popular would be benjamin franklin and george washington those would be some on either side of it but see what they've done they've exaggerated the freeze right so they got the very small architrave they've got a cornice that's compacted and this the proportions are still good but now they've got this big freeze in there and they've got these swags going across there and that's where the decoration goes same thing in this mantle exact same thing right and then same thing over top there these these columns are very small and refined sometimes you'll see those yeah they're there on that co on that mantelplace too but this is prototypical federal notice too there's not paneled walls right very simple moldings just a chair rail very simple cornice not not just not very heavy okay remember we're now discovered what the inside of these buildings really look like so we're no longer using exterior moldings here yeah yeah any questions on woodwork carving that kind of stuff so you know wrapping up the federal period it's it's uh it's it's pretty distinctive it's it's it's pretty awesome it is neoclassicism okay we call it federal could call it atomesque it's a refinement of the style the architect in this period is just starting to kind of come into his own can't quite get paid there's a famous story of benjamin latrobe first goes to norfolk virginia you know the clients don't want to pay what he's asking for he's just come from london where you know he would have gotten paid a normal amount they didn't appreciate what he was doing they didn't appreciate his abilities they didn't want to pay for it so it's a difficult time to be an architect but that they the professional architect has arrived in this period and we'll see them more and more and really push the builder out as a designer right the master builders that i always that are my heroes you know are a pre-1840 guy right they're not you know because you know architect schools and everything else started in 1880s 1890s the rise of the architect and the design buildings change and so the master builder really kind of goes away at that time architectural plans are more refined the drawings are actually something that we might look at today uh very detailed uh jefferson is just his own dude he's just he's crazy um style is still very balanced right still very grounded in the classical direction it's just a different expression right the the the the way they ornament the way they do things is just very different and so uh the lesson for today kind of what it takes to become a master builder um this this this understanding of design understanding of skill and craft and trying to combine all those so that we can get better at what we do today i think that's it the next one is greek revival alice august october 21st didn't change that but we're going to study greek revival in that period i want to thank kenneth keuken and windsor any questions yes sir when did or did uh ornate plasterwork take over the carving industry this period i mean yeah no it's it's this is when it starts and um you know because they're carving molds and if they're not carving the compo to put on a fireplace they're carving the uh they're making those molds to go on the ceilings you saw that remember samuel mcintyre is designed for that ceiling that would have been all done in plaster so uh this is that era um when that when that starts yeah right when nick did that plaster carving that plaster piece he took it from the hand carved and yep you're right i think we were at that time talking about maybe starting to replicate uh things out of plastic yeah uh yeah we've done that before we did it on a fireplace leg in there and because the fireplace design you can't have something flammable next to the fireplace you got to be 12 inches away that looks really ugly so you can do a plaster leg as that first thing so it's not flammable so you can get away from the fire mouth or get closer to the fire mouth and and not be flammable and so we did that there but we did that a number of times that's right any other questions thank you guys for coming there's still tons of food it's dinner time too so you can start eating dinner there thank you guys for coming [Music] you

Channel: Brent Hull

Views: 9,800

Keywords: Thomas Jefferson, Architecture, History, Design, Samuel McIntire, Charles Bullfinch, Robert Adam, Pompei, historic design, Preservation, UVA, Monticello, Syon house, Osterly Park, UK

Id: beH64FZRcd8

Length: 77min 17sec (4637 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021