West Ridge Architecture #2 - Asymmetrical Georgians

These boxy Georgian-styled homes are found in West Ridge, but also throughout the city and  The ones from the 1940s are solid brick, while later versions are concrete block with a face brick veneer. Most have stone trim or details.  Unlike the original Georgians, they are asymmetrical, with the front entrance to one side and the projecting bay with standing seam metal roof on the other. You can sometimes find identical versions on the same block with left- or right-handed orientations.
suburbs. 

Typically they have a raised entrance with an ornamental surround, a decorative bay on the first floor, colonial windows with shutters, and a hipped or pyramidal roof with minimal eaves.  The examples to the right are not drawn from an exhaustive survey of the type, but represent many of the typical characteristics. They're collected here to show some of the variations found throughout the neighborhood. 

The Georgian Revival style, which can be categorized as a subset of the Colonial Revival, had long been advertised in home catalogs and pattern books as the perfect combination of hominess and sophistication.  It could also be simplified easily while maintaining its basic characteristics. It lent itself to a variety of materials and expressions, from wood to stone and brick.  And it clearly appealed to the families who began to move to West Ridge following WWII.

Versions sometimes appear which bend the mold, like the example at 6813 N. Ridge.  The main entrance is at-grade, and casement windows replace the typical double-hung colonial windows. A portion of the building has been extruded forward, resulting in a more vertical orientation and a more complex roof configuration.

It's common to find these homes with entrances canopies resembling the roof over the projecting bay.  The more efficient version of these extends the roof bay over the entrance, hitting two birds with one stone.  This is especially common on the examples built later in the 1950s, when they begin to take on a more modern cast.

I can't emphasize enough how important the shutters are for this style. In some cases my illustrations restore those which have been removed.  Sure, they're non-functional and kind of silly, but the homes just don't look right without them.

When I started to look at these I was hoping there would be a clear progression from more historically-styled versions of the 1940s to modern types with minimal ornamentation from the 1950s.  Some of that can be seen, but not as much as I expected.  But as I pile up some more examples from the neighborhood perhaps some  new models for facade evolution will be suggested.

What I did begin to notice was how much the multifamily buildings from the 1950s and 60s borrowed from the architectural expressions of these single family homes.  But that will wait for a future post.