Critiquing "Sterilizing Development" in Historic Areas

Typical "patchwork" apartments in Richmond's historic center.

Urban advocates in Charlotte NC are taking a close look at the massive new multi-family apartment complexes that are transforming historic neighborhoods in a way that is becoming increasingly familiar here in Richmond. Is there a way to do new housing in city centers without damaging the fragile historic fabric of the small commercial and residential background buildings that provide the setting for the rich civic life, great cuisine, and commercial diversity that characterize Richmond's "bottom-up" revitalization in recent years? Is there a way to make new buildings that are more timeless in appearance and durable in materials, and that also respect the city's historic patterns of building?





Old Stone Row in Richmond's Shockoe Valley.



New apartment building in historic Jackson Ward.



Image:  Opponents of a new apartment complex at a recent Charlotte City  Council meeting credit: Ely Portillo, Charlotte Observer

In Charlotte a group of committed urbanists have organized "Civic by Design," a forum partnered with a wide array of cultural and design-related institutions, that intends "to elevate the quality of our region’s built environment and to promote public participation in the creation of a more beautiful and functional region for all." New Urbanist architect Tom Low, based in Charlotte, recently posted news of the forum on the traditional TradArch List.

The group has effectively defined the dense, cheap apartment blocks appearing in American cities as "sterilizing development." More than 10,400 units are under construction in Charlotte, with more than 10,300 planned. As in Richmond, many are four- or five-story mid-rise buildings being constructed in historic neighborhoods. These buildings are out of character with their surroundings in scale, materials, and proportion. Their designers attempt to mitigate their massiveness by applying a variety of exterior finishes in a seemingly patternless collage, often mixing brick, cement board, and corrugated metal. One prominent Richmond traditional architect has named this kind of form "RPQ, the Random Patchwork Quilt Style."

In Richmond, unlike in Charlotte, there has been little criticism of these new apartment blocks, perhaps because they are not yet as widespread and have not yet caused an extensive demolition of much-loved older buldings. The principal conversation in the past has been over the official design standards for new buildings in historic districts and the lack of external windows in a surprising number of rehabilitated lofts funded by historic preservation tax credits. 

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/biz-columns-blogs/development/article23919511.html#storylink=cpy

A forum at Charlotte's Levine Museum of the New South on June 9th defined the problem:

"Sterilizing development can be defined as new development that is too dense, too tall, too quick and diluting the funky character that makes our historic neighborhoods special.   These new designs are completely different in character and feel, quality, and style of bland, boring, beige, behemoth boxes all with the same look, the same standards, same floor plans.  This coarse grain approach is wiping out affordable housing and hole-in-the-wall neighborhood hang-outs, forcing people out and changing both the character and the social structure.  Developments with weak design and poor construction will not age well and quickly become passé, leaving neighborhoods to deal with the negative consequences in their wake.  Please join Civic By Design as we explore how development is sterilizing Charlotte."

The forum explored ways to change or mitigate the direction of development in Charlotte:

 

 

"1.  Review current design and redevelopment projects and their pros and cons for improving and harming neighborhoods and citizens — inclusive vs. elite, fine-grain vs. too coarse, durable vs. disposable?

2.  Determine what is key — can better civic design preserve elements of what is here now and allow for something new to come in and is it possible to control this? 

3.  Analyze the time and financial challenges developers along with the constraints and design teams must address and what options should be considered — the benefits and backlash of strong and time-consuming strict historic standards if imposed or are there other options?

4.  Explore ideas for a better and more civic design and development process as well as tools and techniques and how they can help —   where economics do not trump sentiment."

Civic by Design has come up with this alternate design for the kinds of bland, big-box developments that are overwhelming Charlotte's small-scale historic districts. This for an area around "Tommy's Pub," a much-loved landmark threatened with demolition.

Thanks to Tom Low on TradArch List.
 

Here are some pertinent links:

Plaza Midwood Residents Back Tommys Pub, oppose rezoning at council meeting.

 

Apartment developers are sterilizing Charlotte

Plaza Midwood Pleads with City Council to Stop Sterilizing Charlotte.

 

http://wfae.org/post/growth-and-development-charlotte-neighborhoods

 

Tyler Potterfield: An Appreciation

Tyler, left, exploring East Main Street for a blog entry in Spring of 2010

Here it is time that we should inscribe a terse memorial of our dear friend Tyler Potterfield.

It has been barely long enough since Tyler's death in late April to realize that is no longer with us. It's not just that he won't be biking over to sit at our table on an odd Wednesday evening, although that is very important.  Here at Urbanismo, we also prized him as a keen critic and sympathetic observer. Tyler accompanied us on most of the tours posted on the blog. He understood what a city could be and where it missed the mark. It is very important to us to remember him in full, as a friend, an urbanist, a husband, and a historian of his adopted city of Richmond.

Tyler's presentation could be a little off-putting to those who didn't know him: the ghost of a downturned lip might have been mistaken for a kind of disdain. Nothing could have been less true of him-- although, if he could have been a snob, it would have been in the cause of good sense, accomplished woodcraft, and well composed surroundings. He preserved a laconic style even when delivering a pungent comment about poor design or mistaken planning decisions; his compliments were always meaningful. It is a little known fact in Tyler's history that he once aspired to be a minister in the Lutheran Church. He very much enjoyed singing in church choirs.

As a connoisseur of urbanity, Tyler was always pleased to explore great cities and great museums. He also understood the margins of the wilderness: Tyler especially prized his time hiking and fishing from "Windy Inn," the almost plumbing-free lodge founded by his grandparents on a  Pennsylvania trout stream.  We got to visit more than once and relished the trails and the quiet porch hammock.

In the field, Tyler was a Boy Scout. When on an expedition, he displayed what his necessarily tolerant wife, Maura, once called his "Moonrise Kingdom mode." He was invariably outfitted with selected bits of the traditional kit that went along with living outdoors: shorts, nice hiking boots, elegant envelopes for fishing lures, perhaps a belt for secateurs and small hand-axes that could be useful for clearing trails, a thorn-proof vest, and a cap redolent of the Scottish highlands, ornamented with a clan badge improvised from a sprig of oak. In recent years, his walks regularly led along the bank of a trout stream.

And then there were the undertakings: restoring bridges, fostering the building crafts, marriage, learning to fish, protecting canals, cemeteries, neighborhoods, and making a Corinthian library according to the order of the "Tower of the Winds." Most of these were very successful. Both of us at Urbanismo cut our professional teeth cataloging entire streetcar suburbs under Tyler's careful administration. In recent years, Tyler was increasingly recognized as an articulate defender of the city's urban landscape. He was able to transcend his official position as the city's senior preservation planner to become a personal advocate for key elements in the historic urban fabric that serve the public good.

We also watched when Tyler and Maura, after an eventful courtship, walked into St. Andrews Church and came out in a new combination, making a particular life together in their lovingly tended Oregon Hill row house. Their companionship glowed under the stress of their frequent hospitality: Maura's elegant meals, Tyler's various aperitif combinations, dinner in the kitchen or garden, quoits in the back alley.

His most charming gift was for the creation of what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons," those small societies which make the city stronger and more humane. When he wasn't hoeing or pruning or riding his bicycle, he was continually launching serial organizations, professional circles, student clubs, and quoits teams, all of a duration short enough to prevent them from becoming automatic and, therefore, boring. Short, almost illegible notes were succeeded in recent years by email invitations. Most recently, he organized monthly conversations among the city's upcoming cadre of urban planners.

And, as his most accessible accomplishment, Tyler brought his walker's eye to scholarship. Nonesuch Place, his memorable history of the Richmond landscape, cuts across the grain of traditional civic history. It reminds us of Walter Muir Whitehill's elegantly crafted Topographical History of Boston, gifting the city with a new and exciting way of understanding itself.

Among all of these projects, Tyler was his own best effort. He was loyal, brave, very true, and most of those other things as well, even thrifty. Who knows what his next project might have become or might be? What is needed just now is a topographical history of Tyler Potterfield. We won't forget him anytime soon.

A PROPOSED NEW CITY HALL FOR WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

A recent design project provided the StudioAmmons design team, of which we are a part, with an unmatched opportunity, not only to make great civic architecture, but to aid in the definition of an important new urban space in the beautiful, restored colonial capital of Virginia. We present here a design intended to transcend the unconvincing and thoughtless “traditional” building projects in evidence in the suburbs surrounding the historic city center.  Although StudioAmmons was not selected to design the building, the design process provided a valuable opportunity to explore appropriate forms for civic architecture in the present day. 

The proposed building was intended to: 

• provide a dignified place for the legislative functions of city government

• act as an engaging and flexible place for cultural events and ongoing exhibits

• reinforce the framework supporting the civic and cultural life of the city

• contain the ingredients of sustainability

• acknowledge and embody the local ethos to ensure long-term vitality

• set a convincing model for new building in the Williamsburg area, that it is possible to make fine buildings that model themselves on the best that has come before.

Existing Stryker Building (1967)

The Program

The project involved replacement of the outmoded Stryker Building, a centrally located city government building that houses the Williamsburg City Council Chamber and other offices of city government. The building was constructed in 1967. In addition to a meeting room for the City Council and other boards and commissions, the proposed new Stryker Center would add public meeting and exhibition space, as well as offices to augment the current public library facilities.

The program suggested the form, plan, and architectural detail of the proposed design.  The local context stresses, not only responsiveness to local tradition and history, but an economical use of the most durable and environmentally responsible materials to achieve a sustainable result that complements, not only the location on the emerging City Square, but the city as a whole. 

The best connection with the architecture for which Colonial Williamsburg is so widely known can be found in an expanded use of the same effective architectural design methods used by the builders of those structures and further developed by designers of the principal public buildings in U.S. cities.  The role of the civic authorities in the region, as well as precedent in the historic courthouse on Market Square, former seat of government for both the county of James City and the town of Williamsburg, indicated the use of a monumental form and a suggestion of that dignified and sober architectural order, the Ionic. 

The proposed “city hall,” not only the meeting place of the city council, but the venue for civic debate and exhibits of art and history, responds to the historic and contemporary nature of the city on several levels. It achieves this result by its siting in relation to the growing city on a wonderful civic plaza, its historical models, its materials, and its floor plan, without mimicry or irony.

An important civic building like this will draw indirectly on the scale and form of Virginia's colonial courthouses, but the design should also incorporates knowledge developed in the design of nineteenth- and twentieth-century civic architecture.  Building materials, particularly the elements of brick, allude to local tradition, while the painted character of masonry contrasts with the many derivative Colonial buildings in the locale and directly relates the building to the impressive Community Building that dominates the square by its location at the center of the east end. 

The building takes as its cue the five-hundred year tradition, seen in disparate examples from Renaissance Italy to twentieth century Boston, of orienting government buildings on a civic plaza and of mediating the connection between those buildings and the public square by means of sheltering porches or arcades. These intermediate structures represented the accessibility of civic institutions and serve, not only as transitional places, but as markets for ideas as well as goods. 

The Community Building, City Square, Williamsburg VA (Carlton Abbott, architect)

The Urban Setting

In a well-ordered city, new buildings are carefully placed within intentional urban patterns in order to support a robust civic life. The new City Hall should take its place within the overall pattern established by the city at the center of civic life. It should neither dominate the square by its architectural form, nor should it give no indication of the importance of the its role, but it should join with the other buildings around the square to create a balanced whole reflective of the city’s shared ideals for a strong, wise, and just community. 

The Stryker Building currently does not relate well to its most immediate context, the remarkable urban amenity known as City Square. It faces instead towards Boundary Street, a busy street that bisects the square. City Square was created in 1999 within the nondescript grid on the northern edge of the historic district and forms the heart of the city’s 23-acre Municipal Center. It represents a very successful attempt, engineered by architect Carleton Abbott, to carve a new urban place out of the desert of parking lots and back lots that formerly provided the only context for the Stryker Building. 

The square unites the various forms and styles of the city’s civic buildings, from the low bulk of the Williamsburg Public Library on the south to the axially placed Community Building at its east end. Its planners also included a series of smaller urban gestures, built and unbuilt, that seem intended to complete the definition of City Square by enclosing its long sides.

Williamsburg's Municipal Center, just north of the historic district, with the City Square
 at the center. The Community building is the prominent cross-shaped structure to the
 center right. The Stryker Building is at the upper left, just north of the square. The Public
 Library is at the lower left.

In our view, the new Stryker Center should fulfill two important urban requirements:

1) It should serve as a symbolic seat of government appropriate to the city’s civic heritage

The proposed building would house the City Council Chamber, designed to seat 100 persons for regular meetings of council and other government bodies and as a well-equipped venue for other community events, such as lectures and concerts. Its architecture should support its purpose and it should serve as a worthy heir to the buildings housing Williamsburg's historic civic institutions.

2) The building should act as an activator and full participant in the ongoing definition of City Square

The new Stryker Center, correctly handled, should assist in structuring City Square as a successful civic plaza. It would provide essential definition to the northern edge of City Square and it will clarify the public value of the plaza by making larger connections among civic institutions. The Stryker Building would join, functionally and visually, with the Public Library and the existing Community Building to make City Square an active and appropriately unified public place.

The proposed new Stryker Building shown in orange (StudioAmmons).

Bird's eye view of the proposed Stryker Center (watercolor by Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons) 

Perspective of the Proposed Stryker Center looking NW (Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons)

Site Analysis

City Square occupies an important location on the functional map of the city. It is placed at the heart of the 23-acre Municipal Center, a complex of city government buildings that are sandwiched between Colonial Williamsburg and twentieth-century residential areas associated with the nearby College of William and Mary. The award-winning public green was created in the late 1990s by carving out streets from a grid of lots on the east side of Boundary Street and on the west side from parking lots owned by the city and the public library. Interestingly, the southeast corner of the Boundary Street at the southern edge of the square represents the northwest corner of the 1699 city of Williamsburg.

The central green is cut in two by Boundary Street, a busy thoroughfare that cuts across the city at the west end of Duke of Gloucester Street. This division into two parts gives a definite character to the square. Rather than forming an intrusion, the street gives citizens exposure to the unifying value of this civic green space and reminds them of the many activities that take place there. The eastern half corresponds to the Community Building and its key role in the life of the city, while the western half corresponds to the two institutional expressions of civic life that flank it, the Council Chamber and the Library, mediated by the leisure zone of the fountain and trellis. The central green is bounded by fictive, granite-curbed streets that lie on public land and is flanked by single lines of trees. The city has provided lots for development on the north side of the square and controls a similar narrow lot on the south side.

North and South Sides

The north side of the square is characterized by the pre-existing green lawn of the Stryker Building that lines the west side of Boundary Street and the tightly spaced buildings that conceal the parking garage that was built at the same time to serve the Municipal Center. The existing Public Library occupies the southwest side of the square across from the trellis and fountain. Two additional lots along the north and south side of the street are intended to be the sites of buildings designed to enclose the square and screen neighboring structures from view.

East and West Ends

Most significantly, the east and west ends of the green are book-ended by major civic elements that effectively close off the ends of the rectangular piazza. At the east stands the dominating form of the Community Building, which by its symmetrical form and axial location, is clearly the most important building in the entire municipal area. It shows, to the users, that the cultural and imaginative lives of the citizens carry the highest value in civic life.

Library Plaza

At the opposite end of the square is Library Plaza, a rambling public pavilion which incorporates a trellis in the form of a deconstructed eighteenth-century house frame and a naturalistic fountain. This feature effectively forms the square’s western end and conceals a municipal parking lot beyond. This public amenity seems intended to serve, not only as a fair-weather picnic trellis, but as an idealized representation of the relationship of the citizens to their historic context in Colonial Williamsburg.

The Envelope

It is important to emphasize that the buildings, not the streets, form the actual edges of every fully realized square or piazza. In this way each, this urban square can be seen as
the central hall of the Municipal Center or as a large urban room, out of which open the various public functions which join together to make it a single civic place. The volume of the square can be accentuated by blending materials so that the textures and colors minimize the difference between the streets and the central area. In this case, however, the central area is a green lawn intended more for visual gratification than active use as a public venue. Even so, the essence of a traditional square or piazza is its sense of enclosure. Most American squares fail in this regard because they are too large or too open at the corners. City Square has an opportunity to reinforce its form by strengthening its edges and the Stryker Building can act its part to achieve this goal.

Building Placement

A reorientation of the Stryker Building towards City Square will not give it in the most important position. The Community Building retains that character. Like the Public Library, which faces it across the green, the Stryker Center takes on an important supporting role in the larger structure of the Municipal Center. In addition to a new inflection toward the square, the building, in order to establish its volume, is aligned with the other buildings on the square’s northern edge. It is also be placed close to Boundary Street so as to create a dynamic contrast with the openness of the square.

It is very important for the building to join in establishing a northern edge for the square while, at the same time, expressing its relative importance in the civic life of Williamsburg. This is achieved by establishing a well marked, but not too strongly emphasized, entry centered on the western half of the square, in order to balance axial and edge-creating lines. In order to establish its presence, the building should be fully on the square, and not permitted to run past its visual ending point at the Library Plaza Trellis.

The building signals its important role as the official home of city government by an advanced central pavilion and pediment. This feature announces the building’s importance without limiting its contribution to the square as a whole and acknowledges its counterpart in the Public Library directly opposite. In addition, by not advancing beyond the outdoor pavilion which forms the effective western wall of the square, the new building establishes a northwestern corner for the square. 

Floor Plan, Proposed Stryker Building

Building Description

The program for the replacement of the Stryker Building by the City of Williamsburg suggests the form, plan, and architectural detail of the proposed design.  The local context stresses, not only responsiveness to local tradition and history, but an economical use of the most durable and environmentally responsible materials to achieve a sustainable result that complements, not only the location on the emerging City Square, but the city as a whole. 

The proposed Stryker Center is structured as a composite form extending around three sides of the central Gallery or gathering space. The primary entry is from the south through a public loggia linking exterior and interior. It is located convenient to primary and more distant parking areas. Secondary entrances give access to a shallow courtyard on the east side. A staff entry to the library offices is located on the north end and emergency exits are placed on each side of the council chamber. A hipped roof defines the central spine of the building and visually connects the south facade with the body of the building.

Buildings with complex public roles often take composite forms, and the proposed City Hall is no exception. The building partakes of at least two of the most basic building types, the regia and the theater. The regia, or seat of government, most often appears as a rectilinear building divided into smaller rooms for various governmental purposes, arranged to surround a courtyard or hall. The theater, a place where citizens are able to gather to visualize a better civic life, is usually given a semi-circular shape so that everyone present can engage with each other in the activities which take place there. In this case, the Council Chamber makes use of the theater form. As in most successful examples of similar kinds of buildings, the combination of the two building types, if handled well, can make a stronger result. An example of a similar composite of two types can be seen at Williamsburg's Colonial Capitol, where two theaters join to form an H-shaped regia and flank a central loggia. 

While buildings that embody the regia are often the most important building in a town and is sited in a free-standing location off the street grid (like the Colonial Capitol and the old James City County Courthouse) here the free-standing position has already been granted to the Community Building, a formal composition taking yet another form, that of the templum, at the center of the square’s eastern end. It indicates, by its position and formal type, that the community  honors most highly the gathering of citizens for organizational, private, and educational events. It recognizes that the beneficial activities of citizens, rather than the act of governing, is at the center of Williamsburg’s civic life. 

Gallery looking north (Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons)

Council Chamber looking NE (Gibson Worsham for StudioAmmons)

The Gallery or lobby is placed at the center of the east side of the Stryker Center. It is lit by tall windows facing Boundary Street, which provide a visual connection between passersby and the activities in the center. The gallery is the tallest room in the building. 

The proposed “city hall,” not only the meeting place of the city council, but the venue for civic debate and exhibits of art and history, responds to the historic and contemporary nature of the city on several levels. It achieves this result by its siting in relation to the growing city on a wonderful civic plaza, its historical models, its materials, and its floor plan, without mimicry or irony. and is treated with carefully designed moldings. The Council Chamber, with its semicircular form, extends from the west side of the building and incorporates a semicircular seating layout for both council and the audience. An outer ring provides circulation space and standing room for overflow at events. Modern audio-visual systems are controlled from a booth next to the podium. The Council Work Room, which doubles as a meeting room, connects directly with the seating in the Council Chamber. Short corridors connect the Gallery with the Council Chamber and give access to service rooms, the public toilets and a catering kitchen.

The three meeting rooms, large, medium, and small in size, are grouped around the Gallery. Flexibility is the keyword: the largest room can be sub-divided by a sliding wall if needed. The large and medium meeting rooms can be accessed from the exterior by means of the south entrance when the rest of the building is closed. The catering Kitchen is nearby. Each meeting room is provided with capacious storage for equipment, tables, and chairs. The Library Executive Suite is located in the north end of the building. The clerical staff will staff the services desk in the center of the north end of the Gallery and the adjacent Library Offices Waiting Room. Each of the five offices has a window and access to the office workroom. The Executive Suite has exterior access through a staff entry from the north.

Architectural Design Overview

• A site near the sidewalk at the northwest corner of Boundary Street and City Square that will reinforce the north edge of the square.

• South and east walls that provide strong edges to the square and to the west side of Boundary Street to make a strong contrast between the square and the thoroughfare that bisects it.

• A site axially related to the western half of the square

• A porch or loggia over the sidewalk, joining the building directly to the urban space of the square, encouraging participation in the events within and without. It acts as a porte cochere to provide a covered drop off at the entry.

• A projecting semi-circular wing on the west economically expressing its role as the council chamber.

• A shallow courtyard opening off Boundary Street providing light and outdoor space and supporting the central Lobby or Gallery.

• Provision for expansion to the north along Boundary Street built into the design.

• Economical use of circulation space in the building, reducing construction costs. Due to this sensible use of circulation space, the design is 1,000 square feet smaller than the previously submitted project, representing a cost savings of as much as $400,000. 

• A white-painted brick exterior to provide a clear connection to the Community Building and, like it, appropriate differentiation from the many Neo-colonial buildings in the area surrounding Williamsburg.

• Simple, carefully proportioned, traditional details to make essential connections with Williamsburg’s place in American urban history.

• Legible, elegant building form and floor plan that connects with the architectural heritage of the city.

• Permanent and technologically sustainable materials result in ease of maintenance over time.

StudioAmmons made this unsolicited submission to the City of Williamsburg in 2012. The proposal, in the development of which the members of Urbanismo took part, was presented as an alternate design, proposed under the Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act of 2002, as revised in 2007.

TALKEETNA, ALASKA: "WHERE THE ROAD ENDS, LIFE BEGINS"

Talkeetna, Alaska, has been many things: supply station and winter base for prospectors, miners, and trappers in the area around Cache Creek, a port for riverboat shipping, and a  railroad depot on the Alaska Railroad midway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. It is located 85 miles above the sea at the head of shipping on the shallow Susitna River. Today it has attained new significance as the primary jumping-off point for climbing expeditions to the summit of Mount McKinley in the nearby Alaskan Range. The development of the town’s story is wrapped up with the transportation history of the remote Alaskan wilderness. It involves foot travel, water transportation, dog sled, horse, rail and airplane. 

Remarkable view on July 3 of the summit of Mt. McKinley, usually concealed by clouds.

Main Street looking west from the Town Park with Nagley's Store at center.

A recent visit to the unincorporated town of Talkeetna (pop. 876) revealed remarkable continuity of form between the early Alaska railroad town and the tourist depot that it is today. The town is made up of a Main Street that extends from the station to the river, paralleled by Front Street to the north and First and Second streets to the south. It is crossed by streets named A, B, C, and D. Flooding and erosion have reduced the town by two blocks to the west, but what remains shows the kinship of Talkeetna with planned towns around the world. Information here is derived from exhibits at the Talkeetna Historical Society and the National Register form for the Talkeetna Historic District.

David Lawrence Cabin (c 1920)

Prospectors arrived as early as 1896 with a gold rush in the area around the Susitna River. The tiny port of Talkeetna was established by the Alaska Commercial Company in 1910, soon after the discovery of gold on nearby Cache Creek in 1906. It served as a supply center for miners who spent the summers on their claims and the winters hunting and trapping. The supply center closed in 1912, but the town’s use as a home base by miners in the Yentna District lasted until the end of the mining era during World War II. 

In 1916, the Alaskan Engineering Commission, a federal agency responsible for building a railway to open up the interior of Alaska to development, selected Talkeetna as the location for a construction headquarters, station, and post office. With the completion of the railroad in 1923 the town lost a significant section of its population, but its purpose as a supply center was sustained. From 1920 to 1932, the Alaska Road Commission maintained a road crew in Talkeetna, building and repairing 22 miles of wagon roads and nearly the same number of miles of sled road giving access from the depot to the back country all around.

Map from the National Register form for the Talkeetna Historic District [National Park Service]

The AEC used its authority to plat a grid of eighty lots in 1918 and sold them to merchants, freighters, and miners. The town previously consisted of informal lots flanking a route running back from the river landing. Many occupants were able to establish “preference rights” to purchase approximately half of the lots since they had already made improvements to them. In 1920, the population included 53 men and 17 women. 19 of the men were miners, 5 were trappers, 7 worked for the railroad, and 22 were involved in commerce. 

The main intersection and the commercial center (at least since the loss of the western end of town to erosion in the 1940s) is found where Main Street is crossed by D Street. One corner is occupied by a triangular park, probably established by the Alaskan Engineering Commission in 1918 as a site for the rail-related buildings. Such parks were commonly included in post Civil-War town developments in order to allow for additional railroad buildings and to impress visitors by ordering and ornamenting what would serve as the gateway to the town. 

When the 30-foot-wide Talkeetna Village Airstrip opened in 1938, it was positioned immediately adjacent to the town as a continuation of D Street, so that airplanes could readily load supplies from the trains and take off directly over Main Street. This new transportation center may partially account in part for the importance of the intersection of D and Main streets.       

Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, (1923), view from intersection of Main and D streets on July 3.

Not until 1964 was Talkeetna connected by road with the outside world. The streets were unpaved and the buildings fronted directly onto the streets, probably with boardwalks in heavily traveled sections. A section of boardwalk has been maintained in front of Nagley’s Store. The rough and even primitive character of the edge between lot and street is what gives the town its peculiar historic atmosphere. Although the streets have been paved, the lack of sidewalks and presence of wildflowers and native shrubs give the sense of continuity in time and place.   

Street edges in Talkeetna

Ole Dahl Cabin #1 (c 1918)

Nagley's Store (1920/1945)

Of the thirteen historic buildings built between the late 1910s and the 1930s, most are located along the Main Street. As a town with limited functions and restricted demographics, the number and variety of civic and other specialized buildings was limited. There was no school until 1936, when the Alaska Territory built a one-room school house (now the town’s museum). There was no church and the only public building for many years was the railroad station. The Fairview Inn, the only hotel, was built between 1920 and 1923. It stands across the street from Nagley’s Store, built by Horace Nagley out of reused parts brought in by barge in from an older supply station about 1920. It was relocated in 1945 from the lower part of town after it was threatened by erosion of the river bank. 

The Frank Lee House (1917), known after 1940 as "the Talkeetna Roadhouse," a longtime headquarters for Mt. McKinley climbers, located on the corner of Main and C streets.

Detail of logs at the David Lawrence Cabin

All of the early buildings, other than the depot and the Fairview Inn, were built of logs. Many of these have v- and square-notched corners that are protected by boxed corner boards. A two-story, gable-front log house was built in 1917 on the corner of Main and C streets by Frank Lee, a river freight operator. At 21’ x 32’ feet, it is one of the largest. It was converted into an inn and restaurant (“the Road House”) in 1940. Other houses include the small and low-ceilinged (13’ x 20’) typical “trapper’s cabin” built by Ole Dahl about 1918 and the David Lawrence Cabin, which measures 15’ x 20,’ and the second Ole Dahl House of c 1920, which was built after his marriage and measures 20’ by 26.’ By the 1930s, houses continued to be built of log, but were supplemented by frame buildings like the school. 

RESUSCITATING URBAN FORMS AT HISTORIC NAUVOO, ILLINOIS

Lewis Henry, Nauvoo, 1854

  
The city of Nauvoo, Illinois, is one of the most fascinating of the phalanx of utopian communities that appeared in the American Midwest in the period leading up to the Civil War.  Gibson Worsham spent two years at 3north Architects managing the development of a strategy for resuscitating urban forms at Historic Nauvoo, a destination heritage site for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, located on the banks of the Mississippi River. Our task was to assist in making sensitive additions to the city in order to house an expanding variety of programs associated with its unusual historic importance, including visitor facilities. The 3north design team began with an analysis of the city's organizing principles set out during the formative period of 1839-1846 and adapted during later periods of development. 

Introduction

Nauvoo was the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the six-year period after the followers of Joseph Smith were forcibly expelled from Missouri and lasting until he was killed and his followers left for Utah under the charismatic leadership of Brigham Young. During its remarkably short time of occupancy (late 1830s to 1846), Nauvoo grew with extraordinarily rapidity. Hundreds of masonry buildings, both private and public, were erected on lots placed in an expansive street grid.  As many as 96 buildings survive from the period.   

Following the departure of the Mormons in 1846, the town grew slowly as a local commercial center. The LDS church has re-purchased large portions of the historic city over the past fifty years in order to present an important portion of its history to church members and to the general public. The largest project has been the impressive reconstruction (in 2002) of the limestone temple completed in 1846 and later destroyed. The city contains a late-nineteenth-century business area, a large historic district, and the interpretive apparatus of a modern historic restoration, quite effectively informed by the restoration ethos of Colonial Williamsburg. Restored and furnished buildings are staffed by energetic volunteer retired couples, who populate the buildings and provide entertaining musical and theatrical programs. Other important buildings in Nauvoo, inherited by Joseph Smith's family in 1844, are maintained and exhibited by the Community of Christ, a separate branch of the Mormon tradition based in Independence, Missouri.  

Reconstituting the City

Carroll William Westfall in his book, coauthored with Robert Jan van Pelt, titled Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism has explored the way cities are made and how they can be revived. One of the first principles of classical design, both for cities and the buildings which make them up, is that urban form is derived from political form. When the two work together, the ancient goal of achieving the “good life” is approached. As Westfall has said: “ just as there is only one politics (the art of living together in order to perfect the nature of each individual) so too there is only one architecture (the art of building serving that politics). In that sense politics and architecture are both conducted according to normative principles. Their purpose is to facilitate the good life, the life of happiness, the one in which the individual may aspire to reach the normative.”

Each city is embedded in a complex web of past solutions to the same questions, local traditions of building, and regional climatic and geographic necessities. Over time, principles emerge with increasing clarity about the best ways to build. Cities hold a layered texture of past responses to these principles. This texture forms a civilization’s conventions.  The answers to urban and architectural questions are embedded in their political and physical locales. It is possible to examine, study, and extract the buildings, architectural form, and materials of cities from their contexts.

Classical Urban and Architectural Design 

Nauvoo's classical vocabulary was derived from the common heritage of the west and adapted by Joseph Smith and a small team of architects and builders to fit the city's political structure and the difficult economic conditions under which it grew. 

According to Westfall, the traditional city is made up of a legible hierarchy of building types and building components. As Westfall has observed, “the complementary poles of continuity and distinctiveness accommodated within this system satisfies one of the principal aims of traditional city building and urban practices whether Roman or otherwise" Just as buildings are related by common materials, finishes and patterns of composition, they are differentiated in the urban order by the chosen material, level of finish, and organization of the parts. In the Western city, including Nauvoo, the builders' “kit of parts” and the underlying system of relationships has been provided by the classical orders. Understanding local patterns which had informed building in the Mormon context of the historic of the city will aid in making decisions about the form and materials of new building fabric. 

Temple and Great Tabernacle in Salt Lake City 

Joseph Smith, the chief designer, was driven by a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem (where the good life might be fully manifested both politically and architecturally). Smith’s inspired vision often overcame the literalism of his bookish architects and builders, but the urban and architectural expression was fundamentally American and classically republican, as leaders acknowledged when they affirmed the New England meeting-house roots of the temples, tabernacles, and assembly halls built in the antebellum era. Not until Brigham Young determined the form of the Salt Lake Temple was the special character of the central Temple set apart from the workaday classicism of the Morman city. This was manifested in the use of an otherworldly version of a rediscovered Gothic. Otherwise, classical temple forms continued to be used for civic architecture long after Nauvoo was abandoned. A good example can be seen in the Salt Lake Theater of 1861-62, an elegant version of a Greek Doric "distyle in muris" temple.

Salt Lake Theatre, 1861-62

Gustavus Hall's Map of Nauvoo, 1842

The Government of Nauvoo

The city of Nauvoo was governed at first by a council of religious leaders. In previous locations the distribution  of goods and land to church members had followed a communal system. By the time they arrived in Nauvoo in the late 1830s, church leaders had instigated a return to private enterprise for a number of practical reasons. In 1839, Nauvoo received a charter from the state similar to that of Chicago, which had been authorized  two years before. The city government consisted of a mayor and council, justices of the peace, and various officials. More unusually, however, the charter granted the city the right to organize a virtually independent militia, the Nauvoo Legion, and a university. 

Although organized as a secular government, in effect many of the church leaders held influential dual roles in the religious and civic spheres. The city was at first divided into four wards that intersected at the northwest corner of the Temple Lot. The Nauvoo Legion, a large and active defensive force, was based in an armory placed at this symbolic and functional center of the city. The wards were the smallest units into which the political and religious order of the city were divided. Each was to provide schools and a community meeting house.


Urban Design in Nauvoo

“No one lot, in this city, is to contain more than one house, and that to be built twenty-five feet back from the street, leaving a small yard in front, to be planted in a grove, according to the taste of the builder; the rest of the lot for gardens; all the houses are to be built of brick and stone [Joseph Smith, Plat of the City of Zion, 1833].”

The landscape at Nauvoo was carefully ordered and organized according to visionary Mormon precepts. The city was built with great energy in spite of unrelenting political and economic pressure. It was still incomplete when abandoned but its pattern was clearly established.  The land in the "flats" along the river owned by the church was laid out in a grid of streets outlining four-acre squares or blocks, each containing four one-acre lots, also square. Smith had set out the church's principles for town planning in 1833, with the revelation of the "Plan of Zion", the layout for a sacred city proposed for a site in Missouri. The main idea embodied in the plan of Zion was that each member family would be ensconced on a lot that was large enough to provide room for gardens, orchards, and other immediate domestic support activities. “An individual plot of ground was viewed as an integral part of the larger concept of “sacred space” [Hamilton 23]. 

As in earlier settlements influenced by the Plan of Zion, the residents were intended to live on large one-acre lots, although population pressure later led to subdivisions. As
uniquely dictated by the plan, the houses on each block faced either north-south or east-west in a checkerboard pattern, not favoring any street with a line of tightly spaced buildings, but giving a suburban openness to the city, a “rural lifestyle in an urban setting” [Leonard 60]. The city was to appear like a garden, with each citizen maintaining crops and orchards on their acre. 

A Nauvoo paper editorialized in 1842 “Let each citizen fill his spare ground with fruit tress, shrubbery, vines, etc., tastefully arranged. . . . Let the division fences be lined with peach and mulberry trees, the garden walks be bordered with current, raspberry, and gooseberry bushes, and the houses surrounded with roses and prairie flowers, and their porches crowned with the grape vine, and we shall soon have
formed some idea of how Eden looked [Times and Seasons, 1 Feb. 1842].” So luxuriant was the summer of 1845, that the twelve-foot-tall corn crop concealed all but the rooftops
of Nauvoo from view. Many had farms on the edge of the city. The community also provided a collective “Big Farm” of nearly four thousand acres where landless citizens could raise crops.

Revised Plan of Zion, 1833, prepared for a city to be built in Missouri. The central  square
 holds twenty-four temple-form public buildings.

In Smith's "Revised Plan of Zion" of 1833, the city is a residential grid centered on several squares holding a core of ecclesiastical and public buildings (a temple, church offices, houses of worship, schools, offices, and government buildings) in the form of numerous temples. These squares were framed by two wide parallel thoroughfares running through the city in each direction. The rest of the streets were narrower and undifferentiated in width. 

Commerce was not envisioned in the Plan of Zion, because its utopian vision included a law of consecration, where all property was held in common and distribution of goods was made from central storehouses. Heavy industry and agriculture were set outside the city in a green belt. The houses in almost all of the cities based on the plan of Zion were to be oriented in a basket-weave pattern so that no house faced the front of any other and each was to be set back twenty-five feet in a garden setting. 

The grid at Nauvoo was largely undifferentiated, with streets slightly less than 50 feet wide. The only exceptions were the 87-foot width of Main Street, running north to south and planned as the main thoroughfare, and Water Street along the southern waterfront, planned to be the site of an important canal (to provide passage past a set of falls in the river) and given a width of 64 feet. No land was originally provided for a temple. In 1841, a central, four-acre Temple Lot on additional land to the east became the center of the city. Joseph Smith did not intend for the land around the temple to become a commercial section. However, over time, businesses gathered in two areas, on Main Street near the river landing on the flats, and around the temple on the bluff and along Mulholland Street, the main route into the city from the east. Tradesmen and craftsmen worked out of their homes or nearby annexes. By 1846 there were as many as thirty merchants in Nauvoo, 25 of whom were in the area around the temple and east along Mulholland Street.

 

Housing orientation at Nauvoo [3north, 2008]. We were able to determine that a majority of the houses at Nauvoo 
conformed to the unique basket-weave plan propounded in the “Plan of Zion.” The angled plat at the 
upper left is the earlier, failed town of Commerce, Illinois.

The reality of urban planning at Nauvoo was complicated by its unique geography and by fierce economic and historical pressures, but our analysis and the resulting diagram indicates that the authorities continued to encourage the same pattern. 

Temple Square, Nauvoo, showing the canvas
Tabernacle in front of the Temple in 1842

Sacred Geometry

The builders ignored Baroque axial planning in favor of the Mormon concept of sacred geometry and central enclosed sacred precincts. 

The public buildings on the Plan of Zion were not meant to be arranged like the houses on their lots, but were to be sited in free-standing locations on the public land at the center of the city. Their orientation in unclear, but the sacred buildings were undoubtedly to be oriented in an east-west direction, as seen in the temple design for Zion presented by Joseph Smith.  The central public square was reproduced at Nauvoo as soon as the land on the bluff could be developed. Since the public land  was not as large as those proposed for Zion or the square built later at Salt Lake City, other public buildings were not located on the square. 

Map of Nauvoo today. The numbered buildings are (1) the reconstructed Temple on the bluff (2) the
 modern meeting house or Stake Center, 93) the LDS Visitor Center in the flats below the bluff, and
 (4) a parking deck near the Temple. The large building at the bottom center is the incomplete
Nauvoo House (Hotel), near the historic river landing. Many buildings have been lost and some
 area of the city are empty of historic buildings. Historic Mormon-era structures are located
 throughout the area shown on the map, both east and west of the Temple. The original grid 
can be seen as an underlay behind the modern streets.  

Organization of the City

As previously mentioned, commerce was not envisaged in the Plan of Zion, but it soon became a vital element in Nauvoo. Joseph Smith eventually planned a public market for Nauvoo, but it was never realized. The law of consecration (church ownership and distribution of property) was set aside in the collapse of the community following the expulsion from Missouri. At Nauvoo, a variation on the conventional American commercial relationship between merchant, supplier and customer was required if the growing population was to prosper. The greater width provided for Main Street in the flats suggests that this may have been the principal area of commerce, but this was replaced by the rapid development of stores and businesses in the area on the bluff around the temple as it was opened for development by private owners.  The one-acre residential lots were subdivided over time on an ad hoc basis to provide the narrow sites appropriate to standard American commercial architecture.

In the Plan of Zion, the city’s institutions were housed in 24 “temples” on squares at the city center. No special position was allotted in Nauvoo for schools, social halls, or other institutions. The sides and corners of blocks surrounding the the temple square or "lot" were probably favored places, as the Armory and other structures of the Nauvoo Legion were built on one corner. As in the multipurpose temples shown on the Plan of Zion, the institutional buildings can be seen as temples in miniature. The Seventies Hall and the Masonic or Cultural Hall use the classical orders, incorporate arched openings, and contain rectangular assembly rooms. Schools and meeting houses in later locations in the West used the same rectangular temple-like forms, often with pedimented gables. The Arsenal of the Nauvoo Legion was a rectangular pedimented structure as well.

Other than the temple, the public buildings at Nauvoo were placed on a scattered series of lots, some subdivided from one-acre home sites. The Masonic and Seventies halls were built on the flats near Main Street, while the Music Hall (of which no image survives) and Arsenal were built on the bluff around the Temple. Clearly, once underway on the bluff-top site, the Temple became a draw for other significant new buildings. The area around it would have continued to grow as the civic center of the city as schools and other institutional buildings joined the stores and hotels around the Temple and along Mulholland Street.  Given the industrial and transportation potential of the rapids along the river, that was the site chosen for industrial development.  Similarly, the agricultural fields, including a very large one held and worked in common, were located on the plateau to the east of the city.  In all these ways the city’s leaders tried to remain true to the vision of the city of Zion. 

  

View c 1846 across the flats toward the Temple

The form of the city is characterized by a clear distinction between the flats and the bluff. The rise on which the Temple was eventually completed was intended to form the center of a larger city that never fully materialized. Economic forces forced distortions in much of the city’s development, but the idea of a civic core surrounded by undifferentiated blocks or squares, each housing four dwellings set in a garden-like setting, was paramount.

Architectural Materials

In keeping with the Plan of Zion, the vast majority of the buildings at Nauvoo were constructed of brick or stone. While the Temple was of neatly tooled and smoothly finished stone, seen in the classical tradition as the best possible building material, secondary public buildings, such as the Masonic Hall and the Arsenal were given an appearance of stone by the addition of plaster to a stone or brick base substratum. Less important public buildings than these, such as the Music Hall and the Seventies Hall, were built of undisguised brick. 

Frame and log construction was used for a number of now-vanished building in Nauvoo, but more substantial frame buildings today are limited in number, at least among those that survive or that were photographed in the nineteenth century. These consist of the Sarah Grainger Kimball House (this predates the arrival of the Mormon community), the Mansion House, the Orson Hyde House, the Sidney Rigdon House, the Joseph Coolidge House, and the City Hotel. Each of these was carefully built and detailed, probably by Joseph Coolidge, who built the Mansion House for Joseph Smith. Almost all of the rest of the nearly 100 buildings for which some record exists were built of brick or stone. Cornices on all houses are usually of wood, but in a few cases, such as the Heber C. Kimball House, the wall is crowned by a brick mousetooth cornice.



City of Nauvoo Proposed Land Use Map [3north]. The Temple is the large black 
rectangle in the Civic District just right of center.

Building Placement

Like many planned utopian communities, Nauvoo's layout was based in a communitarian approach to civic life. Nauvoo's founding included an original mandate for a Edenic garden setting for each household.

Photographs and drawings of Mormon public buildings built in Salt Lake City and elsewhere in the years soon after Nauvoo was abandoned show a continuity of site planning and material choices, even as the types of buildings multiplied.  The Salt Lake Temple and its subsidiary buildings were placed in east-west alignment on the mud-walled Temple Square. Architectural design remained similar for some years (see the similarity of the Beehive House and other dwellings in Salt Lake City to the finer houses in Nauvoo).

  

Artist's conception of Nauvoo at its height c 1845. Joseph Smith encouraged the planting
 of shade and fruit trees, shrubs, and vines. Many of the houses and their landscaped lots
 face the sides of the houses across the street, in a unique basket weave pattern 
that guarantees oblique garden views [Stephen K. Rogers in Leonard, 140].

Following the Plan of Zion, which remained influential long after the migration from Nauvoo, public buildings were placed on a special square or lot, starting with the Temple and moving down the public building hierarchy to the tabernacles, meeting houses, and other structures needed to make manifest the Mormon polity. Sacred logic governed the placement of the temple on the public square. Just as the four wards centered on the NW corner of the Nauvoo Temple Square, the temple itself was not placed on axis at the exact center of the square. Rather, the center of the square was occupied by the southeast corner of the temple building.

Detail of the current Nauvoo map showing the placement of the SE
corner of the restored Nauvoo Temple near the center of the square. 

Lesser public buildings or those whose purposes were temporary, were located on ordinary lots subdivided from residential lots (like the Brick Store and the Seventies, Music, and Masonic halls, or made larger by adding one or more lots together (as at the Arsenal).  In Utah cities, the tabernacles or assembly halls were located, like the temples, near the center of an open square planted with trees and surrounded by fences or walls. Similarly the Council House at Salt Lake City of 1862 was located on a fenced lot. Fences were required to exclude livestock. Entire blocks were kept clear of buildings and used as meeting places- “groves”- or intended as parks.

In the 1838 plan of the interim LDS community of Far West, Missouri, four secondary squares or parks were located, one in each of the city’s quadrants. Several groves were provided in the city of Nauvoo for outdoor gatherings of the population for instruction or worship. One of these, the “West Grove,” was a park-like area directly in front of the temple, and, although shown on official maps as divided into lots, probably intended to stay open to preserve views of the temple from the low ground and vice versa. Another, the “East Grove,” was also referred to as the “Public Green.” Now the site of ordinary building lots, it would probably have become a park had the community stayed in Nauvoo.

By the time the Mormons left in 1846, the city possessed two thousand houses, as many as six hundred of which were “good brick or frame houses.” Of these, five hundred were built entirely of brick [Leonard 131]. Housing in the city ran the gamut from small huts to urban mansions of brick or framed lumber. Even though the city has lost any trace (other
than archeological) of the vast majority of its original housing, what remains standing and in the archival record is a fairly complete representation of the homes and stores of its leading citizens.

Architectural Hierarchy

The designers fully participated in the American building tradition and employed the European inheritance of architectural and urban solutions as it suited their polity and purposes.

Nauvoo was built according to a unique, sacred conception of the urban matrix as a holy order.  At the same time, the city was conceived within the American and European architectural tradition, from which the leaders derived the forms of its buildings. This tradition was based in a classical hierarchy that could to be meshed seamlessly with the top-down structure of the church. Because LDS doctrine embraces all human activities within the sacred zone, all types of buildings and all parts of the city were included in the civic order. Important buildings were given classical form to the degree that they manifested the form and purpose of the church, so that the architecture embodied the theological and political precepts on which the Mormon city was based. As in most traditional cities, basic buildings, such as the homes of ordinary church members and citizens, industries, and shops, were not treated with fully expressed classical orders, but were given forms associated with regional vernacular architectural traditions.  

While classical and biblical ideals dominated the intellectual understanding of architecture on the part of Nauvoo leaders and builders, a less codified grammar of vernacular architectural rules controlled the types and forms of most buildings. This was composed of the types and forms of buildings that constituted the familiar way of building experienced by the community in earlier settings in the east, in Europe, and along the way west. The city's "basic building tissue" was superficially affected by the national adoption of popular ideas typified by the Federal and Greek Revival details advocated by pattern books and designers through the country and the developing Midwest.    

      

The Ionic Order from Asher Benjamin, The Practice of Architecture, 1830

The classical treatment of the "special" buildings was derived from ancient Western tradition, but it was also colored by contemporary American architectural practice. Just as was the case in other American cities, established methods of detailing and ordering buildings was found cheek-by-jowl with the latest detailing from the most fashionable architectural publications. Unlike other Midwestern and western American communities, however, Nauvoo, and later Salt Lake City, benefitted from a clearer vision of the goals of the city, the knowledgeable involvement in architectural design of the highest leaders of the church, and direct experience of the best buildings of the eastern states and England.

These elements of architectural expression were used to augment and express the community’s political order. Much of the large-scale form and detailing was based in stylish Greek Revival pattern books, but the Georgian and Federal roots of American architecture were present everywhere. As was true throughout American architectural practice, the elements were applied without close regard for their historical basis. Arches were used in connection with Greek columns (mostly represented by applied pilasters), without regard to their complete absence from ancient Greek architecture. 

Original design for the Nauvoo Temple by William Weeks with
pediment, Corinthian entablature, and square bell-tower base. 

The designers of Nauvoo regarded the value of architectural forms to express the community’s structure as more important that any use of them as an historical reference. The idea, commonplace among historians, that the Greek Revival was used in the United States because of its association with democratic and republican "values," does not apply to the theocratic structure of the Mormon polity. The three basic classical orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, were not present in their full variety, in either their Roman or Greek forms. The hierarchy of the orders as understood in the western tradition was, however, used to emphasize the city’s internal order. In this system, Corinthian was the most delicate and expansive and was given the greatest importance and placed at the highest level. It was followed by the Ionic, midway in significance and honor between the Corinthian and the Doric, which was the plainest and sturdiest of orders, usually placed at the most basic position.

Idiosyncratic capital from the Nauvoo Temple

Although placed firmly within the western architectural tradition, the architects of Nauvoo and Salt Lake City displayed one of most unfettered decorative imaginations in the nation. New variations of the architectural orders were invented. Complex and innovative decorative programs helped church members and converts better comprehend the essentials of the faith. On the other hand, the architectural order of Nauvoo is undoubtedly distorted by the city’s extraordinary struggle for political and economic existence and its brief and feverish life.

The reconstructed temple of 2008 with octagonal cupola and 
square attic as originally built.

The central building in Nauvoo was the Temple. As the numbers of faithful grew and new revelations deepened the faith, the nature of the Temple as a public building was transformed and, with it, the city.  

The earliest temple at Kirtland, Ohio, was essentially based on the New England meeting house, adapted to meet the needs of the church for specially designed assembly space, but not set apart from the world.  In Nauvoo, the American church model was radically transformed and merged with that of ancient temple prototypes. The building was designed by William Weeks under the personal direction of Joseph Smith. The temple’s importance as the center of the community was reinforced. Its complex decorative program interpreted its role as center of the city’s life.   

Temple as built with sun orb capital and crescent
moon column bases. 

The initial design for the Nauvoo Temple was based in the Corinthian order, considered among the ancients as the highest and most beautiful order. The capitals were adapted to depict a new dawn brought about by renewed revelation. As part of a significant change to the attic story, the unadorned frieze of the Corinthian pediment, was replaced by an assembly with Doric characteristics permitting the placement of third-floor windows. The Temple has a belfry/steeple traditionally used on the most important buildings in the city, those with a role in ordering the timing of public life.  All other structures were subsidiary and deferred to it. 

James Gibbs' St. Martins-in-the-Field (1722-1724).

The temple was given highly symbolic ornament that suited its role as the seat of God and focus of religious life. At that time the temple served multiple roles as the center of community assembly and of special, more private, rituals. The exterior was provided with a unique, specially designed classical order, fully expressed in the form of pedestal, pilaster, entablature, and cornice. The building was also given a set of three massive arches at the entry and a bell tower. The original church design, loosely based on published versions of James Gibbs’ St. Martin’s-in-the-Field in London, was more Georgian than Greek Revival: both buildings had a pedimented front, arched windows, a Corinthian entablature, pilasters among the sides, and a four-stage tower. The removal of the pediment from the design appears to have been related to the specialized functions needed in an enlarged attic story. Although as built, the bell tower was domed and smaller than that called for in the original design, the central tower with its clock and bell regulating the hourly life of the community reinforced the temple’s importance at the heart of the city’s religious and political life. 

The original public building: the Red Brick Store (reconstructed)

Secondary Institutions

Secondary institutions, such as buildings for education, social gatherings, and musical performances, were built as time and funding permitted. All religious and social functions were originally housed in the second floor of Joseph Smith's "Red Brick Store" until the specialized building intended for them were built. Secondary buildings were provided with the classical orders to varying degrees. The buildings were likely thought of as temple-form structures in the sense that Joseph Smith delineated all institutional buildings as temples on the plan of Zion. The orders were never as elaborate as those expressed at the Temple, and did not ever exceed the Temple in scale or form. 

Domestic and Commercial Architecture

Brigham Young House 

Domestic and commercial building observed a hierarchy not unlike that seen in most contemporary American cities. Houses and stores were directly related in form, material, and detail to the wealth and position of the owner. Most of the large and grand houses built by contractors of brick in the city were the homes of those who commanded capital. They usually were successful merchants and also were important in the councils of the church. Joseph Smith, who himself set up and operated a store, did not choose to live in a grand house of his own, but occupied three rooms in what was essentially a church-owned hotel. Similarly, church leader Brigham Young lived in a smaller, unusual three-part brick house which he built himself.

Mansion House, seat of government, hotel, and home of Joseph Smith

Two frame houses are among the most architecturally refined in the city. The Mansion House, the town's principal hotel and the home of Joseph Smith and his family, took the form of a very traditional two-story center-passage-plan dwelling with elegant pilasters across the front (at the corners and flanking the central entrance) and a classically framed central entrance door and window above. The Smith family had a separate entry and internal stair serving what amounted to an apartment within the south side of the building. 

The Orson Hyde House, a one-story, frame center-passage plan dwelling, was built by the community for an honored traveling missionary and one of the twelve Disciples. It features paneled corner pilasters and a tall frieze with inset garret windows.

Amos Davis Store and Hotel

One store was architecturally superior to the others. The Amos Davis Store and Hotel was a brick building of two stories that stood on the southwest corner of the Temple Lot. The building had three arched openings filling the ground floor of the tall rectangular front. It is not clear whether it had a pediment, but it appears likely, based on a photograph made shortly after it burned.

Noble-Smith House

There is a wide variety of house forms in Nauvoo, but there is a consistent clarity and simplicity of form characteristic of the Greek Revival era. In spite of the Greek Revival influence, some less expensive houses, such as the Noble-Smith House have asymmetrical door and window arrangements. Chimneys in Nauvoo were located on the interior. Extra rooms tended to be provided in ells to the rear of the house or in side wings. While the important houses were all designed using the widespread vernacular side-passage and central-passage plans, the smaller houses utilized one and two-room plans familiar to all the settlers. The three-part designs ultimately derived from published models based on the designs of Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). At least one urban double house was built and a long row of connected single-cell rooms for poor widows resembled the almshouses of the eastern states and England. Interior trim was invariably drawn from up-to-date pattern books, with a few old-fashioned Federal features.

Heber C. Kimball House

Joseph Young House

Among the grandest houses is the home of Heber C. Kimball, a governing Apostle. He lived in a plain log house until just before the departure in 1846, when he completed this elaborate and comfortable side-passage-plan house. The house has the stylish, box-like, Greek Revival form familiar from towns throughout the nation, with paired gable-end chimneys linked by a raised parapet. It is provided with a brick cornice and entablature. It is, however, equipped with very traditional penciled Flemish-bond brickwork and an arched entry fanlight. Like many houses, it combines the bold clear lines of the Greek Revival with the conservative Federal details associated with the previous era. The unusual Joseph Young House, no longer standing, had a central monitor on top of a deep hipped roof and the layout widely recognized by historians as the double-pile, central passage plan. A low upper story was lit by windows built into the tall cornice.

Parley Pratt Store and House

John Young House

Other houses vary according to scale and expense, but none, other than the Mansion and Orson Hyde houses, have fully expressed classical orders. The very substantial John Young House has a full entablature incorporating frieze windows lighting the garret. The friezes at the Snow-Ashby Double House, the Parley P. Pratt House/Store, and the Wilson Law House are partially expressed. Some, such as the John Young House, of the buildings have stepped parapet gables. Some have raised end parapets that slope with the roofs. 

Many houses and stores present a narrow three- bay gable front to the street as is typical in commercial towns with narrow building lots. Some of these have temple-front pediments in the gables. Many have projecting gable eaves with box cornices. Among the few surviving frame houses is the Joseph Coolidge House, with its classical doorframe. Its pedimented gable end contains a fanlight. A few of these with sufficient wall height, have full entablatures expressed on the front. 

John Smith House

Among the more unusual houses in Nauvoo is the John Smith House on Parley Street with its saltbox form. It appears that Smith, president of the Nauvoo Stake, remembered traditional houses at home in Vermont when he built this dwelling. The house has an asymmetrical five-bay façade, a low second floor, and a long “catslide” leanto roof to the rear. 

Aaron Johnson House

Almost all door and window openings in Nauvoo are square headed. Some houses and stores, like the Aaron Johnson, William Weeks, and Wilson Law houses, do, however, have arched entry openings. As mentioned above, the brick store/hotel operated next to the Temple Lot by Amos Davis mirrored the Temple in miniature, with its triple front of arched first-floor openings. An important triple arched porch is inset across the entire front of a small brick dwelling now housing the Icarian Museum. The only other arched openings were the first floor windows in the Masonic Hall as it stood before restoration, the upper windows in the drawing for it by William Weeks, and the entry to the Seventies Hall.

Architects in Nauvoo

While Joseph Smith was the source of many of the ideas for buildings in Nauvoo, architect William Weeks was responsible for the initial plans of the Nauvoo Temple (procured through a competition) and for the drawings and details for the most important other structures, Nauvoo House, the Arsenal, and the Masonic Hall.

William Weeks (1813-1900) was born in Massachuetts, where he trained under his father, a builder, and moved with his family to Chicago in 1835. It is clear that Weeks had some training in architectural draftsmanship. His drawings of the Temple and the Nauvoo House show a grasp of detailing and form that indicates a background and familiarity with great buildings from books and personal experience. His design work, though not always completed as drawn, shows an acquaintance with architectural theory as well. If it is assumed he did most of the design for public buildings in that period, and there is a strong likelihood that he did, he was heavily responsible for the physical manifestation of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s vision of the city of Zion at Nauvoo. 

Original design for Masonic Hall by
William Weeks

The Masonic Hall as built

While the governing aspects of civic order in Nauvoo issued from the prophet, the implementation fell to the architect, who carefully adapted the forms of ancient and European classical architecture to the unique structure of the Mormon city. His work was taken up by his assistant at Nauvoo, Truman Angell, when the saints relocated to Salt Lake City. There the planning genius of Brigham Young united with the architectural skill of Angell to produce a new and even more integrated civic architecture, closely allied with the changing fashions of later-nineteenth-century historicist architecture.

Architectural Catalog

Building types in Nauvoo were not dissimilar to those found in most antebellum American towns, except for the disparities caused by the rapid development and harsh conditions of settlement.  The religious requirements of the LDS church were taken care of by the Temple, supplemented by the groves and a proposed canvas tabernacle in the form of a "temple forecourt" for large groups.  All buildings in Nauvoo were originally subsidiary to and related to the Temple. 

William Weeks' final drawing of the Temple front

THE TEMPLE-  The most important building in the community, given the religious focus of both the political and spiritual spheres, was, of course, the Nauvoo Temple. As prescribed by classical tradition and official revelation, the temple was given the central position, the most expensive and elaborate scale and finish, and the highest level of decoration. As was the case in the larger western architectural tradition, the buildings of the city were ornamented in ways that elucidated and strengthened the position of the institutions that were housed in each.

• Originally Corinthian entablature on drawings
• Cornice changed to resemble the Doric
• All windows arched  
• Ashlar stone exterior
• Temple form building
• Original pediment changed to flat attic story
• Location near the center of the Temple Lot
• Large scale
• Clock tower and belfry

A conjectural sketch of Nauvoo House as might have appeared if it 
had been finished. Only a portion of the building was completed 
and incorporated into a later structure. 

NAUVOO HOUSE- The second most important building in the community was the Nauvoo House. The building was related to the more architecturally sophisticated hotels that formed the commercial and social center-pieces of many American cities. It was called for in the same 1841 revelation that designated the schedule of the temple building, which gave it great significance and momentum. During the struggle to complete it in 1845, it was referred to as “next in magnificence to the temple [Leonard 477].” It was to serve not only as the introduction of visitors to Nauvoo and the housing of travelers, but as the home of the prophet and a symbol of the success of the city. The Nauvoo House, which was likely intended to serve at least symbolically as a
seat of government as well as a residence for the community’s leader, was never completed due to the pressures of time and economics. As the surviving section
indicates, the enormous, four-story building was to be provided with three-story attached pilasters. A drawing by Nauvoo architect William Weeks shows that it was at one point intended to receive a full Roman Doric entablature.

• Full Doric pilaster order
• Windows not arched
• Brick construction
• Stone lintels 
• Three-story (with raised basement) urban building
• Large scale
• Located at river entrance to city

Sketch after the original design for the Masonic Hall. 

MASONIC HALL- The Masonic Hall, built on a lot on the west side of Main Street, as built (see above), was provided with three-story Roman Doric pilasters and a shallow pediment. In an earlier  proposal by William Weeks, the hall had been given symbolic decoration appropriate to its function, including a low dome surmounted by a statue and a painted "all-seeing eye," derived from Masonic literature, in the pediment. As at the Temple, arched openings, a crowning feature on the rooftop, and applied ornament were used to convey the higher purpose of this building used for the social and intellectual pursuits of the community. The more workaday Doric order was selected, rather than the festive Corinthian used at the Temple.

• Full Doric pilaster order on principal facade
• Upper floor windows arched
• Brick 
• Two-story temple-form building in original design
• Sculpture on roof
• Medium scale
• Pediment and central dome (in original design)
• Painted symbolic image in pediment
• Located mid-block on side of Main Street

HABS drawing of the Mansion House

MANSION HOUSE- The elegant, frame Mansion House was built near the river landing to serve as a temporary substitute for the functions in the Nauvoo House, including its uses as the residence of the Prophet and a hotel. Its political significance, as opposed to the religious importance of the Temple, was underlined when the Nauvoo Legion gathered in strength to hear an address by Joseph Smith during a tense time. The setting was the area in front of the Mansion House and beside the rising walls of the Nauvoo House. It used the popular architectural order adapted by American pattern books from the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens. 

• Full Greek pilaster order 
• No arched windows
• Painted weatherboard
• Two-story free-standing dwelling
• Medium scale
• Located major intersection near boat landing

Sketch of the Seventies Hall as reconstructed 

SEVENTIES HALL- The Seventies Hall, a structure built as a gathering place for a religious leadership group, was also used for educational and social purposes. It was pushed to completion to serve as a preparatory school for missionaries [Leonard 500]. Together with the Masonic Hall, the building resembles a miniature of the temple-type as first manifested at Kirtland, Ohio. It perhaps relates to the twenty-four temples housing civic institutions prescribed in the Plan of Zion. The relative significance of the Seventies Hall within the civic hierarchy can be read from the lack of an exposed order but the provision of an arched doorway and an arched fanlight in the gable parapet.

• No expressed order
• Arched Door
• Brick 
• Two-story gable-fronted building
• Medium scale
• Located on conventional lot

Reconstruction drawing of Arsenal Building, home of the
Nauvoo Legion, which stood across the street from the 
Temple. Note the pedimented gable ends.

ARSENAL- The Armory of the Nauvoo Legion, as is appropriate for the sober character of a defensive organization, was a plain, two-story building with minimal exterior ornament, located on a block next to the Temple Square at the center of the city. It was completed in mid-1845, built of stone, and probably treated with exterior stucco designed to portray the superior ashlar stonework called for by in a governmental institution. The arsenal was intended to store the powder, ammunition, and public arms of the legion. Since the arms of the legion had already been surrendered to the state during its construction, the building was completed, appropriately, for use as a school [Leonard 478]. 

• No expressed order
• Flat lintels
• Stucco ashlar over rough stone
• Pedimented gable ends
• Two-story free-standing buildings
• Medium scale
• Located on two corner lots facing the Temple Lot 
• At  the center of the city. 

CONCERT HALL- A concert hall was built north of the temple in 1845. The 30 by 50 foot brick building had

a curved ceiling and a curved sounding board for the musicians [Leonard 579].

• Architectural  order unknown 
• No surviving drawing or photograph
• Brick construction
• One-story free-standing building
• Medium scale
• Near the Temple Lot 
• At  the center of the city. 

Davis Store and Hotel on important corner facing the Temple Lot. It burned at an early date. 

IMPORTANT STORE OR DWELLING (TYPICAL)– Conventional temple-fronted house or store. 

• Pedimented roof
• Brick or frame
• Stone lintels
• Two-story urban building
• Medium scale
• Pediment and sometimes full entablature 
• Square or arched stone openings
• Located on conventional lot, often at corner

HABS drawing John Tayor House

Habs drawing of Heber C. Kimball House

IMPORTANT HOUSE (TYPICAL) 

• Full Entablature sometimes with frieze windows
• Brick or frame
• Stone lintels
• One or two-story freestanding or urban bldg.
• Medium scale
• Located on conventional lot

HABS drawing of Wilford Woodruff House

MEDIUM-LEVEL HOUSE  (TYPICAL)

Many modestly scaled houses were well-built of brick and detailed like their larger, wealthy neighbors. The one-story Lorin Farr House and the nearby duplex Winslow Farr House are examples of the middling character of many small-scale house with very plain detailing. The George Laub House, the Hiram Clark House, and other similar brick structures with
small, three-bay, two story forms, wood lintels, and two-room floor plans may be considered the best of the homes of those of middling wealth and skills. Laub worked as
a joiner.

•   Box Cornice
•       Brick or frame sometimes with arched openings.
•       One-, or two- or three-story freestanding bldg.
•       Medium scale
•       Located on conventional lot

Commercial Streetfront

MEDIUM-LEVEL COMMERCIAL BUILDING (TYPICAL)

• Overhanging or flush eaves 
• Brick, log, or frame 
• One- or two-story freestanding or urban bldg.
• Small scale
• Located on conventional lot
• Often closely spaced along commercial street.

HABS drawing of Brigham Young's House with accretionary wings

GABLE-FRONT HOUSES (TYPICAL)

• Gable front 
• Brick or frame
• One or two-story freestanding bldg.
• Medium and small scales
• Located on conventional lot

Howard Cory House, one of numerous early log
dwellings, no longer extant

MODEST, ENTRY-LEVEL DWELLING (TYPICAL)

Little information survives concerning the form of the houses of the least wealthy and the manner of their detailing. Less expensive houses and stores, such as the brick office of the Expositor and the adjoining frame structure, had little overhang at the roof eave. The gables were finished with a simple rake board. Log buildings were similarly finished. The Charles C. Rich and James Hendricks houses were among the more modest brick houses to be recorded. The Howard Coray House, a modest log dwelling not far from the Temple Lot, survived long enough to be photographed.

• Overhanging or flush eaves
• One-story, log or other inexpensive material
• Small scale