Terraced house
|
|
Street_of_terraced_housing.jpg
In architecture and city planning, a terrace, rowhouse, or townhouse (though the latter term can also refer to patio houses) is a style of housing in use since the late 17th century, where identical individual houses are cojoined into rows. A terrace is also the term used to refer to paved, unroofed areas that open out from a building, usually in residences at upper floor levels.
The term terrace was borrowed from garden terraces by English architects of the late Georgian period to describe streets of houses whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "row". The "row", as in the 16th-century "Yarmouth Rows" in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, was a designation for a narrow street where the building fronts uniformly ran right to the property line.
In England the first streets of houses with uniform fronts were built by the Huguenot entrepreneur Nicholas Barbon in the rebuildfing after the Great Fire of London, but Paris had led the way in the Place des Vosges (1605 – 12). In Parisian squares, central blocks were given discreet prominence, to relieve the façade, but the Georgian idea of treating a row of houses as if it were a palace front, giving the central houses columned fronts under a shared pediment, appeared first in London's Grosvenor Square (1727 onwards; rebuilt) and in Bath's Queen Square (1729 onwards) (Summerson 1947)
Early terraces were built by the two John Woods in Bath and under the direction of John Nash in Regent's Park, London, and the name was picked up by speculative builders like Thomas Cubitt and soon became commonplace.
Guilford.jpg
By the early Victorian period, a terrace had come to designate any style of housing where individual houses repeating one design are conjoined into rows either long or short. The style was used for workers' housing during the great industrial boom following the industrial revolution, particularly in the textile industry. The Terrace style spread widely in the UK, and was the usual form of high density residential housing up to World War II, though the 19th century need for expressive individuality inspired variation of facade details and floor-plans reversed with those of each neighboring pair, to offer variety within the standardized format.
In New York City, a large apartment building occupying a full city block, London Terrace, finished in 1930/1931 capitalized on the earlier, more stylish connotation. Terrace housing in American usage generally continued to be called rowhouses in the Eastern U.S., with a distinctive type in New York City called a brownstone; west of the Mississippi, the term townhouse is preferred.
Sources
- Summerson, John, 1947. "John Wood and the English town-planning tradition" collected in Heavenly Mansions (1963)
- Summerson, Georgian London