8 EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY STYLES: 1905-25 Architectural design in the early twentieth century presented the country with a new group of styles and types less dependent on historical models than were the styles of the preceding Victorian period. As with other major stylistic periods, no precise commencement or concluding dates can be cited, and various popular styles frequently overlap. For example, Victorian cottages in styles such as the Queen Anne were built contemporaneously with bungalows. One of the most visible features of the Bungalow, the Arts and Crafts, the Prairie School, and other styles of the early twentieth century, was their lack of busy three-dimensional ornamentation so popular in the Victorian period. This is not to say that the new architecture lacked ornamentation altogether, but it was more reserved and less three dimensional. The Bungalow, Arts and Crafts, and Prairie School styles were quickly absorbed into Utah's building tradition during this period of economic prosperity. The origin of the Bungalow house type has been traced to a dwelling noted for its verandas that existed in India. Its popularity in the United States, and particularly Utah, was due in part to the American Arts and Crafts movement. The bungalow was intended to be a comfortablelooking, low profile house that communicated a sense of shelter. This new type of residence became an everyman's house replacing the Victorian cottage of the 1880s and the 1890s. The bungalow came to be a style as well as a building type, and many variations on the basic bungalow form were sketched out in numerous builders' magazines and pattern books published by such companies as "Bungalowcraft" of Los Angeles. These plans were advertised as open and informal in nature and as spatially economical. In early twentiethcentury Utah, as in other areas of the developing western United States, particularly California, the bungalow became one of the most popular residences. Its popularity in California led to a subtype that was further
Fig. 233: Bungalow, c. 1912, Manti, Sanpete County. The front porch, an omni-present bungalow feature, is protected by the projecting hip roof on this one-story brick dwelling and supported at the corners by two battered wooden piers. The attic story of this bungalow is illuminated by multipanel casement windows located in the hip roof dormers.
enhanced by the designs of the brothers Charles and Henry Greene of Pasadena. Thus, a prototypical "California bungalow" was a one-story (two-stories on occasion) wood frame house with a low-pitched roof and partially exposed framing members in its gable ends. Bungalows were frequently dressed in Neoclassical, Swiss Chalet, Tudor, California, Mission, Arts and Crafts, and Prairie School decorative motifs. The latter two were the most popular styles for bungalows in Utah. The Arts and Crafts style in America was the result of several influences; the orginal English movement called "Arts and Crafts" led by designer William Morris, who elevated the concept of craftsmanship to art; the work of English architects C. F. A. Voysey and Sir Edwin Lutyens; 136
