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The American Foursquare or American Four Square is an American house style popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. A reaction to the ornate and
mass-produced Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and ba ...
elements of the Victorian and other Revival styles popular throughout the last half of the 19th century, the American Foursquare was plain, often incorporating handcrafted "honest" woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalog). This style incorporates elements of the
Prairie School Prairie School is a late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural style, most common in the Midwestern United States. The style is usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped ...
and the Craftsman styles. It is also sometimes called Transitional Period. The hallmarks of the style include a basically square, boxy design, two-and-one-half stories high, usually with four large, boxy rooms to a floor (with the exception of the attic floor, which typically has only one or two rooms), a center
dormer A dormer is a roofed structure, often containing a window, that projects vertically beyond the plane of a pitched roof. A dormer window (also called ''dormer'') is a form of roof window. Dormers are commonly used to increase the usable spac ...
, and a large front
porch A porch (from Old French ''porche'', from Latin ''porticus'' "colonnade", from ''porta'' "passage") is a room or gallery located in front of an entrance of a building. A porch is placed in front of the facade of a building it commands, and form ...
with wide stairs. The boxy shape provides a maximum amount of interior room space, to use a small city lot to best advantage. Other common features included a
hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus ...
, arched entries between common rooms, built-in cabinetry, and Craftsman-style woodwork. A typical design would be as follows: first floor, from front to back, on one side, the
living room In Western architecture, a living room, also called a lounge room (Australian English), lounge (British English), sitting room (British English), or drawing room, is a room for relaxing and socializing in a residential house or apartment. Su ...
and
dining room A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level. Historically the dining room is furnis ...
; while on the other side, the entry room or foyer,
stairway Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps which enable passage ...
and
kitchen A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running wate ...
. Sometimes a
bathroom A bathroom or washroom is a room, typically in a home or other residential building, that contains either a bathtub or a shower (or both). The inclusion of a wash basin is common. In some parts of the world e.g. India, a toilet is typically ...
was also included. Second floor, front to back, on one side,
bedroom A bedroom or bedchamber is a room situated within a residential or accommodation unit characterised by its usage for sleeping and sexual activity. A typical western bedroom contains as bedroom furniture one or two beds (ranging from a crib f ...
, bathroom and bedroom; while on the other side, bedroom, stairway and bedroom. The upstairs bathroom would generally be placed above the kitchen, so that the plumbing could run directly from one to the other. The bedrooms had a slightly longer dimension along the front and back of the house with side-by-side
closet A closet (especially in North American usage) is an enclosed space, with a door, used for storage, particularly that of clothes. ''Fitted closets'' are built into the walls of the house so that they take up no apparent space in the room. Closet ...
s between the bedrooms. This gave a very efficient layout, with a bedroom in each corner and a centralized bathroom and stairway. The top floor was generally just a big open space with one to four
dormer A dormer is a roofed structure, often containing a window, that projects vertically beyond the plane of a pitched roof. A dormer window (also called ''dormer'') is a form of roof window. Dormers are commonly used to increase the usable spac ...
s, essentially an
attic An attic (sometimes referred to as a ''loft'') is a space found directly below the pitched roof of a house or other building; an attic may also be called a ''sky parlor'' or a garret. Because attics fill the space between the ceiling of the ...
, whether finished into living space or not. The
basement A basement or cellar is one or more Storey, floors of a building that are completely or partly below the storey, ground floor. It generally is used as a utility space for a building, where such items as the Furnace (house heating), furnace, ...
generally contained a large natural convection furnace or
boiler A boiler is a closed vessel in which fluid (generally water) is heated. The fluid does not necessarily boil. The heated or vaporized fluid exits the boiler for use in various processes or heating applications, including water heating, central ...
, exhausting to a chimney running upwards through the center of the house, which also provided exhaust for the stove.


Models

Foursquare houses may be built with a variety of materials, including bricks and wood frames. Later models include built-in shelves and other amenities. Large tracts of these homes exist in older
Midwestern The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. ...
urban neighborhoods, particularly
streetcar suburb A streetcar suburb is a residential community whose growth and development was strongly shaped by the use of streetcar lines as a primary means of transportation. Such suburbs developed in the United States in the years before the automobile, when ...
s, but the design was used everywhere. As with other styles in streetcar suburbs, it was tailored to relatively narrow lots, and was multi-story, allowing more square footage on a smaller footprint. The American Foursquare style is occasionally revived in new developments, although its appeal is as a "traditional-looking" style rather than a fully authentic one, often including modern two-car attached garages and other features absent in originals, and typically built on larger lots.


History

The American Foursquare or "Prairie Box" was a post-Victorian style, which shared many features with the Prairie architecture pioneered by
Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...
. During the early 1900s and 1910s, Wright even designed his own variations on the Foursquare, including the
Robert M. Lamp House The Robert M. Lamp House is a residence built in 1903 two blocks northeast of the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his lifelong friend "Robie" Lamp, a Real estate broker, realtor, Insurance broker, insurance agen ...
, "
A Fireproof House for $5000 "A Fireproof House for $5000" is an article and house design by Frank Lloyd Wright published in the ''Ladies' Home Journal'' in April 1907. It is Wright's third and final publication in the journal following " A Home in a Prairie Town" and " A S ...
", and several two-story models for
American System-Built Homes The American System-Built Homes were modest houses designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. They were developed between 1912 and 1916 to fulfill his interest in affordable housing. Wright was devoted to the idea of providing beautiful yet affo ...
. Unlike other houses of the style, Wright's versions featured more open main floor plans achieved by removing or minimizing partitions between the entry, living room, and dining room. He in turn inspired other Prairie School architects, such as
Walter Burley Griffin Walter Burley Griffin (November 24, 1876February 11, 1937) was an American architect and landscape architect. He is known for designing Canberra, Australia's capital city and the New South Wales towns of Griffith and Leeton. He has been cr ...
, to design similar Foursquares in the following decades. Later Foursquares often had the same type of interiors as bungalows, with open floor plans, many built-ins, and fireplaces. Many examples are trimmed with tiled roofs, cornice-line brackets, or other details drawn from Craftsman,
Italian Renaissance The Italian Renaissance ( it, Rinascimento ) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Europe and marked the trans ...
, or
Mission architecture The Mission Revival style was part of an architectural movement, beginning in the late 19th century, for the revival and reinterpretation of American colonial styles. Mission Revival drew inspiration from the late 18th and early 19th century ...
.


Mail-order era

The Foursquare was a popular mail-order era style along with the California bungalow. When one was ordered, it came in a boxcar with a book of directions and all the parts pre-cut and numbered for self-assembly. These homes are particularly common in neighborhoods near rail-lines built in this era. The largest mail-order house catalog companies were
Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...
and
Aladdin Aladdin ( ; ar, علاء الدين, ', , ATU 561, ‘Aladdin') is a Middle-Eastern folk tale. It is one of the best-known tales associated with ''The Book of One Thousand and One Nights'' (''The Arabian Nights''), despite not being part of ...
.


References


The American Foursquare
OldHouseWeb


External links

* {{Architecture in the United States American architectural styles American Craftsman architecture House styles