I spent a lovely few hours yesterday sorting my architecture photos into 'style' folders. Admittedly, that sounds a teeny bit OCD but it's actually a wonderful exercise in really seeing detail and consolidating what I learned in my Mohawk college course about architectural styles in Ontario. In the course of some Internet research into a few hard-to-identify houses, I came across three wonderful sources - one fellow has more photos that I will EVER produce, in a Flickr slideshow - and he responds in an erudite and gentle manner to all comments made by visitors to the site. His name is John Fitzgerald and he's based in Toronto. Two other ''go-to" sites feature great photos and spot-the-style lists: HouseProud at www.housepride.ca hosted by Brian R. Booth, which is also a Canadian site, and architecture.about.com which is part of the wider About.com empire. I look for Canadian sites, as the terminology is used differently in the US in many cases, and the last thing I need is to be more confused! But despite all the help, I can still post photos of a few houses that are, for the moment in my "guess the style" folder. (I expect when I find the answer, it will be a Homer Simpson "doh" kind of moment.) Have a look and help me out!
Left - This old stone house started life as a 1 1/2 storey, with a magnificent trellis verandah (photo in Peter Stokes' The Settler's Dream) so I'm wondering- could it have started out life as a Regency cottage? It's got Georgian presence, but the roof's wrong, and Italianate brackets without a wide cornice. And the state of decline is sad.
Centre - (I don't seem to have any control over where these photos land when I upload) was built of marble in 1857. Again presence, but no ornament.
Right - I'll admit the dark second storey makes me think of period revival, but is this just a sedate Queen Anne? I think it's quite lovely.
Off to take more photos.
How can sorting your photos into folders be OCD? Doesn't EVERYone do that? Are these photos you found on the Internet or did you take them yourself? If the latter, location??
ReplyDeleteYes, I took them...top two are in Belleville, the stone house is on Victoria Road in PEC. It's unique for a large outcrop of Cambrian Shield granite above it - a very rare rock formation in that most limestone of limestone counties.
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