Woodland Terrace in Philadelphia (1861).
This is Sloan's most impressive surviving architectural ensemble and is
characteristic of his numerous works in West Philadelphia.
The best published work on Sloan is Harold N. Cooledge's Samuel Sloan: Architect of Philadelphia 1815-1884 (1986) which not only provides a thorough biography of Sloan's life and career, but also a catalogue of his works. Additionally, Sloan's own voluminous writings give us more insight into his thoughts and architectural ideas and practices than we have for almost any other mid-19th century architect. Born in 1815 in rural Beaver Dam, PA to a family of cabinet makers, Sloan was by 1833 an active builder in Philadelphia. His first recorded work was building some elements of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and he moved up the ranks working for well known architects like John Haviland and William Strickland. Soon after, Sloan began producing designs for the opinionated and visionary Thomas Kirkbride, a hospital and mental health theorist, giving Sloan an immense amount of training in institutional design and providing him with a patron who encouraged and transformed him from a carpenter into an architect and designer. Most of the early decade of his career was spent in the background, working on institutional and governmental public buildings, schools, court houses, and hospitals guided by the theories and ideas of powerful and opinionated clients.
Sloan's independent career properly begins in 1850, when he was given the commission to design a villa for Andrew Eastwick, a locomotive manufacturer. This building, which Sloan designed in the "Norman" style, combining Italianate features with north Italian medieval design would gain him architectural renown and introduce him as a unique architect. At exactly the moment Sloan appeared on Philadelphia's architectural stage, the city was expanding, and several developers aimed to construct a model suburban community in West Philadelphia. The selection of Sloan as the principle designer for many of these developments, mostly in Gothic and Italianate styles, meant that he would shape the entire architectural vocabulary of suburban Philadelphia. Even later architects who continued the project followed Sloan's design principles, giving this area of the city a distinctive architectural harmony, disrupted only in the later 19th century by scores of Jacobean, Colonial Revival, and Queen Anne rows. In 1855, Sloan even got to plan and design an enclave of fine villas in Riverton, NJ. Additionally, he became a designer for most pf Philadelphia's public schools, several major commercial buildings, and several speculative residential rows within central Philadelphia.
|Sloan's design for the Eastwick House "Bartram Hall".|
Between 1851-3, Sloan worked on and published his first major architectural work, The Model Architect. While plan books were plentiful in the 19th century, Sloan's contribution was different. Not only did he provide dozens of plans and elevations, but Sloan also offered several illustrated pages of details, in which he depicted up-close the doors, windows, cornices, brackets and sometimes interiors and furniture choices for architects. A few plans contained full landscape plans, complete with a series of fantastic gazebos, squirrel houses, bird houses, and conservatories, all carefully designed. But Sloan didn't stop as many other designers did, in just offering a superficial set of designs. This book also included theorizing on styles, advice on good joining and construction practices (including complete drawings of the framing of buildings), detailed discussions of heating and cooling mechanisms for homes, a frank discussion of comfort and practical designs, as well as detailed descriptions of cost, construction timelines, and architectural accounting. Sloan provided basically a full tutorial on architectural practice in America. The Model Architect was a revolutionary book and so central to American architecture that copies of it spread across the US. No other architect gained as much exposure as did Sloan, and it's thanks to this book that Sloan's designs ended up all over the US, with thousands of buildings based on his work. Thus, while Sloan had a confined set of commissions he personally worked on, his designs spread far beyond his personal reach, stamping his legacy on dozens of towns. The book was so popular it was reprinted every decade until the 1880s. Below are examples of Sloan's detail pages as well as his designs for non-architectural members, such as birdhouses (an Italianate birdhouse!).
From 1852-8, Sloan formed a partnership with builder John Stewart. In this period, Sloan came up with one of his most original designs, the Bennett & Co. building, a fantastic commercial edifice in the Norman/Gothic style. He also designed the Second Masonic Temple in Philadelphia, a fantasy of lacy Gothic, in 1855. Joseph Harrison as well in this period commissioned Sloan to design his planned communities in West Philadelphia as well as his palatial estate on Rittenhouse Square (1856). Unfortunately, this period of prosperity came to an end in 1857, when Sloan and Stewart dissolved their partnership after a major financial panic. In 1858, Sloan published his second work, City and Suburban Architecture, which offered a wider range of designs ranging from commercial, civic, religious, to residential. In it, Sloan focused on the difficulties of designing buildings appropriate to sites and for different functions. The book has numerous beautiful drawings, more polished than his earlier work, which the draftsman Addison Hutton contributed. As Sloan's career matured, so did his architectural approach, and in CSA, we can see a far more austere and sophisticated approach to European style Renaissance ornament.
|"Longwood" Photo: Wikimedia.|
As for the Oriental style, Sloan considered its application to housing to be a matter of decoration and not design. In essence, he created an Italianate plan and plastered on Oriental ornament: "It would be sheer folly to introduce the original pure style into this country, for no wise man will sacrifice his comfort in order to secure consistency in the appearance of his house with those which have been built in other countries, in other climates, and perhaps for other purposes by people with different customs. Our style of living is totally unlike that in the East, and were we to build just such houses as they have, we would certainly part with comfort. This last is of the first importance. Let every one arrange his dwelling so as to secure the greatest amount of convenience, and then exercise his judgment in decoration. We hold that, in a manner, each building is an independent being, and if it be consistent with itself both internally and externally, and as to its purpose, then no fault can be found with it on that score. Many buildings similar to the one here given have been erected in this country and command universal admiration. The best location would be on the banks of some of our noble streams, the Mississippi or the Hudson."
As for the Bracketed style, Sloan considered it a subset of Italianate design in which the eaves were oversized: "In sunny climes, it is highly desirable that the walls of dwellings, especially, should be protected, as much as possible, from direct rays. This fact has given rise, in Italy, to a style in which the eaves of the building project considerably. This projection is often so great, that unless there be some apparent support for the eaves, the eye is offended by a sense of insecurity. The defect is remedied by the use of cantilevers and brackets; whence the name bracketed style, in use among some authors. The style is growing among us, and deserves high commendation, for country residences especially, since, in addition to cooling shade, it gives many other pleasing effects."
Thus, for Sloan, Italianate remained the bedrock of planning. Most of his designs maintain the irregularity and convenience of the Italianate style which was suited for his ideological beliefs about residential and architectural design. The Norman and Oriental styles consisted mostly of an ornamental idiom applied to the convenience of Italianate design, and that idiom in his plans always remains an intriguing dress over the consistent Italianate features of irregular or convenient planning, brackets, towers, and large eaves.
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