Colonial Revival Architecture - History

History

Successive waves of revivals of British colonial architecture have swept the United States since 1876. In the 19th century, the Colonial Revival took a more eclectic style, and columns were often seen.

Three localities that feature larger neighborhood tracts of colonial revival style residences are the Windsor Farms area in the west end of Richmond, Virginia; the Country Club District of Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis; and the Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri, a residential district lying south and built around the former grounds of the Kansas City Country Club (now Loose Park), and which the J. C. Nichols Company began developing in 1906 to become what is now the largest master-planned community in the United States. All were built in the 1920s.

In the early 20th century, the books and atmospheric photographs of Wallace Nutting showing scenes of New England became popular reflecting public interest in the Colonial Revival style. With the popularity of research-based history attractions like Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, the subsequent "colonial" architecture took a more scholarly and less ostentatious turn, and columns fell out of favor. By the 1976 United States Bicentennial, Colonial architecture merged with the then popular ranch-style house design, and created yet another iteration of the Colonial Revival, one that often featured eagle, cannon or drum motifs and sometimes wooden shake roofs. In the early part of the 21st century, styles evolved again, with "colonial" in the United States suggesting a more Anglo-Caribbean or British Empire feel.

In California and the American Southwest, which had been under Spanish and not English colonial rule, revival architecture looked back to Spanish, rather than Georgian prototypes, taking the form of both Mission Revival Style architecture and Spanish Colonial Revival Style architecture.