Hanover and Over Again

The House of Hanover might have lost the Revolution, but it won the Culture War. The British Monarchy left its mark all over Champaign. Evidence? Charles Platt, architect of the elite, planned much of the southern portion of the U of I campus and left the university spangled with Georgian Revival buildings. The most notable being:

The President's Mansion
All the reliable online sources call this structure the President's House, but who are we kidding? Look at this monstrosity.

The Board of Trustees voted in 1928 to build a snazzy home for the university president. Despite the Wall Street Crash and most of the civilized world sliding into a Great Depression, construction commenced. In 1931, President Harry Woodburn Chase moved into the completed 14,000 square foot house that cost 225,000 dollars. That's 3.5 million in Today Dollars. In the middle of the Great Depression.

The land on which they built this modest bungalow originally formed part of university's horticulture tract. This tract now serves a dual purpose as a home for the president's family and a site for horticultural design and exhibition for students and the community. That's why, if you walk out of the president's back door, you run into the Arboretum.

The celebrated Mr. Platt, aided by university architect James M. White, designed the house in the Georgian Revival Style. What does that even mean? Well, let me tell you a story.

Colonial Revival Architecture
In the 1600s, when European settlers were sailing to the Atlantic coast of North America and creating representative governments, they found that legislatures and land were super duper, but they needed houses in which to live. They built these houses in the styles of the countries they left, creating the American Colonial Architectural Style. The most notable being:

Spanish Colonial: You see these in the South and Southwest. Round arches, red tile roofs, stucco walls.

French Colonial: Huge porches that surround the entire house and massive columns. Old plantation houses around New Orleans reflect this style, but you can find French Colonial up and down the Mississippi River.

Dutch Colonial: There's some controversy over whether the original houses of this style were Dutch or Deutsche, but in the revival style, almost all of them have Gambrel roofs. In fact, the Gambrel is synonymous with Dutch Revival the way the Mansard is synonymous with Le Second Empire.

German Colonial: I've only seen a few pictures of these. They're pretty much all brick and ugly.

British Colonial: We call it Georgian Style.

Ok, Colonial architectural styles were popular from the 1600s well into the early 1800s. During the early 1900s, it became popular to resuscitate the Colonial Styles. Anything built after this time is called Colonial Revival. Most of the colonial styles you see in Illinois are Colonial Revival, predominately Dutch Revival and Georgian Revival.

Georgian Revival Architecture
The original Georgian Style took its name from the first four monarchs of the Hanoverian Dynasty, all named George. You're most familiar with Number Three. He went crazy, had purple urine, and lamented his whole life the loss of the colonies.

Public Domain

When John Hancock scrawled his name crazy big across the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, he said, "I guess King George will be able to read that." He was talking about George III. Then he went home that night to his Georgian Style house.

Built in the 1930s, the President's Mansion (like the other Platt buildings on campus) is Georgian Revival.

How you know it's Georgian Revival:

• Ridge Pole (the top ridge of the roof) is parallel to the street
• Symmetrical facade
• Accented doorway or small covered porch
• Centrally located door

Many people confuse Georgian Revival with Greek Revival. Here's how you know it's not Greek Revival:

• No broken pediment
• No two story support columns
• No full frontal (porch, that is)
• No gable visible from front of house

Take another look:

Parting Shots
Not all plantation homes are French Colonial. The farther east you go, the more likely they are to be Greek Revival. I ran across the following tidbits while looking up plantation homes. In the movie Gone with the Wind, both Tara and Twelve Oaks are Greek Revival, the house Rhett buys in Atlanta after they marry is Swiss Chalet, and Aunt Pittypat's house is Queen Anne. Granted, these are fictional houses, the first three being big matte paintings, but Aunt Pittypat's house was a facade built on the backlot of the famous 40 Acre Studio. Mysteriously, her house shows up almost 100 years later in Mayberry, next door to Andy Griffith's house (if you're facing the venerable sheriff's house and look to the right, you'll need your smelling salts).

Yes, I said purple urine. Historians believe that George III had acute porphyria brought on by a lifetime of arsenic ingestion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria#Notable_cases

And, you'll notice the flag flying at half mast in the pictures I took of the President's Mansion. I took these pictures in mid-September, so the lowered flag probably reflects the 9/11 Benghazi Consulate attack.