Stick style

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Architectural term coined in 1949 by Vincent J. Scully jr to describe a style of mid-19th century American timber-frame domestic architecture. Scully posited a common theoretical link: the desire to express structure with an externally visible wooden frame. 'This new aesthetic sensitivity to the expression of light wood structure', wrote Scully in 1953, 'in a sense stripped the skin off the Greek Revival and brought the frame to light as the skeleton of a new and organically wooden style.' While acknowledging European sources, Scully concluded that the Stick style was, like the other style he identified, the Shingle style, essentially American. He cited as noteworthy examples A. J. Downing's board-and-batten cottage designs of the 1840s and 1850s, Richard Morris Hunt's J. N. A. Griswold House (1861-3), Newport, RI (see HUNT, (2), fig. 1), and Dudley Newton's Cram House (1875-6), Middletown, RI. Despite its wide acceptance, a few critics have questioned the validity of Scully's term. Rarely is there a direct correlation between external woodwork and actual structure; Hunt's Griswold House drawings bear this out; and there is little evidence that American designers sought structural expression. Their goals had more to do with the Picturesque, historicism, eclecticism and a wish to follow the latest fashion from abroad. These houses recall a variety of wooden building types, from the half-timbered Late Gothic domestic architecture of England, France and Germany to the Swiss chalet and Scandinavian, Tyrolean and Slavic vernacular building. They reflect the contemporary European taste for houses that invoked these traditions.

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An eclectic style of domestic architecture in the United States primarily from about 1860 to 1890, mainly of wood-frame construction; usually asymmetric in both plan and section; has applied ornamentation in the form of wood boards on the exterior surfaces that is intended to express the inner structure of the building. Buildings in this style usually include some of the following characteristics: a façade of clapboard or board-and-batten siding with structural framing materials used as exterior ornamentation or wood boards prominently applied in patterns on wall surfaces; prominent structural corner posts; spacious porches, decorated in wood with simple diagonal braces or brackets; a steeply pitched gable roof, often with intersecting gables and/or cross gables; eaves with a significant overhang, often supported by large diagonal brackets; exposed roof trusses and rafters; corbeled chimneys.

Stick style