Jamie Brothers was too nice to Colonial Williamsburg and their
original architects, Perry Shaw and Hepburn.  It was a New England
firm that Rockefeller hired to do up his pretty little patriotic
shrine. The idea of academic rigor never entered their minds, and
they didn't understand the peculiar vernacular architecture of
Virginia.

In Virginia during the eighteenth century, external end chimneys were
built with the stack on the outside, so that stacks were freestanding
above the fireplace breast.  The New England architects, unfamiliar
with external chimneys, invented a form of external end chimney that
features the stack hugging the wall and cutting through the barge
cornice.

The result is a mess that simply can't be efficiently flashed, but
they are all over Williamsburg.  I was working in nearby Charles City
County on an eighteenth-century site and sketched a reconstruction
with an exterior end chimney on the outside. It looked just like the
old houses nearby, but a colleague in Williamsburg noted that he had
never seen such a chimney!

Perry Shaw and Hepburn didn't understand cornice returns, either, but
that is another story altogether.

The unfortunate result of this early muddled approach to restoration
has been a proliferation of  garish misrepresentations of the
historic fabric. Everyone wants the Williamsburg look, based on
misconceptions that never existed. Next door to me here in Delaware,
a former Williamsburg architect was renovating an eighteenth-century
house with an external end chimney. When a wing was pulled off, he
found a typical southern external end chimney with a free-standing
stack. He promptly pulled down the original stack and rebuilt it
where he thought it belonged, smack up against the wall of the house.
Subsequent owners have never been able to keep it from leaking!

We need to remember that architects, even modern historical
architects, are trained in aesthetic design. It must "look right" to
them, regardless of the actual original appearance.  Unfortunately,
architects are in charge of many restoration projects, when in fact
it should be the archaeologists who are in the lead.  We do, after
all, have the architectural evidence that they should be seeking.





--
Ned @ Heite.org

You know you're in trouble
when your idea of excitement
is the way the receipt pops
jauntily, even with gay abandon,
from the slot in the ATM machine.