Mar 12, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: Romanesque Revival Homes
The Romanesque Revival was all about masses and large-scale forms. Most houses don't have the size to show the style well.
Mar 1, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: Romanesque Revival Commercial Buildings
Commercial buildings were large enough to make use of the Romanesque Revival style. In La Crosse, the two largest use no decoration, while the smaller one uses relief sculpture to enliven the surface.
Feb 28, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: Romanesque Revival Public Buildings
The Romanesque revival was based on church architecture, mostly in France and Spain, from the period of 950-1100 CE. The name means “like that in Rome” or in the Roman Empire.
Jan 29, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Colonial Revival
During the 1876 U.S. Centennial celebrations, the old argument that the United States needed an “American” architecture was resurrected, but what at first seemed clear-cut and definable, soon changed into another catch-all style. By 1876, the various revival styles and the pseudo-revivals were well-known and documented, but relatively little was known about house types before the revolution.
Jan 22, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Queen Anne Style
This style, as developed and named by Richard Norman Shaw in England in the late 19th-century, claimed to be based on design elements used in the time of the English monarch Queen Anne. As the style moved to the United States, it lost many of medieval elements.
Jan 15, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Second Empire Style
The Second Empire style features include the mansard roof with dormer windows, decorative brackets, columns, paired columns, half columns, triangular pediments, curved pediments, decorative window crests; the more complex, the better. Even though few examples of either remain, La Crosse had more Second Empire designs than most Midwestern communities.
Jan 10, 2024
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Italianate Style
Though commonly referred to in architecture conversations, often used for any building with a bracket, the Italianate style is almost entirely a domestic style. There are very few public, religious, or commercial examples of the style in the United States and none in La Crosse.
Dec 19, 2023
Looking Back (2023)
A look back at the local history stories shared by the La Crosse Public Library Archives in 2023.
Dec 11, 2023
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Exotic Revival
Exotic Revival architecture is mostly understood to be Romantic era homes with added ornamentation inspired by architecture from regions that, at that time in the United States, would have been considered exotic.
Dec 5, 2023
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Gothic Revival
The Gothic Revival began at about the same time as the interest in the classical world did and lasted into the mid-nineteenth century in the United States.
Nov 28, 2023
Architectural Styles and Revivals: The Greek and Roman Revivals
Greek and Roman Revival styles themes are highlighted by the use of classical elements, using old buildings as prototypes to exactly copy or treating various elements from classical buildings as independent items and arranging them to suit contemporary taste.
Nov 21, 2023
Architectural Styles and Revivals
This is the first of a series of blogs on the major architectural styles used in La Crosse during the nineteenth century.