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The American Foursquare or American Four Square is an American house style popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. A reaction to the ornate and mass produced elements of the Victorian and other Revival styles popular throughout the last half of the 19th century, the American Foursquare was plain, often incorporating handcrafted "honest" woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalogue). This style incorporates elements of the Prairie School and the Craftsman styles.

The hallmarks of the style include a basically square, boxy design, two-and-one-half stories high, usually with four large, boxy rooms to a floor, a center dormer, and a large front porch with wide stairs. The boxy shape provides a maximum amount of interior room space, to use a small city lot to best advantage. Other common features included a hipped roof, arched entries between common rooms, built-in cabinetry, and Craftsman-style woodwork.

A typical design would be as follows: First floor, from front to back, on one side, the living room and dining room; while on the other side, the entry room or foyer, stairway and kitchen. Sometimes a bathroom was also included. Second floor, front to back, on one side, bedroom, bathroom and bedroom; while on the other side, bedroom, stairway and bedroom. The bedrooms had a slightly longer dimension along the front and back of the house with side by side closets between the bedrooms. This gave a very efficient layout with a bedroom in each corner and a centralized bathroom and stairway. The top floor was generally just a big open space with one to four dormers. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace.

Models

Foursquare Houses may be built with a variety of materials, including bricks and wood frames. Later models include built-in shelves and other amenities. Large tracts of these homes exist in older urban neighborhoods, particularly streetcar suburbs, but the design was used everywhere.

As with other styles in streetcar suburbs, it was tailored to relatively narrow lots, and was multi-story, allowing more square-footage on a smaller footprint. The American Foursquare style is occasionally revived in new developments, although its appeal is as a "traditional looking" style rather than a fully authentic one, often including modern 2-car attached garages and other features absent in originals, and typically build on larger lots.

History

The American Foursquare or "Prairie Box" was a post-Victorian style, which shared many features with the Prairie architecture pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. Many Foursquares are trimmed with tiled roofs, cornice-line brackets, or other details drawn from Craftsman, Italian Renaissance, or Mission architecture. Later Foursquares often had the same type of interiors as Bungalows with open floor plans, lots of built-ins, and fireplaces.

Mail-order era

Enlarge picture
Three American Foursquare houses in Louisville, Kentucky displaying typical variations such as double-gabled roofs and full or half porches
The Foursquare was a popular mail-order era style along with the California bungalow. When one was ordered, it came in a boxcar with a book of directions and all the parts pre-cut and numbered for self-assembly. These homes are particularly common in neighborhoods near rail-lines built in this era. The largest mail-order house catalogue companies were Sears and Aladdin.

References

Foursquare may refer to any of the following:
  • The American Foursquare or American Four Square is an American house style popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s.
  • Four square as a is a ballgame played by four players on a square court.

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A house is a building lived in by people. The word "house" may also refer to a building that shelters animals, such as a lemur, especially in a zoo. [1]
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Victorian architecture can refer to one of a number of architectural styles predominantly in the Victorian era. As with the latter, the period of building that it covers may slightly overlap the actual reign of Queen Victoria after whom it is named.
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Revival may refer to:
  • Revival (play), of a former hit play in a new production
  • Revival (television) of a former television series
  • Language revival, of an extinct language
  • Revivalism, of religious fervor or fervent traditions

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Prairie School was a late 19th and early 20th century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States.

The works of these architects are usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal
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American Craftsman Style, or the American Arts and Crafts Movement, is an American domestic architectural, interior design, and decorative arts style popular from the last years of the 19th century through the early years of the 20th century.
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For people named Dormer, see .
A dormer is a structural element of a building that protrudes from the plane of a sloping roof surface. Dormers are used, either in original construction or as later additions, to create usable space in the roof of a
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porch is a platform structure attached at the front or back entrance of a building. It is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.
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A living room, also known as sitting room (especially in the UK), lounge room or lounge (in the United Kingdom and Australia), is a room for entertaining guests, reading, watching TV or other activities.
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dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level.
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Stairs, staircase, stairway, and flight of stairs are all names for a construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into smaller vertical distances, called steps.
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A kitchen, at least in the western view of the word, is a room or part of a room (sometimes called "kitchen area" or in modern times in the USA "kitchenette") used for food preparation including cooking, and sometimes also for eating and entertaining guests, if the kitchen is large
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A bathroom is a room that may have different functions depending on the cultural context. In the most literal sense, the word bathroom means "a room with a bath". Because the traditional bathtubs have partly made way for modern showers, including steam showers, the more general
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worldwide view of the subject.
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A bedroom is a large room where people usually sleep for the night and/or for relaxation during the day.
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closet (especially in North American usage) is a small and enclosed space, a cabinet, or a cupboard in a house or building used for general storage or hanging clothes. A closet for food storage is usually referred to as a pantry.
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For people named Dormer, see .
A dormer is a structural element of a building that protrudes from the plane of a sloping roof surface. Dormers are used, either in original construction or as later additions, to create usable space in the roof of a
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basement is one or more floors of a building that are either completely or partially below the ground floor. Slab-on-grade buildings do not have basements. Basements are typically used as a utility space for a building where such items as the furnace, water heater, car park, and
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furnace is a device used for heating.

In American English, the term furnace on its own is generally used to describe household heating systems based on a central furnace (known either as a boiler or a heater in British English), and sometimes as a synonym for kiln,
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An urban area is an area with an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it. This term is at one end of the spectrum of suburban and rural areas. An urban area is more frequently called a city or town.
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A neighbourhood or neighborhood (see spelling differences) is a geographically localised community located within a larger city, town or suburb.

North America


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A streetcar suburb is a community whose growth and development was strongly shaped by the use of streetcar lines as a primary means of transportation. The earliest suburbs were served by horsecars, but by the late 1800s cable cars and electric streetcars, or trams, were used,
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California Bungalows, commonly called simply bungalows in America, are a form of residential structure that were widely popular across America and, to some extent, the world around the years 1910 to 1925.
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Sears, Roebuck and Company

Subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation
Founded 1886 (Chicago, Illinois, USA)
Headquarters Hoffman Estates, Illinois, USA

Industry Retail
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The Aladdin Company

Founded 1906
Headquarters Bay City, Michigan

Key people W. J. Sovereign, O. E. Sovereign
Industry Mail Order
Products Houses, Garages, Various Buildings
Revenue $5,400,000 (1950)

The Aladdin Company
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