Townhouses

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

For as long as there have been towns, there have been townhouses. However, the modern study of the townhouse as a distinctive architectural type has largely focused on the relatively recent past, from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries, a long era of urbanization throughout Europe and North America. In this era, the attached townhouse, sometimes referred to as a rowhouse, sometimes as a terraced house, became ubiquitous as intensive speculative development remade Western cities with street after street of high-density, multistory attached housing. Note that “townhouse” is used here to denote the broad range of housing that is sited in cities, whereas “rowhouse” is a particular subset of townhouse that shares its party walls with its neighbors and is most often built speculatively, in rows of three or more at a time. “Brownstone” is a further sub-category of the rowhouse, one that is built of masonry and most closely associated with New York City in the middle decades of the 19th century. Two principal problems have animated the scholarship on this period: first, identifying the range of options available to urban householders at the outset; and second, defining the causes of a widespread shift to a more regular streetscape and a smaller number of plan forms over the 18th and 19th centuries. In the Anglo-Atlantic world, this process is referred to as “Georgianization.” Despite the relative abundance of surviving housing in this period compared to earlier eras, there have been catastrophic losses: from fire, the depredations of war, and urban development policy. London has fallen victim to all three. Students of townhouses at the beginning of this period and earlier must therefore look to other disciplines, principally archaeology, for relevant literature, though some information about medieval housing is available in the sources collected here. Similarly, those interested in multifamily urban housing of the late 19th and 20th centuries, such as tenements and public housing, should consult sources in urban history and planning. Though the townhouse is commonplace in Western cities, this form has not received the same level of scholarly attention as other building types, such as churches, country houses, or farmhouses. The townhouse has seemed too cosmopolitan for the folklorists associated with vernacular architecture studies, while, at the same time, it is too commonplace and too uniform to warrant the attention of scholars of polite architecture. This pattern holds especially true for continental Europe, where there is very little English-language scholarship on urban housing, even in cities with significant inventories of premodern buildings like Amsterdam, Bruges, and the towns of the Hanseatic League. That said, a relatively rich literature is available on the cities of the English-speaking Atlantic world, especially in the Georgian era. Housing in London, Philadelphia, Bristol, and Boston is increasingly well documented thanks to long-standing efforts at survey and historical research. So, too, are the construction practices and development process for urban housing, especially concerning the speculative rows of London and its suburbs. Similarly well studied is the work of individual architects who are closely associated with urban housing, such as Robert Adam and John Nash.