"Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England"
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The barb in Gardiner's line is its blunt refusal to flatter American originality. "Copied straight" isn’t neutral description; it’s an accusation in plain clothes, aimed at a national habit of turning import into inheritance and then pretending it was destiny. Coming from an architect, the charge carries an insider’s impatience: he’s not just noting stylistic influence, he’s calling out a professional culture that treated prestige as something you could ship across the Atlantic in pattern books.
The phrase also needles the romance people attach to "Victorian" as a cozy, homegrown aesthetic. Gardiner re-centers it as an export product: gables, turrets, and gingerbread as packaged signals of respectability, purchased along with the social script they implied. In that reading, the copying is less about laziness than aspiration. The young United States, fast rich and socially anxious, borrowed England’s architectural vocabulary to borrow England’s authority - to make new money look like old lineage.
Context matters: nineteenth-century American builders did rely heavily on British precedents, and the spread of illustrated manuals made replication easy and profitable. Still, Gardiner’s absolutism ("straight") is strategic. It compresses a messy history - regional adaptations, local materials, hybridization - into a provocation designed to puncture nostalgia and force a harder question: when Americans built "Victorian" streetscapes, were they building homes, or performing legitimacy?
The phrase also needles the romance people attach to "Victorian" as a cozy, homegrown aesthetic. Gardiner re-centers it as an export product: gables, turrets, and gingerbread as packaged signals of respectability, purchased along with the social script they implied. In that reading, the copying is less about laziness than aspiration. The young United States, fast rich and socially anxious, borrowed England’s architectural vocabulary to borrow England’s authority - to make new money look like old lineage.
Context matters: nineteenth-century American builders did rely heavily on British precedents, and the spread of illustrated manuals made replication easy and profitable. Still, Gardiner’s absolutism ("straight") is strategic. It compresses a messy history - regional adaptations, local materials, hybridization - into a provocation designed to puncture nostalgia and force a harder question: when Americans built "Victorian" streetscapes, were they building homes, or performing legitimacy?
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| Topic | Art |
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