The Baptist Church of Streetsboro, Ohio, Part 2

The Streetsboro Baptist Church, built c. 1820: the second phase of its construction - its decoration - the front facade and the steeple.

 

 

The first post* discussed how the framer used the geometry of the 3/4/5 Triangle to layout the floor, the bents, the walls and  windows, the roof and steeple. After the framers made the building 'tight to the weather',  joiners would often be responsible for the finish work: window sash, doors, molding.  Different trades had different skills and tools.

I think this division of labor happened here.

 

The church front on a cloudy day in October. It is a handsome building. It is also a box decorated with boards and moldings. That's what I am looking at in this post.

The HABS drawing is below.





 

 

The windows had been set by the framer when he laid out the floor plan, the walls, and the roof frame. The black lines show what the front wall would have looked like when the joiner began his work. Holes for windows, a space - perhaps a larger framed opening - for a door, a triangular gable. 

The congregation expected that this box with a roof would become a modern Greek Revival church. 

Of course the joiner was considering the pediment, the frieze, the architrave. the water table. He also needed to lay out a facade which has grace and rhythm as well as symmetry.

 

Here is the geometry of the facade as the framer knew it: 3 bays with their height from the floor to the roof trusses, their width between the corner posts, and a door, centered but of undetermined dimensions. The windows are centered within the  3/4/5 rectangles of  the frame's rhythm. Their shape is 2- 3/4/5 rectangles.
 

 

I think, the joiner chooses to balance the windows first, to set them as supporting wings to the central door. The corner boards grew to become paired columns balanced by 2 more columns on the other side of the windows. Note that the columns are not on the lines of the bays, therefore the center bay is slightly wider than the side bays. The window bays became back drop to the central bay with its  double door and paneled transom.The joiner 'adjusted' the geometry; but the window bays' symmetry is so strong it is hard to catch. The tall, broad main door, recessed  in the main bay, then surrounded by the columns and the frieze, becomes the focus. 

The joiner 'fooled the eye' and created a dynamic facade, much better than 3 equal rectangles would have been.

 

The framer built the base which supported the steeple. Its dimensions at the roof are based on the 3/4/5 Triangle.

 

The steeple uses neither the geometry of the frame nor that of the front facade. It is a series of blocks, decreasing in size, with their corners clipped. The design uses the square and the circles that fit within and without it. Was it the work of the same joiner? **



The HABS drawing shows the steeple sections.

Here I have added the circles  - In 'A' the red circle is outside, the green inside. In 'B' that green circle is now outside, a new smaller red circle inside. 'C' continues the progression with the red circle from 'B' now the outside. The green circle of  'C'  is the base of the spire.

 The steeple layout follows the  drawings of James Gibbs in his book "On Architecture", published in England in 1728. Copies were in the Colonies, available to builders.  I have written about Gibbs' steeples here: https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2022/02/james-gibbs-steeples.html  

 These  HABS measurements are too simple for an in depth study of the steeple geometry.

The shapes that make up the tower are a series of blocks with related faces all derived from the simple manipulation of the square: a complete square, 2 squares, one square, half a square (the base for the spire).
The spire's height uses the width of the steeple's base as its unit of measure: it is 1.5 times as tall as the base is wide.
 

The paneling, edge moldings,  and the series of roofs as the tower extends create the steeple.

The  door itself is approximately square, the transom: half a square. They are the same size as the section of the steeple which holds the bell.

The wall of that bay acts as a setting,  a frame for the door.  The columns and architrave are a second frame.

 
   

Look again at the photographs.

The church's grace and presence come from simple proportions in the design and the understanding of how light and shadow give life to the parts themselves and thus to the whole building. 

Here is what Asher Benjamin wanted the joiner - and by extension, we who see the church - to understand about moldings :  

"...the bending, or turning inward, of the upper edge of the Grecian, or quirk ovolo, when the sun shines on the surface [and] causes a beautiful variety of light and shade, which greatly relieves it from plane surfaces, and if it is entirely in shadow, but receives a reflected light, the bending or turning inward, at the top, will cause it to contain a greater quality of shade in that place, but softened downward around the moulding to the upper edge."   ***

 

* Part 1:  https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2018/04/the-baptist-church-of-streetsboro-ohio.html

 
** The Sandown, NH, Meeting House and Gunston Hall in Virginia are good examples of this separation of craft. At Sandown a skilled joiner built the main door and the pulpit, perhaps the wainscotting and box pews. George Mason of Gunston Hall brought William Buckland from England to create the porches and interiors for his new brick house.

**Asher Benjamin, The American Builder's Companion, 6th edition, 1827, R.P. & C. Williams, Dover Publications reprint, Plate IX, Names of Mouldings.

 

the Geometry of the Kirkland Temple

.A reader of this blog asked me to look at the geometry of the Kirkland Mormon Temple in Kirkland, Ohio.  He saw similarities between the geometry of the Cabin at Tuckahoe Plantation and the Temple.

I have not seen the Temple, but HABS drawings are available on the Library of Congress website; and the Kirkland Temple has good exterior and interior pictures on their website. https://www.kirtlandtemple.org/





The Kirkland Temple, built 1833-6, has a design specific to its use, not a traditional church form adapted to a new way of worship. I am not referring to belief, but about how the religious group planned to meet together.The Temple has 3 floors, each for a specific use: the Church floor, the Apostolic floor, the School and Quorum floor,  and the accompanying a Vestibule and Stair Well. This is different from the churches the people who built this would have known.
However, the red organizing diagram for the frame was not new; it was the ancient pattern that the craftsmen had learned as apprentices. They used the Square and  its Lines to plan the facade. The diagonals mark the placement of the Palladian window, the Lines encompass the ellipse in the pediment.



The builders did not use the division of  Lines into thirds. They seem to have preferred dividing in half and then in half again.

I have marked the 'third points' with red circles; the design does not depend on them. I could have left them out of the diagram.
Half the square also determines very little - maybe the sash location of the Gothic windows.  However, the body of the facade is 3/4 of the square, the pediment 1/4. The pitch of the roof is the diagonal from the center to the upper corner.





The  body divided in half - or the square divided into 3/8 and 5/8 - determines the 2nd floor location - the horizontal red dashed line.

For clarity I  have only laid out one quarter of the possible facade Lines - the red square on the lower left.  Half the quarter seems to set the height for the Gothic windows on the first floor. 3/4 of the small square seems to locate the door with its fanlight. The location of the Gothic windows does not quite work - the vertical red dashed lines.
The west elevation is  much the same, not quite symmetrical. The plans show that the windows were set to accommodate the stairs in the Vestibule and the seating the Church and Apostolic spaces.   




  

The plan is a square, solid red lines, and an overlapping 2nd rectangle whose length is determined by the overlapping arcs of its width, dashed red lines.

Again I would like to compliment my analysis by the experience of being there, walking through it as well as around the outside. For example here the 2 overlapping squares seem to include the platforms and stairs in front of the Temple. If I were there I might understand if the stairs had been part of the intention of the original design.





The division of the square into quarters locates the  columns and the beams along the length of  the whole structure. The spacing of the columns across the width probably is 1/4, 2/4, 1/4. The columns in the  interior elevations look wider than they are drawn in plan here.


The 5 columns at the east end (bottom of the  drawing)  support the tower.










The Gothic windows and the Federal doors also use  squares, and their division into halves as the initial layout.  The interior dimensions  - the panes, the panels -  do not seem to follows the same pattern.


 







The Church sanctuary and the Apostolic floor both have a central square flanked with smaller ones on each side. The regular spacing of the columns, the square side aisle bays between them, and the central naves with arched ceilings facing Palladian windows create 2 dramatic spaces. 
I do wish there was more information about the framing. Look at that blank space above the side aisles!

I was curious about the Temple partly because Joseph Smith, Jr. was born in Vermont where I live. I wondered if the framing traditions I see here were used in Kirkland, Ohio. I was curious about what forms the early Mormons used.  I wanted to compare it to the Streetsboro Baptist Church - built about 15 years earlier - near by.  https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2018/04/the-baptist-church-of-streetsboro-ohio.html
I found a use of Practical Geometry that was very basic. Perhaps it allowed untrained members of the community to help with the construction.
From the photographs on the Kirkland Temple website the community seems to have created a striking building with effective spaces. 































The structure was measured in the 1930's for the US Dept of the Interior; the drawings are now part of the HABS collection in the Library of Congress.