Alexander jackson davis architect

America's greatest architect of the mid-nineteenth century, a designer of picturesque buildings in myriad styles, Alexander J. Davis was born in New York.

Alexander Jackson Davis was a leading figure of the 19th-century Gothic revival in American architecture. Alexander Jackson Davis began as an apprentice architectural draftsman to Josiah Brady of New York in , though his early painting ambitions remained evident in his lifelong picturesque approach to architectural design. In Davis joined Ithiel Town in what became the first architectural firm of a modern sort in the United States , lasting until Town's death in Davis specialized in domestic architecture, leaving more public or monumental commissions to Town.

Hundreds of houses were built directly or indirectly from Davis's designs; he was also among the first architects to design furniture for his larger houses. He claimed to have been first to introduce to America "the English Gothic Villa with Barge Boards, Bracketts, Oriels, Tracery in Windows … in " and also the Italianate villa, with a drawing exhibited about In the early s Davis began moving into the orbit of A.

Downing, illustrating Downing's book, Country Houses, in Haskell as America's first "garden suburb" Picturesqueness was predominant in all Davis's works. Yet in his last major project, an unsuccessful submission in the competition for the New York City Post Office , he designed a metal and glass structure which clearly presaged 20th-century "functional" concepts.

Far from being contradictory, however, both picturesqueness and functionalism were from the first inherent in the American—as distinct from English or French— Gothic revival. In America, Gothic revival architecture never challenged the Roman or Greek revival in mass popularity; indeed, its associations were fundamentally "antiestablishment. Harral house in Bridgeport, Conn.

Such stylistic self-consciousness inevitably encouraged self-conscious formalism—emphasis on the "naturalness" of Gothic forms and structure as an end in itself—and thence to the kind of "functionalism" exhibited in Davis's Post Office design. For historical reasons, however, the picturesque side of Gothic revival architecture predominated in America so that its chief legacy was the Arts and Crafts movement of about to about , prefaced by the Romanesque of H.

Combining something of both trends, Davis has claim to be the most representative of all American Gothic revivalists.