Blackburne, E.L. (ed)
Suburban and rural architecture. Brick, stone, concrete and fireproof.
London, James Hagger 1867.
Full Description
4to. Colour frontis., decorative colour printed title leaf, ii + 117 + (1)pp, (89) litho plates (numbered in suites), many partly printed in colour. Contemporary quarter morocco. Text leaves and plates both rather spotted.
A substantial collection of designs for suburban villas, detached and semi-detached, many in colour. The best are those designed by Blackburne himself, in domestic Gothic or Anglo-Italian styles, and a number of these represent actual villas built to his designs in the recent past. Alongside them there are a series of villa designs in contemporary German styles by an architect called Marchand, evidently working not in Britain but in Germany, for despite the book’s English publisher it was produced by the expatriate English printer and illustrator A.H. Payne at Reudnitz, near Leipzig. The volume is completed by other designs in a thoroughly debased Italianate style by a firm of English architects and surveyors called Shaw & Lockington. These include a design for a “block of labourers’ dwellings for eighty families”, and other designs for terrace houses and fireproof semi-detached villas, all to be built in “Portland Cement Concrete” ; such designs reflect the cheap end of the mid 19th century house building market, and their appearance in this volume is valuable evidence for a type of building that does not generally feature in pattern books of the period. Although the present copy is rather more spotted than the only copy that we have previously catalogued (cat 1, item 18), the book is not common and NUC records only three copies in American libraries.