The other day I had the opportunity to visit Camp-Woods, a house on Philadelphia’s Main Line. It was built in 1910-12 for James M. Willcox, a banker who would later be president of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society—and would commission the PSFS Building, America’s first International Style skyscraper. Camp-Woods is definitely not International Style, according to the brief Wiki entry it is Italianate-Georgian. While the architecture is a fusion, that is a misleading description. The architect was Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926), one of the leading residential architects of his day—he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, a high honor at that time. Shaw was a Chicagoan. After graduating from Yale and MIT he apprenticed with William Le Baron Jenney, the steel-frame pioneer who mentored Louis Sullivan. Like Sullivan, Shaw was neither a revivalist nor a modernist. He belonged to The Eighteen, a luncheon club that brought together architects with an Arts & Crafts sensibility—Frank Lloyd Wright was a member. Shaw and Wright were probably the two leading residential architects in Chicagoland in the early 1900s, but unlike Wright, Shaw worked with a rich palette, which is what informed the design of Camp-Woods, his only East Coast commission. The house is brick, not Georgian red but a lighthearted mix of colors. The entry porch has doubled Doric columns, the only classical columns in the house save for two freestanding giants that frame the view from the garden court. The interior is not an open plan, but neither is it traditional: a long vaulted gallery stretches the full width of the back of the house and forms a processional space between the large living room and the equally large dining room. Both rooms open onto protected loggias. Sitting decorously to one side is a grand stair with beautiful ironwork by Samuel Yellin. The hand-crafted ornament throughout the house is neither Italianate nor Georgian, but a brilliant fusion of old and new. Nice.
