Today's interpretation of Tudor architecture might best be expressed as a copy of a copy. This style derives from building methods commonly used during the reign of Britain's Tudor monarchs (1485 to 1603) and, as is the case with many historical styles, is not compatible with today's building methods. These days, the well-known "black-and-white" of authentic half-timbered Tudor buildings is often an add-on to an otherwise unremarkable modern facade.
Understanding the origin of the half-timbered Tudor style requires a look at British building after the Middle Ages. The vernacular architecture of the time reflected materials immediately available and the common knowledge of how to use them. England at the beginning of the sixteenth century was densely forested with ancient oaks. Huge timbers felled from the nearby forests were a logical choice for structural members of a building. Trunk sections ("crucks)"were sawn and sunk into the ground to form vertical members, giving the name to cruck construction.
Verticals were further braced by the addition of lesser branches placed at an angle to the trunks. Bracing members were flat sections cut from the branches and often reflected the curve that the branch took as it grew. These branch sections often expressed a graceful curve in the braces of the Tudor style not intentional decoration, but the builder working as best he could with the materials at hand. Members were not laid out in even, symmetrical bays; instead, spacing was worked out with whatever dimensions the available timbers presented.
Once framed in, walls in a typical Tudor dwelling were completed with wattle and daub construction. This was based on a framework of twigs. (The form is still seen in woven-twig, or "wattle," fencing in English gardens.) Wattle filled the spaces between vertical and bracing members and was then covered with "daub," a mixture of whatever local clays, mud, straw and animal dung might be available. Certainly an early forerunner to lath and plaster construction, the daub-covered wattle was still relatively exposed to the elements and required protection. Daub and wattle was whitewashed (and recoated frequently), giving the bright white so familiar in authentic Tudor construction.
As the daub surface was protected by its periodic coat of whitewash, the exposed timbers expressing the building's structural members also needed protection from the elements. The best means of protecting exterior timbers in Tudor times was a liberal coating of pitch, which blackened the timbers. The derivation of the striking black-against-white contrast of Tudor architecture's half-timbered style was nothing more than the Tudor builder's attempt to protect his handiwork against the English climate.
Later in the Tudor period, there arose demand for a more impressive vernacular, and what might be considered "manor house" Tudor resulted. Generally built of brick, often with carved stone detailing at doors and windows, Henry VIII's Hampton Court is a highly recognizable example of the later style. A typical brick building of the period had large masses of tall narrow windows made of small diamond-shaped panes. (As in earlier Tudor buildings, panes were small because glass was expensive and impossible to make in large pieces.) Other common features were steeply pitched roofs, elaborate clusters of chimneys and frequent use of the four-square - or Tudor - arch, a rather low, flat arch as opposed to the high, pointed Gothic arch. Another distinguishing feature of this more elaborate Tudor architectural style was the oriel window, a structure that extended beyond the vertical face of the building and was supported by sturdy decorative brackets or corbels.
The more manorial Tudor style was often the signature style for suburban expansion in the United States in the 1920's. As improved urban transit and more readily available automobiles fueled a building boom away from core cities, developers sought an architecture that bespoke a moneyed ancestry, and Tudor was the style of choice in many areas. Cleveland's Shaker Heights; Scarsdale, New York; Detroit's Indian Village (including the half-timbered factory of Pewabic Pottery); many of Philadelphia's Main Line communities and several Chicago suburbs resembled the genteel English country countryside of centuries past.
Considered an excellent extant version of American Tudor Revival is Stan Hywet, built in 1915 by A. F. Seiberling, founder of Goodyear Tire and Rubber. Stan Hywet's Director of Historical Structures, Mark Gilles, characterizes the Tudor Revival of the first quarter of the twentieth century as an expression of the desire of the newly rich to display their wealth and implied English ancestry not only did such buildings suggest historical wealth, but the materials to build them were indeed expensive brick, leaded glass, stone and slate roofing with copper details. In fact, Gilles points out that a popular nickname for the style was "Stockbroker Tudor."
It is these expensive materials and the labor of the skilled artisans required to craft them that will probably preclude Tudor architecture ever again attaining the wide-spread use it saw early in the last century. There are exceptions, to be sure. Good Architecture in Maryland recently designed and oversaw building of an Annapolis area Tudor home so meticulously true to the British originals that architect and clients traveled to England four times to verify authentic details. A carpenter in Upper Upnor in Kent England has spent the last five years building a rowhouse exactingly to Tudor standards using the building methods of the period (and has no interior finishing completed as yet). Most of today's homebuyers have neither the huge cash reserves required for the first example nor the patience and skill required for the second.
Instead, today's interpretation of Tudor architectural style is apt to be limited to adding superficial suggestions of Tudor motifs to a facade of another style or period. On online survey of "Tudor house plans" gives evidence of some oddly discordant combinations. A Tudor Arts and Crafts plan most resembles a two-story farmhouse with wooden window planters and shutters. Or consider a single-story ranch with u-shaped floor plan and four half-timbers in the gables on either end of the "U." Or even an otherwise unremarkable house with a front projection displaying a large window expanse topped by a half-round window surmounted by four radial half-timbers defining the gable.
Purely decorative timbering, an occasional window of leaded diamond-shaped panes, a steep roofline here or there - Tudor architecture in twenty-first century America is mostly a whisper or a mere suggestion, a slight reference to our earlier Tudor revival. Ironically, the typical small window panes are again prohibitively expensive (because today's technology easily produces large sheets of glass, and largely bypasses the more labor-intensive small leaded work). The most cost-effective aspect of Tudor construction might be a return to hay-bale or clay-and-straw wall interiors of increased interest because of new "green construction" methods. Here is an echo, with technological updates, of the old wattle and daub!
A large-scale return to Tudor architecture, however, seems unlikely. The style is not well suited to our modern world and building materials. Rather than strange add-ons or pale imitations of an historic architecture, perhaps the best future of American Tudor architectural style lies in careful preservation and veneration of the Tudor Revival buildings that remain from the last century. Those copies of British buildings made sense to the time and the lifestyle of the times; today we are only copying a copy, and much seems lost in the translation. Somehow, a "modern" Tudor manse seems a throwback, and just a little too precious, what the British might call "twee."