Status Demolished Address 3 Low Lane Client William G. Low Opened 1887 Demolished 1962 Architect Charles Follen McKim | Type Seaside cottage Completed 1887 Architecture firm McKim, Mead & White Town or city Bristol Construction started 1886 | |
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Similar Kragsyde, William Watts Sherman, Mary Fiske Stoughton House, Isaac Bell House, Marshall Field's Wholesal | ||
Now an icon of American architecture, the demolished William G. Low House was a seaside cottage at 3 Low Lane in Bristol, Rhode Island.
It was designed in 1886-87 by architect Charles McKim of the New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White. With its single, exaggerated, 140-foot-long (43 m) gable, it embodied many of the tenets of Shingle Style architecture — horizontality, simplified massing and geometry, minimal ornamentation, the blending of interior and exterior spaces.
The architectural historian Vincent Scully saw it as "at once a climax and a kind of conclusion" for McKim, since its "prototypal form ... was almost immediately to be abandoned for the more conventionally conceived columns and pediments of McKim, Mead, and White's later buildings."
Just prior to its 1962 demolition, the house was documented with measured drawings and photographs by the Historic American Buildings Survey.
According to architectural historian Leland Roth, "Although little known in its own time, the Low House has come to represent the high mark of the Shingle Style."
