Friday, May 3, 2024

What Is Spanish Colonial Style? Everything to Know About This Iconic Architecture

spanish colonial house

With so many elementary and high school textbooks tracing the United States from the pilgrims to the Revolutionary War, over 400 years of Spanish rule in what is the modern-day U.S.A. gets tossed by the wayside. ​Marshall Bright is a freelance lifestyle writer and home décor expert for MyDomaine with over 10 years of experience. Bright has covered everything from design to health to food for websites like Apartment Therapy, Refinery29, InStyle, and SheKnows.

Form, Space, Order and Location

Also contributing to temperature control is the tiled flooring that runs throughout all areas of the home. Red clay tiled roofs were popular among the Spanish, and they can be seen in every country the Spanish visited. The red color comes naturally; once you heat clay to create bricks, it turns red. The Pueblo Revival employs thick walls made of real or fake adobe, with soft, slightly rounded wall edges and a smooth stucco finish mimicking the original mud finish. When there is more than one story, however, the higher ones are usually designed in a setback to look like the originals. American houses have generally reflected a strong bias toward English-inspired styles—Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, or Arts & Crafts, for instance.

What features make up Spanish Colonial style?

spanish colonial house

While you can still find many Spanish colonial-era buildings and churches throughout America, most homes you see are part of the revival movement. Starting in the 19th century, and inspired by events like the world’s fair, architects began to build houses that harkened back to Spanish rule. Many cities also chose to design public buildings and spaces around a unified, Spanish-inspired style.

Must-Have Elements of Spanish Colonial Architecture

In addition to specifying the location of the church, the orientation of roads that run into the main plaza as well as the width of the street with respect to climatic conditions, the guidelines also specified the order in which the city must be built. The Spanish colonial style of architecture dominated in the early Spanish colonies of North and South America, and were also somewhat visible in its other colonies. It is sometimes marked by the contrast between the simple, solid construction demanded by the new environment and the Baroque ornamentation exported from Spain.

Colorful Outdoor Tile in a Spanish Revival Home

During the late 19th- and early-20th centuries, however, builders in parts of the country with a Spanish heritage began to follow quite a different vision—or, to be more precise, several different visions. As mendicants were pushed out of central Mexico and as Jesuits also evangelized Indians in northern Mexico, they built mission churches as part of a larger complex, with living quarters and workshops for resident Indians. The first churches to be built by the Franciscans to evangelize the populations were the Church of San Francisco and the Iglesia de la Merced, and later the cathedral.

Stone Foundation

Adobe walls were dominant in Spanish colonial architecture, especially in parts like California and Florida. The adobe brick is made of mud and straw, materials the Spanish never had to bring on their ships. In California, the Monterey style also blended old Spanish building characteristics with those of eastern houses of the same period. The Monterey Revival, a minor 20th-century version of an earlier style, featured projecting balconies on the front of the second floor. The 1909 Gerson House in Oklahoma City, with its arcaded porch, stuccoed walls, barrel-tile roof, and curved dormers, is a good early example of the Mission Revival style.

Morocco is just South of Spain, and one of the most important buildings in the country has Spanish colonial architecture features all over it, from the narrow windows to the flat roof. While the walls of the front facade are not white, the rest of the parliament buildings behind it have white walls. While the Plaza Del Lago has a red roof with white walls, just like the Spanish-style homes. The bell tower on the house looks like those of a Spanish mission church.

iv) Palm Beach Town Hall

This 2005 San Antonio home was modeled after the Spanish-revival style of the 1920s - San Antonio Current

This 2005 San Antonio home was modeled after the Spanish-revival style of the 1920s.

Posted: Fri, 12 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Tiled floors were used to regulate temperatures in the house and outdoors. The design choice not only worked aesthetically, but it brought a lot of advantages. For instance, the tiles, just like the thick walls, kept the temperatures cool during the day, and at night, the absorbed heat could be emitted to make the house comfortable.

Kathryn M Ireland, where English country house meets Spanish Colonial - Financial Times

Kathryn M Ireland, where English country house meets Spanish Colonial.

Posted: Sat, 21 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Famous Spanish Style Houses

Additionally, since the patio was available, the alfresco kitchen made it easier for families to dine outdoors. Since the Spanish majorly visited areas with dry climates in America and other parts of the world, their architecture had to conform to the climatic needs. The Spanish were mostly found in areas along the beaches or places with warmer temperatures, which need stone foundations for the houses to stand for long. Since the Spanish were busy discovering new territories, they could not carry around building materials. The Pueblo Revival is a 20th-century adaptation of a building type developed in the late-18th and early-19th centuries in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley.

So, what does the Spanish colonial architecture look like, and what are some examples? Christina Donnelly is a lifestyle expert writer covering stories in home décor and gardening. She also has expertise in pets, which comes from her 12 years of volunteering for animal welfare organizations, such as the ASPCA and Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Her work has appeared on Nick.com, Healthline.com, and Sharecare.com, among others.

Characterized by neutral tones and natural textures, Spanish Colonial style is warm and timeless. Houses in this architectural style are common throughout southern California and Florida, since these parts of the country were settled by Spaniards and bear a similar climate to that of Spain. While most Spanish-style homes were built in the last 150 years and would fall broadly under the Spanish Revival movement, there are different styles of the revival that can be found throughout the U.S. Mexico City is a good example of how these ordinances were followed in laying out a city. Previously the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan was captured and placed under Spanish rule in 1521. After news of the conquest, the king sent instructions very similar to the aforementioned Ordinance of 1513.

Additionally, it can be found in its former colonies and some non-Spanish colonies too. Pueblo Revival is now the officially required building style for new structures in the historic area of Santa Fe, and is routinely used in new construction outside the historic area as well—which has resulted in at least one gigantic “adobe”-canopied gas station. A traditional Spanish house in Albuquerque sports an unusual Pueblo-style bay window, replete with vigas—projecting round beams used in traditional Pueblo work.

These include the Mission (or Mission Revival), Spanish Colonial Revival, Pueblo Revival, Territorial, and Monterey styles. To that list we might add the Mediterranean Style, which is a blend of rustic Italian and Spanish Renaissance styles. In fact, all the Spanish revival styles are sometimes lumped under the Mediterranean label.

Ornamentation was typically of terracotta and was often vaguely Moorish in design. Windows and doors in myriad arch shapes, from Moorish to flattened semicircles, were also often edged with heavy mouldings of stone, brick, or terracotta. All these details fit nicely within the Arts & Crafts movement’s tendency to stress indigenous architectural forms and at the same time presaged the eclectic European architectural revivals that would prevail in the 1920s and ’30s.

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