Arcade

History

According to lexicographers, an arcade was a series of joined arches that could be used to support a roof and thus create a covered area or walk. Arcades created architectural and aesthetic links from the main building to side or outbuildings that were often situated away from the principal structure for practical reasons (for example, kitchens, which were typically located at some distance from the house to prevent the spread of fire). As connectors, arcades provided covered walkways, as well as channels of cooled air that circulated from ancillary structures to the main building.

The arcade form derived from antiquity and had been revived in the modern era, particularly in the work of Italian architect Andrea Palladio. From the late seventeenth century onward, Palladian-inspired architecture spread throughout continental Europe, England, and America, popularized in part through pattern books, which often feature the arcade form. The Capitol in Williamsburg, which utilized an arcade to link the two wings of the building, served as a model for several eighteenth-century public buildings in Virginia [Fig. 1].1 Arcades were also found in early nineteenth-century campus designs, such as Joseph Jacques Ramée’s plan for Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and Thomas Jefferson’s work at the University of Virginia, both of which became important precedents in this field [Figs. 2 and 3]. Here arcades helped to establish the framework of the campus and to enclose and define common space. A number of significant and well-known private dwellings, including Mount Vernon, Peacefield [Fig. 4], and the White House also included arcades that made direct reference to Palladian designs and became models for subsequent builders, even up to the present day.

The significance of arcades for landscape design was rarely articulated by contemporary observers of American architecture, yet visual representations of sites employing arcades make plain the role such structures played in shaping their surroundings. At Mount Vernon, the open arcades that Washington built between his house and the neighboring outbuildings allowed him to maintain views of the Potomac (considered one of the chief sources of beauty at his estate) from the western side of the house

[Fig. 5]. Glimpses of water, land, and vegetation afforded by these arches helped to situate the house in the landscape, visually linking the house and its outbuildings to the shrubbery-lined walks on the land side of the house and the park landscape on the river side of the house. In the case of the White House, Anne-Marguerite-Henriette Rouillé de Marigny Hyde de Neuville’s sketch of 1821 shows the arcades as arms extending out from the main structure into the landscape, visually and conceptually connecting the house to the grounds [Fig. 6].

Arcades also operated as viewing platforms, much like porches, pavilions, and other covered garden structures. In A. J. Downing’s designs, for example, arcades were often placed where porches or verandas might also be situated. In fact, the term “arcade” was often elided with “porch” or “veranda.” A covered, open-air extension of the house, the arcade was also similar to a piazza, and structures resembling arcades in the colonial period were often referred to as piazzas (see Piazza). A case in point is an example from Batty Langley’s Gothic Architecture (1747), a publication that was available in America by the end of the eighteenth century [Fig. 7].

Arcades were also associated with public gardens. For example, Columbia Garden in New York, which opened in 1810 under the ownership of Daniel Ensley, included two arcades that flanked and encircled the central tower that was used by performers, and they probably served as seating areas for outside entertainment [Fig. 8].2

--Anne L. Helmreich