American Foursquare

The American Foursquare is a two-and-a-half-story house with a nearly square, boxy plan. It has a hipped roof, sloping down on all four sides, usually with a dormer window centered on the front, and a porch across the full width of the front. The name refers to the typical plan of four roughly equal rooms on each floor, with the staircase in one corner. Interiors often have built-in cabinets, wide openings between the main rooms and Craftsman-style wood trim.

Builders applied details from several styles to the same form: brackets under the eaves from the Craftsman style, wide overhangs from the Prairie School, or Colonial Revival columns on the porch. Frank Lloyd Wright's versions include the Robert M. Lamp House in Madison, Wisconsin (1903). Sears and the Aladdin Company sold Foursquares as kits, shipped in a boxcar with pre-cut, numbered parts and a book of instructions. A Queen Anne house has an irregular plan, towers and mixed wall surfaces; a Foursquare is one rectangular block under a single roof.

The Foursquare appeared in the United States in the mid-1890s as a plainer alternative to the ornate Queen Anne and other Victorian revival houses of the late 19th century. No single architect created it. Builders, plan books and catalogs spread the form, and it drew on both the Arts and Crafts movement and the Prairie School. In the early 1900s, Frank Lloyd Wright and other Prairie School architects designed versions with open main floors, and Wright published a square two-story design, A Fireproof House for $5000, in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1907.

Mail-order sales carried the type across the country. Sears sold about 370 house designs between 1908 and 1942, including Foursquares, and more than 70,000 of its kit houses were built in North America, many of them near railroad lines that delivered the parts. Foursquares were built in large numbers in older Midwestern city neighborhoods and in the streetcar suburbs around them, as well as in Canada. The type remained common for new houses until the late 1930s.