:
WARWICK COMPOUND
:
WARWICK COMPOUND
THE WARWICK COMPOUND consists of the residence of Clay Lancaster and its various dependencies.
CLAY LANCASTER’s octagonal tower derives from his long fascination with polygonal buildings and their relationship to nineteenth-century American architecture.
Nineteenth-century Lexington boasted Phelix Lundin’s octagonal Floral Hall (1882), adjacent to The Red Mile trotting track. Much earlier, George Trotter built The Woodlands (ground acquired in 1794), which stood approximately at the site of Lexington’s Woodland Park pool; The Woodlands featured domed octagonal towers at each of its four corners. As early as 1819 an octagonal court house was built at Scottsville in Allen County; it was razed in 1903.
In his Bluegrass and Bargeboards (1976), Patrick Snadon refers to an octagonal brick library that once stood behind Edgewood, a Gothic cottage in Nicholasville. Ingleside, a suburban villa near Lexington, had an octagonal tower for its smokehouse. This would have been familiar to Clay Lancaster, who often visited his friend Dunster Pettit at Ingleside, where enthusiastic players made their plans for the Guignol Theatre.
In June of 1946, Clay published “Some Octagonal Forms in Southern Architecture” in The Art Bulletin. His brother Jack even took his picture in front of the octagonal Longwood, or “Nutt’s Folly,” in Natchez, Mississippi, built after plans in Samuel Sloan’s Model Architect.
In his Architectural Follies in America (1960) Clay extensively surveyed the architectural history of the octagon, citing Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s Bedford County, Virginia, retreat. For the nineteenth century, the key document for popularizing the octagon form was a book entitled A Home for All; or The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building. Important for encouraging the use of poured concrete to make 135-degree angles, A Home for All, published in 1848, was the product of a well-known phrenological expert of the day, Orson Squire Fowler. Fowler, a graduate of Amherst College, was an ardent exponent of the octagon form, which he felt gave optimal exposure to good light and air. Fowler himself built a sixty-room octagonal house near Fishkill, New York. In the wake of Fowler’s popular treatise, hundreds of octagonal buildings were constructed.
An important Kentucky example is the Andrew Jackson Caldwell House, built in the 1850s in Warren County. It is illustrated in Clay’s Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky (1991).
Still standing in Athens, the original octagonal Tower of the Winds continues to fascinate students of architecture, while Clay’s Tower brings to the Bluegrass a key form from antiquity.
The Moses Jones
House, constructed between 1809 and 1811, is the oldest building within the
complex. It was acquired by Clay Lancaster in 1978, when he returned to Kentucky
after living in New York City, Brooklyn Heights, and the island of Nantucket,
Massachusetts.
During his years at Warwick, Clay Lancaster designed a small banqueting house with eighteenth-century architectural features. The tea house and the tower were undertaken by Williamsburg-trained builder and craftsman Calvin Shewmaker.
Photographs of the Tower, the Moses Jones House, and the Tea Pavilion by Helm Roberts, May 18, 2003
Summer 2003
http://www.warwickfoundation.org/compound.htm