The cities and towns of the northeast are filled with two- and three-family houses that date from the last quarter of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. The architecture of these houses runs from nondescript, boxy mill workers’ housing to some very nicely designed middle-class examples incorporating fine details and workmanship. From what I can tell, the design of most of these is now attributed to the builders, and I can see how this could be possible in the case of the less imaginative housing, which tends to take a set of basic variables (footprint, windows, gable roof, stairways, etc.) and rearrange them in elementary ways. But some of the more ambitious designs must have required an architect’s eye and oversight.
I’ve seen a number of late nineteenth-century books of house plans published for the carpentry trade, but these invariably involve plans for single-family houses. I can’t recall that I’ve ever seen a multi-family design in any of these books. By searching old city directories I’ve been able to find the names of various house carpenters who worked in Providence and Boston in the late-nineteenth, and who are likely to have been the builders of some of these houses, but none of these carpenters seem to offer the services of any particular architect.
So my question is – is it reasonable to assume that the houses were typically designed by an architect in the employ of the builder, or would they more likely be the work of an architect hired by the person paying for the house, who would then give the plans to the carpenter they’d selected? Or was there possibly another source for these multi-family designs, such as mail-order, that I haven’t discovered?