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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781728306902 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
Warren & Wetmore
• Whitney Warren (1864-1943)
• Charles D. Wetmore (1866-1941)
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the most successful architectural firm in the United States was Warren & Wetmore. They produced more than three hundred major projects encompassing the prevailing architectural styles of the exciting period of the first three decades of the twentieth century.
As architect and professor Robert A.M. Stern writes in the Foreword of "The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore" by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker (W.W. Norton & Company New York 2006):
"Warren & Wetmore virtually invented the modern luxury resort hotel, perfected the grand, apartment house, and transformed buildings for transportation into quintessential urban landmarks."
Pennoyer and Walker were able to dramatize and describe the extraordinary architectural accomplishments of Whitney Warren and Charles D. Wetmore in one of the most successful architectural partnership in the development of American cities.
Whitney Warren wrote, "Architecture is always an evolution. Of course, we use old styles; we can't invent a new one, we can only evolve a new one. So we are taking the best elements in the old styles, and we are attempting to produce from them what is suggested and demanded by our present conditions in a new and American style."
Architect Whitney Warren and attorney Charles D. Wetmore are best known for their spectacular Grand Central Terminal in New York City (1904-1912). Partners for more than thirty years, they were the beneficiaries of the rapid growth of American cities during the Gilded Age. The firm's bold interpretation of French and classical styles into American design reflected their sensitivity to the cultural, social and business requirements of the country's aspiring well-to-do population.
In addition to Grand Central Terminal, Warren and Wetmore created some of New York's most memorable buildings including the singular New York Yacht Club on West 44th Street adjacent to the Harvard Club of New York. They also designed great hotels and grand mansions for the wealthiest families of New York including the Vanderbilts.
Educated in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1887 and 1894, Whitney Warren adopted a lifelong devotion to European classicism with a sprinkling of American design independence. Warren invited Harvard-educated Charles Wetmore, lawyer, businessman and real estate developer, to form a joint partnership. These two businessmen were trained in widely varied disciplines which melded together successfully.
In addition to Grand Central Terminal (in partnership with architects Charles A. Reed and Allen H. Stem), the firm's most significant commissions were the Ritz, Vanderbilt, Ambassador and Biltmore Hotels in Manhattan; opulent town houses and elite apartment houses on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue; country clubs and tennis and squash courts in Tuxedo Park, Long Island, South Carolina and Massachusetts; and expansive estates in suburban New Jersey, the Hudson River Valley and on Long Island. In addition, Warren & Wetmore designed the Seamen's Church Institute, Steinway Hall, the Heckscher Building, the New Aeolian Hall and the Chelsea Piers complex. In the 1910s and 1920s, Warren & Wetmore also designed railroad stations and terminals for the New York Central Railroad and for various Canadian railroad lines.
Warren & Wetmore's unique architectural designs were devoted to classicism that became known as "modern French" when used in American practice. They embraced all three divisions of the Beaux-Arts style: architecture, painting and sculpture. Some of their greatest works were so imaginative that they escaped easy analysis. On his seventy-fourth birthday, Whitney Warren declared "I don't believe there was even any one else who got as much fun out of life as I did." Born into a wealthy family, he grew up with a sense of adventure and purpose. One of eight children, Whitney was raised in New York and spent summers at the family's villa in Newport, Rhode Island. After being schooled by private tutors, Warren enrolled in Columbia University's School of Architecture class of 1886. Warren found the new school (which started in 1881) uninspiring and, after marrying Charlette Tooker at age of twenty, left for Paris. Warren's ten-year stay in Europe provided the direction and education that shaped his professional life. Although he failed to earn a diploma from Beaux-Arts school, he won a few design awards and returned to the United States in 1894. In 1909, he was elected to the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts at the Institut de France. While living in Paris, Warren had grown into a true cosmopolite and ardent Francophile, adopting the French manner and style of dress. Throughout his adult life, he wore an unchanging costume of blue shirt, white silk scarf, white double-breasted waistcoat, dark suit, opera cloak, broad-rimmed black hat and, later, a gold-tipped cane. Lawrence White, son of Warren's friend Stanford White, commented: "He was an absolutely fantastic person just to look at. He was very handsome ... He carried himself and acted exactly as if he was a French aristocrat before the Revolution. He wore very peculiar clothes, but got away with it."
Soon after his return from Paris in 1894, Warren won the commission to design the Newport Country Club against some of the well-known architects including the well-known Boston firm of Peabody & Stearns. In an era when country clubs were becoming essential outlets for wealthy patrons, the Newport Country Club became a popular facility and was described in the New York Times in 1895 as "supreme in magnificence among golf clubs not only in America but in the world."
From 1896 to 1898, Warren worked for McKim, Mead & White as a draftsman. When he won the commission for the New York Yacht Club in 1898, Warren joined with attorney Charles Delavan Wetmore for whom he had designed a house. Like Warren, Charles Wetmore was raised in a wealthy family prominent in business and civic life. He was the son of Rosalia Elona Hall (1838-1912) and Charles Canvass Wetmore (1829-1867) of Warren, Pennsylvania who was a civil engineer and well-to-do businessman. He was a pioneer in the development of Western Pennsylvania's oil business and an investor in a lumber company on the Allegheny River. Young Wetmore entered Harvard Law School in 1892. Soon, thereafter, he began buying property between Harvard Yard and the St. Charles river to construct rental housing for wealthy students. In 1898, he designed and built the expensive Tudor-style Westmorly Hall which was well-furnished with a gymnasium, handball courts, showers, telephones, fireplaces and an indoor/ outdoor swimming pool.
Upon his graduation from law school, Wetmore relocated to New York and became a trial lawyer at Carter & Ledyard. After a promising start in his law career, Wetmore was prematurely derailed by partial deafness. As a result, he was convinced to join forces with Warren who had just won the commission for the New York Yacht Club. The unlikely partnership of Warren & Wetmore remained together for 33 years until Warren's retirement in 1931. The firm remained in existence into the 1950s under the direction of Patrick Carry (1876-1962), formerly New York Central's superintendent of construction, and Julian Holland (1888-1961), a Brooklyn-born architect and longtime associate of the firm.
From the beginning of their partnership, Warren & Wetmore were successful in securing assignments from the elite circles which they inhabited. Although he contributed little to the design activities of the firm, Wetmore was vital to its success. Warren would later say, "I owe everything (to Wetmore) ... he has been the force which I did not have in myself to keep me at my task. I (was) a very trying personage, impossible, not altogether selfish but impossible." Warren almost wrecked the partnership when he took a five-year hiatus from the practice to live in Paris to work for the Allied Forces through the end of World War I in 1918. He dedicated his energy toward the Red Cross Commission, the American Clearing House and the Secours National. Warren's efforts led eventually to what would become his most prized post-war commission: the reconstruction of the university library (1922-1928) in the devastated town of Louvain, Belgium.
In their heyday, the two men made a formidable pair. Reflecting on architect Warren's life, architect Howard Greenley wrote,
"There was a certain splendor about the man himself, in his appearance and carriage that one instinctively recognized. There was also about him that indefinable quality of radiance that one felt was so inherently a part of the rare distinction of his thought and his person. To the unprejudiced mind he can be considered as the personification of what is implied of the 'grand manner'. ... It was, so to speak, a fundamental quality in the man and the essence of his whole personality."
Edward Weeks wrote in My Green Age (Boston, Little Brown, 1973) about attorney Charles Wetmore:
"Charles Wetmore was very sure of himself and very stylish. His complexion was florid (so. ... was his temper), his fine white hair was brushed back above his ears and with his high-ridged aristocratic nose, thin lips and light blue eyes he was clearly one who enjoyed authority ... Never had I encountered such a combination of intelligence, will power, and contentiousness as when I tried to hold my end up against Mr. Wetmore. He was an implacable Republican and twitted me about his admiration for Woodrow Wilson; he had no use for contemporary writing, seldom read a book, was a stickler for facts and, depending on how sure he was, would bet me five or ten dollars that I was wrong."
Weeks went on to write about Wetmore:
"On anything having to do with building and finance, he was sharp as a buzz saw ... To him a challenge was the quickest way to test a man, and he once admitted that his closest friends were those he had angered at the outset. He had achieved renown in his field without a degree in architecture and he scorned Who's Who and jury awards-"Who are they to judge me?" was his attitude."
The New York Yacht Club, New York, N.Y. (1899)In February 1899, Whitney Warren won his first major commission in competition with seven of the best-known architectural firms to design a new New York Yacht Club. At the time, Warren was working at the architectural offices of McKim, Mead & White and had not yet started his own firm with Charles Wetmore. It was a remarkable achievement for a relatively young and inexperienced architect. Warren's design presented a spectacular French façade which to this day is a one-of-a-kind outpouring of sculptural ornamentation. It cannot be found anywhere except on the New York Yacht Club façade on West Forty-Fourth Street in midtown Manhattan in New York City. In his competitive entry, Warren wrote, "This being a Club with the special object – the furtherance of naval architecture from an amateur point of view. I consider that externally and internally the arrangements should be such as to place that object in evidence, and not to retire it and make the Club House appear that of an ordinary social institution."
With this design, Warren initiated his reputation of fusing art with architecture to express the essence of a building's purpose, position and standing. The front façade of the New York Yacht Club features three enormous arched windows arched in extended bays which emulate Spanish galleons. In addition, the street façade is animated by jumping sea creatures, twisting seaweed and watery stone blocks that appear to wash off the front of the Club's façade. Warren located the spectacular model museum room at the front of the building because "the room was essentially 'The Club' and to place it where there would be any effort to reach it, as (he was) concerned, would be fatal." The interior design reinforced Warren's aquatic fancy in every aspect: the cast-iron balustrades drip with gilded sea grass while the chimney-piece of the model room features a riot of swags and spinach, icicles and exotic vegetation.
As an avid student of naval architecture, Warren based his exuberant design in nautical architectural fantasy and history. He recalled, "I have always been fond of ships because they seem to me to be things having a soul. To be sure it is the soul of the thing that guides them. It is probably for that reason unconsciously and undoubtedly that the sailor becomes so devoted to his ship that rather than forsake her in time of distress he decides to die with her."
During the competition, Warren was without an office or staff of his own. He took advantage of his friend Stanford White's offer of staff support until he was able to form a practice with Charles Wetmore and open his own office. The Yacht Club opened on January 19, 1901 to mostly rave notices. The Architectural Review admired Warren's "frank acceptance of an unsymmetrical parti, and its frank expression in the exterior, (its) well-composed façade and (his) somewhat ostentatious but ingenuous display of nautical forms and symbols." The Suncalled the building the "finest town house of any yacht club in the world" and the New York Times proclaimed it as "unique and magnificent". Warren's design won a silver medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
The incredible reviews and awards for the New York Yacht Club design led to many commissions and projects for Warren & Wetmore. Over the next decade, they designed hotels, private homes, carriage houses, estates and sport buildings. But their reputation grew significantly when they were selected to design New York's Grand Central Terminal complex along with the more experienced architectural firm of Reed & Stem. Before the twentieth century, the New York Central trains operated by steam power and ran in open tracks on Park Avenue with the attendant fumes and noise.
• The Grand Central Terminal, New York, N.Y. (1913) While it is one of America's busiest train stations with more than 700,000 people passing through it every day, it is actually the third station to occupy this site. The first was built by railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt (17941877) who commissioned architect John B. Snook to design the Grand Central Depot at 42nd Street in 1871. By 1899, Snook's fifteen-track terminal, with its great arched iron-truss train shed, was overwhelmed by the volume of trains. Despite two enlargement projects, a new terminal was required to accommodate the sharp increase in the number of travelers. In the 19th century, New York's trains were operated by steam power and ran in open tracks along Park Avenue creating a distinct and sharp division between factories, railroad repair shops and slaughterhouse on the east down to the East River and the new residential developments to the west.
New York Central's chief engineer and vice president William J. Wilgus (1865-1949) recognized the benefits of electric power for trains. But it was not until 1902 when seventeen passengers died in a fatal accident in the Park Avenue open roadway that the New York Central Railroad committed to a grand scale redevelopment project. Wilgus laid out a conceptual plan for a new terminal with underground access incorporating a safer and cleaner electrical system. His project included a new terminal and surrounding buildings. Perhaps his most important recommendation was the revolutionary establishment of an "air rights" district over a system of buried tracks. Wilgus oversaw a complete transformation of the Grand Central area that included two levels of fixed underground tracks, restored cross streets on Park Avenue north of 45th Street and revenue-producing buildings including a hotel on Madison Avenue. Wilgus's plan enabled the railroad company to sell the air rights and to recoup a substantial portion of the Grand Central Terminal's enormous costs. Upon approval of the plan, the railroad held a competition in which four architects were invited to participate: Daniel H. Burnham; McKim, Mead & White; Samuel Huckel, Jr. of Philadelphia and Reed & Stem from St. Paul, Minnesota. Reed & Stem's idea of elevating the driveways around the terminal building and connecting them to the south by a bridge over 42nd Street enabled automobiles to move around the terminal which provided an unexpected benefit to the ever-increasing automobile traffic.
Nepotism may have played a role in Reed & Stem's victory since Wilgus's wife, May, was Charles Reed's sister. Still, it was evident that Reed & Stem's plan offered the best solution. However, their design triumph would need to be shared. In February 1904, Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem were jointly named Associated Architects of Grand Central Terminal. Leonard Schultze, who later formed a successful partnership with Spencer Fullerton Weaver in 1921 was put in charge of the design department. By 1903, New York Central had bought up all the land bounded by 42nd and 50th Street between Lexington and Madison Avenues which would form Wilgus's "air rights" district after it was cleared, excavated and redeveloped. Over the subsequent years, two hundred buildings were demolished to make way for the unique double-level track system and the automobile roadway. In September 1906, the first electric train departed the terminal and by 1907, the conversion to electric power by a direct-current third rail was complete.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Dedication, vii,
Introduction, ix,
Foreword, xv,
1. Warren & Wetmore, 1,
2. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (1847-1918), 42,
3. Schultze & Weaver, 87,
4. Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869-1958), 124,
5. Bruce Price (1845-1903), 139,
6. Mulliken & Moeller, 148,
7. McKim, Mead & White, 165,
8. Carrére & Hastings, 205,
9. Julia Morgan (1872-1957), 227,
10. Emery Roth (1871-1948), 240,
11. Trowbridge & Livingston, 267,
12. George B. Post (1837-1913), 282,
Illustration Credits, 289,
Index, 293,