Books about antiques

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Alfred Mayor

David Adler, architect

David Adler (1882-1949) took on some two hundred architectural commissions over four decades. Most of them were private houses for the very rich in fifteen states and British Columbia. A goodly number were built around Chicago, to which Adler moved from his native Milwaukee. He designed in a fashion that was "totally at odds with the canonical Chicago tradition of innovative commercial buildings of Louis Sullivan and the domestic Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers."

Adler's houses borrowed shamelessly from houses elsewhere, both here and abroad, and from innumerable architectural styles of the past. What made his houses pleasing when built and treasured today was his sense of style. He copied nothing literally, and he paid attention to every detail of the site, plan, interior, and furnishings. As Richard Guy Wilson has written in his essay in this book: David Adler accomplished the remarkable feat of putting new life into the traditional styles and illuminating how they could be brought up to date. His genius lay in the mastery of so many styles or languages and in the way he contributed to the fundamental American architectural tradition of eclecticism, borrowing from many sources."

David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style accompanies an exhibition on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until May 18. The book focuses on eighteen of Adler's commissions, each of which has an essay to itself illustrated with black-and-white and excellent color photographs, the latter taken specially for the book by Bob Harr of the Chicago photographic studio Hedrich Blessing.

One of Adler's grandest commissions was the house he designed for Mr. and Mrs. Richard T. Crane Jr. on a hilltop in Ipswich, Massachusetts, overlooking an extensive marsh, a perfect beach, and Ipswich Bay. A huge house in the manner of Sir Christopher Wren, it is as incongruous in its setting as the Italian suburban villa with an arcaded open courtyard that Adler designed for a couple in Milwaukee. The Crane house draws directly on five seventeenth-century English houses, yet because of Crane's fear of fire, it is built as solidly as a factory, framed in steel with load-hearing bricks and poured concrete floors. Inside, according to the essayist Susan Hill Dolan, "We see such elements as Georgian woodwork, Gothic vaulting, Greek Revival lighting fixtures, Italian Renaissance-style murals, Baroque carving, and an Art Deco feel to the state-of-the-art Crane bathrooms, all integrated with elegance and taste." Interior woodwork from two English houses, including an overmantel carved by Grinling Gibbons, was parce led out in various rooms. From W. and J. Sloane in New York City came n number of wood-paneled rooms and a staircase from a 1732 London town house, then known as the "Hogarth House." The staircase, unfortunately was too small for the Crane house, so a reproduction was made on a suitably grand scale with all the turnings and ornament of the original exactly duplicated. Yet somehow the house works thanks to Adler's innate sense of symmetry and proportion--and so does the Italian suburban villa in chilly Milwaukee.

Another grand pastiche was Easton, the Syosset, Long Island, house of Evelyn Marshall Field, which the essayist James Shearron calls "a highly personalized, haute couture version of American Colonial Revival design....The elevations of Easton read like a series of overlays of tidewater Virginia's architectural gems, reflecting the exceptional elements of the most noteworthy houses of eighteenth-century America." Stratford Hall on the Potomac River, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Gunston Hall were all tapped for one feature or another. Only the staircase is reminiscent of late eighteenth-century Charleston.

The interior was decorated by Frances Elkins, Adler's sister, whom he often called upon with great success. Virginia was clearly not her favorite place, for inside the house there was a ceiling lamp by Diego Giacometti, an ebonized oak floor inlaid with polished steel in a complex Chinese puzzle pattern, a mass of drawings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, English pier glasses, their frames stripped, bleached and pickled, gilt-bronze lamps from the Paris boutique of Jean Michel Frank, and a dining room straight out of the Brighton Pavilion in England in which "sixteen white-plaster palm-tree pilasters sprouted from a strict twenty-four-inch-high, flat plaster dado, detailed with a band of incised lattice. The treetops finished in a three-dimensional flourish at the ceiling." And, as they say more.

Adler could not draw, he did not like to be photographed, and he did not leave any writings to speak of, so he remains largely an enigma. Impeccably dressed and intensely shy, his client list was nonetheless a compendium of the super rich. He was a dedicated trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-five years and its generous benefactor when he died. He advised the museum on its decorative arts acquisitions, and in turn these objects were made available so that he could have copies made with which to furnish his clients' houses. After his beloved wife, Katherine, was killed in a car crash in France in 1930, he gave the museum one of her dresses and her wedding regalia with this advice: "In regards to the dresses of Katherine which were given to the collection of the Art Institute I thought you might attach to each one that [they] belonged to Katherine Keith Adler. The white satin was specially designed by Lucille [for] her wedding gown worn June 1st 1916....The cap of wedding dress was worn with the strap under the chin." Adler never failed to attend to every detail.