Dream builder - architect Stanford White - excerpt from 'Architect of Desire'

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1996 by Suzannah Lessard

In 1978 Suzannah Lessard began an exploration of her family history that led into the work of her great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White. Perhaps more than any other figure, White shaped the aesthetic character and legacy of the Gilded Age. His phenomonally creative yet also destructive personality left an equally lasting imprint on his family, and thus on the author herself By unraveling the personal and professional strands of Tattoos life, Lessard was led to a more complete understanding of her own. The result is a book--The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, published in November by The Dial Press-that is part biography, part memoir, part autobiography.

It is also a contemplation of how architecture embodies the spirit and values of the age and society from which it springs. The buildings White designed and decorated--Madison Square Garden, the Fudson Memorial Church, New York University (in a former incarnation), Newport's Rosecliff mansion, the Bowery Savings Bank--are now landmarks that reflect the love of indeed obsession with, beauty that drove him. But they also testify to his decadent, dangerous extravagance, and that of the society that exalted White in the last decades of the 19th century. The "overspending, bad-behaving nouveaux riches" embraced White because he could provide access to the byways of class and taste that Old Money controlled. And a nation as hungry as high society for symbols of power and status turned to architects like White to embody both its noblest aspirations and most corrupt ambitions.

STANFORD RODE A SURGING NATIONAL sense of imperial greatness, a mood of power and dominance in the world. His career was merged with a fantasy of the United States triumphant. Indeed, architects, because they could give expression to the dream of imperial grandeur through public monuments and buildings, had a kind of heroic stature in the public eye in those days that is hard to imagine today. It was widely believed that the identity of the nation could be formed by architecture, and consequently there was passionate controversy over which style was best suited to its emergent power. The neo-classical style--championed by Stanford's firm, McKim, Mead & White--prevailed, as the architectural character of the official areas of Washington, D.C., attests. The neoclassical style was the worldly style--as opposed to the Gothic style, its principal competitor, which was of the spirit. Nineteenth-century neoclassicism is a style that celebrates exclusive and total power, a style that not only erects buildings but controls the environment around them too. Because every inch works to reinforce the authority of the whole, there is no acknowledgment implicit in the neoclassical style of realities beyond those that it celebrates. The authoritative rationality of the style excludes mystery, puzzlement, wildness, weakness, suffering, and love. With its unself-questioning assertiveness, the neoclassical style aggrandizes society, political power, and the works of man. It became the style that would reflect the nation back to its citizens, teaching them how to think and feel about their country.

McKim, Mead & White was not associated with the neoclassical style from the beginning, however. Indeed the firm fell into it rather casually. In 1881--still early days in Stanford's career--the firm was approached by Henry Villard, a railroad magnate, who wanted an edifice designed for him that would contain six domiciles for himself and his children, with their families, on a lot at Madison Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Stanford drew up plans for a French chateau, but then he had to go out of town and handed the project over to Joseph Wells, who took it only on condition that he have a free hand. While Stanford was gone, Wells scrapped the chateau and replaced it with plans for a cinquecento palazzo. When Stanford returned, he fell in with Wells's plan without protest and the result was one of New York's great landmarks, the Villard Houses, in my lifetime owned for many decades by Random House and by the Archdiocese of New York. (Today it is part of the Helmsley Palace Hotel.) The exterior remained Wells's, but Stanford took on the interior, taking up this new style with a natural fluency: The Villard interiors are perhaps the greatest of his interiors extant today, and they represent his first crack at the Renaissance mode.

As the years passed, Stanford became fanatical about the neoclassical style as the only appropriate one for public buildings, maintaining, for example, that all the Gothic buildings at West Point--West Point is almost entirely Gothic--ought to be torn down and replaced by classical structures. When his advice was not followed, he called it "a public calamity, a body blow to all those who are striving to raise architecture out of the heterogeneous mush." The issue of Gothic versus classic also arose in connection with the neoclassical design of Stanford's Madison Square Presbyterian Church. The design was attacked by critics as pagan and secular; there was a prevailing opinion that Gothic was the most suitable style for a religious building. Stanford retaliated by saying that Gothic reflected a Catholic and medieval mentality--that classicism was closer to the spirit of the early Christians and was therefore the appropriate style for a Protestant nation.