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

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1996 by Suzannah Lessard

This ideological ardor was uncharacteristic of Stanford, who was not otherwise inclined toward intellectual constructs. Books, for him, were wallcovering. In general, his approach to architectural style was purely aesthetic and playfully eclectic: He could be as lighthearted in his choice of a style, and even in the mixing of styles, as he might be about choosing a costume for a ball. Yet concerning this matter of the appropriate natural style he came to fight with quasimoralistic fervor for the style of secular power against the style that was spiritual, individualistic, irregular, and full of darkness and mystery.

Stanford subscribed wholly to the idea that the new robber barons--the Whitneys, Goulds, and Villards who were McKim, Mead & White's clients--were the American descendants of the great Renaissance merchant princes, a new upper class that would be the backbone of the imperial nation Architects, in his view, fulfilled an additional patriotic mission by building appropriate housing for members of the new class, so that they could better fill their princely roles. The sense of heroic architectural mission was unaffected by such facts as that Villard went bankrupt in the spring of 1884, three months after moving into his mansion, or that, conversely, Ogden Mills (heir to a mining fortune) occupied the 65-room mansion that Stanford had expanded and redesigned for him at Staatsburg, New York--it was completed in 1897--for only a few weeks each year in the autumn. It's hard for us to see a moral mission in such an improvident extravagance, but Stanford, though he was touchy about matters of status, or perhaps because he was touchy about them, was not a clear thinker where issues of class--and particularly excess--were concerned. In 1896, he went to Madison Square Garden to hear William Jennings Bryan, the leader of a pro-labor movement, pitted against Eastern conservative mercantilism. Stanford was swept away and became Bryan's champion--until he realized that Bryan was attacking the clientele of McKim, Mead & White. Abruptly he took a position against Bryan as a demagogue.

In addition to properly housing our new Medicis, the architects of the time, perhaps Stanford more than any other, took on the task of teaching them good taste. This mission included helping them buy suitable furnishings and adornments for their palaces; indeed, Stanford relied for a good portion of his income on dealings in art to fill the houses that he designed. The statue attributed to Michelangelo recently discovered in the French Embassy in New York, formerly the Whitney mansion--designed and decorated by Stanford--exemplifies the service he provided his clients in this respect. He had an eye. But with this went a shamelessness about looting Europe of its treasures. He stripped palazzi not only of objects but of their ceilings, their mosaics, their very doorjambs and window frames, paying their impoverished owners the lowest price that he could. Once, when he saw a fountain in an Italian village square that he wanted for a client, he simply went to the police and made a deal for them to look the other way while he had the fountain wrenched out and carried off. He was of the opinion that it was the prerogative of an ascendant nation to appropriate the treasures of civilization.