Mckim Mead White Architects

For nearly forty years the legendary firm led by Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White was responsible for many of the finest buildings in America, including the Boston Public Library, Penn Station in New York, the Morgan Library, and the campus of ...

First one-volume paperback edition of one of the most important documents in American architecture. 430 photos and over 250 line illustrations depict 130 structures in New York and other American cities, designed by celebrated firm.

A rich, fascinating saga of the most influential, far-reaching architectural firm of their time and of the dazzling triumvirate—Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White—who came together, bound by the notion that architecture could help shape a nation in transition. They helped to refine America’s idea of beauty, elevated its architectural practice, and set the standard on the world’s stage. Their world and times were those of Edith Wharton and Henry James, though both writers and their society shunned the architects as being much too much about new money. They brought together the titans of their age with a vibrant and new American artistic community and helped to forge the arts of America’s Gilded Age, informed by the heritage of European culture. McKim, Mead & White built houses for America’s greatest financiers and magnates: the Astors, Joseph Pulitzer, the Vanderbilts, Henry Villard, and J. P. Morgan, among others . . . They designed and built churches—Trinity Church in Boston, Judson Memorial Baptist Church in New York, and the Lovely Lane Methodist Church in Baltimore . . . They built libraries—the Boston Public Library—and the social clubs for gentlemen, among them, the Freundschaft, the Algonquin of Boston, the Players club of New York, the Century Association, the University and Metropolitan clubs. . . . They built railroad terminals—the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City—and the first Roman arch in America for Washington Square (it put the world on notice that New York was now a major city on a par with Rome, Paris, and Berlin). They designed and built Columbia University, with Low Memorial Library at the centerpiece of its four-block campus, and New York University, and they built, as well, the old Madison Square Garden whose landmark tower marked its presence on the city’s skyline . . . Mosette Broderick’s Triumvirate is a book about America in its industrial transition; about money and power, about the education of an unsophisticated young country, and about the coming of artists as an accepted class in American society. Broderick, a renowned architectural and social historian, brilliantly weaves together the strands of biography, architecture, and history to tell the story of the houses and buildings Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White designed. She writes of the firm’s clients, many of whom were establishing their names and places in upper-class society as they built and grabbed railroads, headed law firms and brokerage houses, owned newspapers, developed iron empires, and carved out a new direction for America’s modern age.

McKim, Mead & White is the best-known architecture firm of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, having built many iconic buildings of America's Gilded Age, from Columbia University and Boston Public Library, to mansions for the nineteenth century's wealthiest, including Frederick Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, Henry Frick, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie (now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), as well as the American Academy in Rome. Selected Works of McKim, Mead & White, published in association with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, collects the work of these important architects during their most prolific period, condensing four volumes into one magnificent edition.

With nearly 1,000 commissions executed between 1879 and 1912, McKim, Mead & White was the architectural firm of choice for the most prestigious projects of the beaux-arts era. Among its residential clients were many of the most powerful figures of the Gilded Age: the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Pulitzers. In this condensed edition of the acclaimed Rizzoli original of 1998 the reader will find more than thirty houses presented, the exteriors and interiors of which have been elegantly recorded in lush color photographs by Jonathan Wallen. A practicing architect and greatgrandson of Stanford White, author Samuel G. White was given unprecedented access to the great, private residential architecture of this legendary firm. This book brings a unique perspective to these houses, offering us a privileged and rare look into this extraordinary body of work.

A look at the homes of one of America's most influential architectural firms.