The Houses Of Mckim Mead White

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.

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.

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 ...

McKim, Mead & White rivals Frank Lloyd Wright for the honor of the premier architectural firm in American architecture. In lavish color, this book explores the Boston Public Library, Newport Casino, the original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Memorial Arch, and many of the firm's other major works.

A rich presentation of the sensual and scenographic effects created by the legendary Stanford White, whose designs extend beyond architecture to encompass lavish interiors, jewelry, furniture, gilded frames, and ceremonial events. Once proposed as the "Commissioner of Beauty" for New York City, Stanford White was a master of architecture, interior design, and ornament, fearlessly juxtaposing materials and objects from myriad cultures and times. Drawing on precedents from antiquity and the Renaissance, from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as well as Colonial America, White created complex surfaces inside and out. Stanford White in Detail examines this innovative and intricate web through lush, tightly framed vignettes of carved wood and marble, metalwork, mosaic, and tile as well as generous overall room views to demonstrate how these are woven together for a unique effect.

"Stanford White (1853-1906), arguably the most celebrated American architect of his day, was the visionary genius of the illustrious architecture firm McKim, Mead White. A defining figure of the Gilded Age, White lived an extravagant life, which ended prematurely in a sensational death. His celebrity as a result was such that perceptions of the man have to some degree distracted attention from an extraordinary body of work. Now, more than a century since his passing, the enduring quality of White's architectural legacy becomes ever more apparent as the circumstances of his life and death fade to the background. In acknowledgment of this legacy, Stanford White Architect comprehensively explores White's sumptuously rich oeuvre - from the residences he designed for himself and his wife, Bessie; to the extraordinary and opulent houses he designed for others; to those works beyond the residential. Stanford White Architect will serve for generations to come as a vivid testament to a resplendent life in architecture."--From book jacket.