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With their new book, “The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury,” architect Peter Pennoyer and architectural historian Anne Walker reexamine the work of a pioneering and prolific architect whose legacy is still keenly felt but largely unrecognized.
In his foreword to the book, architect Robert A.M. Stern rightly points out that the traditional architects of Mr. Atterbury’s generation, labeled “society architects,” have often been misunderstood and characterized as stylists without either the social conscience or the technological background to advance the state of the art. Those who addressed these issues fell, by default, into the modernist camp, which shed traditional form and historic precedent.
Philip Johnson, for example, was quick to dismiss the radical Frank Lloyd Wright as “the greatest architect of the nineteenth century” and instead noted that he thought Mr. Wright’s work was passé and irrelevant. Cross and Cross, Delano and Aldrich, Warren and Wetmore, among others, have sadly been lumped together alongside Mr. Atterbury in this revisionist argument promulgated by the modernists.
But in the foreword to the book, Mr. Stern notes in a rather rebarbative tone that nothing could be further from the truth as the authors elucidate Mr. Atterbury’s status as a multi-dimensional architect of lasting and wide-ranging achievements.
Unlike many prominent architects of his era who worked in the Hamptons, Mr. Atterbury (1869-1956) was, to some degree, a local product. His corporate lawyer father, Charles, owned a summer house in Shinnecock Hills.
Summers spent on his family’s 80-acre Shinnecock Hills estate, Sugar Loaf Acres, an unpretentious shingle-style home by the water, led to an appreciation of local vernacular architecture. Also contributing to Mr. Atterbury’s aesthetic were his studies for three successive summers—from 1891 to 1893—with William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock Summer School of Art.
After graduating from Yale in 1891, Mr. Atterbury enrolled at the School of Mines at Columbia University, worked for New York-based McKim, Mead & White from 1892 to 1893, and then attended the L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in the atelier of the architect Paul Blondel from 1894 to 1895.
Between family business and social connections in New York and Southampton, he readily established a country house practice upon his return from Europe that would quickly receive national attention.
Mr. Atterbury’s early houses, scattered throughout Long Island, reflect the architect’s exquisite attention to detail as well as his use of progressive construction methods.
As early as 1897, at age 28, he was already experimenting with sprayed cement over lath in his design of the Moorish Houses at Bayberry Point for H.O. Havemeyer in Islip. In 1899, for Albert and Adele Herter‘s East Hampton house, The Creeks, he employed concrete construction covered in stucco. At that structure, site planning for orientation, context and maximization of views dictated a butterfly plan, which would become a signature solution in other works as well.
As his practice progressed, the commissions grew and the architect gained recognition not only for his city houses but also for speculative office buildings in Pittsburgh and a model tenement for Henry Phipps in New York. The Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins followed after Mr. Atterbury toured Europe for two months to research this building typology before initiating his design. School and museum commissions came after, and included a 1913 addition to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton.
As a member of a generation of architects concerned with solving social problems, Mr. Atterbury believed that new town planning should produce communities whose buildings provided character and charm with economy while providing light, air and space for the masses. As an example, Forest Hills Gardens in Queens—built on 142 acres by the Russell Sage Homes Foundation from a $10,000,000 gift from Margaret Olivia Sloan Sage (a Sag Harbor summer resident and widow of railroad financier Russell Sage)—would provide a garden community for all economic levels from the upper middle class to middle-class tradesmen and blue collar workers.
For this project, Mr. Atterbury began working in tandem with landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted to create one of the most significant and stunningly beautiful new town projects ever built in this country.
The influence of Forest Hills Gardens is significant to suburban development in America, as well as to the history of the arts and crafts movement, to the progressive movement and the work of gentlemen activists. It also contributed to the “City Beautiful” movement, to the case for affordable, ingenious, prefabricated construction and to the culmination of the careers of Mr. Atterbury and Mr. Olmsted.
Finally, this project also laid the groundwork for today’s new urbanism reflected in such projects as Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk’s “Seaside in Florida” and “Kentlands” in Maryland, along with Cooper Robertson and Mr. Stern’s “Celebration in Florida.”
Preservation projects, like the restoration of New York’s City Hall, which included the re-creation of the Governor’s Room and the reinterpretation of its cupola after a fire, received praise for Mr. Atterbury’s creative use of materials and his ability to work within the spirit of the place.
Of the programme handed to Mr. Atterbury for the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art he had to combine rooms and elements into a three-story building, none of which were of his design.
According to Mr. Pennoyer and Ms. Walker’s book, in Mr. Atterbury’s address on the occasion of the opening of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on November 10, 1924, the architect noted; “If you have ever tried to persuade an assemblage of 25 or 30 old Colonial rooms—each with his or her own very definite idea of the proper ceiling height to have, the best location of windows and doors and fireplaces ... to live amicably in a rectangular building of fixed dimensions, in three stories, each representing more or less accurately their chronological sequence, and, at the same time, so arranged that they can all look out through the original windows of the old Assay Office—you will find that the most diabolical cross-word puzzle ever concocted is mere child’s play in comparison.”
The architect’s later projects involved some of his most creative work. His versatility was demonstrated in the clubs, hospitals, churches, museums, orphanages, medical buildings and estates—such as the barns at Pocantico Hills in New York and gate lodges in Maine’s Acadia National Park for John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Lastly, over the span of his 50-year career as an inventor of the first precast concrete panel system, as a building scientist, and as a humanist concerned with bettering building technologies for low-cost housing, Mr. Atterbury was an idealist without being an ideologue. He was able to fuse sensitivity and sensibility to the practice of his art. In short, he was an architect’s architect.
Anne Surchin is an East End architect and writer.
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