McKim, Mead and White In Newport

The extraordinary work of McKim, Mead & White and their influence on the development of American architecture was the subject of this year’s architectural symposium and house tour sponsored in May by the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island.Established in 1879, McKim, Mead & White employed natural materials such as shingles and stone, and combined them with vernacular forms and idioms taken from colonial American, English and European influences, bringing a new American architecture to the fore. With the Newport Casino as its first commission, the firm launched the era now known as the Shingle Style.

The initial foray, really an exploration of concept houses—as seen, for example, in the Montauk Association—was short-lived, lasting a mere 10 years. The inventive ideas generated during this period, however, were later assimilated into work on a larger scale. Their grand houses from the Gilded Age also revealed references from formal, recognized sources and classical motifs.

Between 1880 and 1920, McKim, Mead & White was the foremost architectural firm in the United States. Its work included many of this nation’s most famous buildings, such as the Boston Public Library, Pennsylvania Station, the Brooklyn Museum, the Washington Square Arch, the J.P. Morgan Library and Madison Square Garden as well as numerous houses in Newport, Montauk, Southampton, Washington, D.C., and New York.

As Richard Guy Wilson, of the University of Virginia, noted in his talk, the triumvirate came from radical reformer backgrounds. Harvard graduate Charles Follen McKim, descended from a family of abolitionists, studied architecture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and worked for H.H. Richardson. He was the key figure in the founding of the firm.

William Rutherford Mead, whose mother had been an Oneida commune member, was the brother of the sculptor Larkin Mead and a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Mead was the silent partner who ran the firm and created what would become the template for the modern architect’s office. When asked what he did at the firm, Mead replied that he expended his energy “trying to keep the partners from making damn fools of themselves.”

Stanford White, who had no formal training in architecture, began his career as an apprentice in the office of H.H. Richardson. White’s father, a Shakespearean scholar, had connections to New York’s art world, which included John La Farge, Louis C. Tiffany, and Frederick Law Olmsted. The flamboyant White, a talented artist, designer and decorator, collaborated closely with these men and other artisans.

The partners, who read the writings of Europe’s architecture critics, such as John Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc and Walter Pater, led a revolution in architecture based on European classicism, which they reformed to create the American Renaissance.

For the 1893 Columbian Exposition, McKim, Mead & White designed the New York State building based on the Villa Medici. The White City, born in Chicago, later led to the creation of the City Beautiful movement. The firm’s clientele of robber barons and tycoons, among others, also included the names Vanderbilt, Whitney, Astor and Carnegie.

After the murder of Stanford White in 1906 by Harry K. Thaw, the jealous husband of the architect’s former mistress, Evelyn Nesbit, on the roof terrace of Madison Square Garden, McKim and Mead continued the practice, albeit with simpler, well-executed works as the Gilded Age wound down.

The firm's legacy continues to this day, as many of the talented architects who trained there opened their own offices. The alumni of McKim, Mead & White, and their own alumni have left quite a mark on the Hamptons.

H. Hobart Weekes of Hiss and Weekes (Red Maples), John Russell Pope (Port of Missing Men and Tenacre), Harrie T. Lindeberg (Coxwould), who trained Treanor and Fatio (the Wooldon Manor pool house), Grosvenor Atterbury (the Parrish Museum and the Creeks), who trained Roger Bullard (the Maidstone Club), F. Burell Hoffman (Ballyshear), who apprenticed with alumni Carrère and Hastings, and the chief designer for Cross and Cross (Chesterton House and Bayberry Land), Robert von Ezdorf, also apprenticed with McKim, Mead & White.

For all of the discussion of the firm’s evolution at the symposium, nothing could replace the experience of visiting some Newport houses that revealed the depth and range of the firm’s work.

Edgehill (1887-98), built for George Gordon King, presents itself as a transitional house for McKim, Mead & White, combining some of the decorative shingling of the Shingle Style capped atop the rusticated stonework of the first floor reminiscent of H.H. Richardson’s work.

Conical turrets containing embedded conical dormers create a French Norman theme with elements somewhat similar to Naumkeag in Massachusetts. The house, on a hilltop overlooking the harbor, with its subsumed entrance and intersecting gambrel and gable roofs, is both intimate and spectacular. With its logical plan, Edgehill has a surprisingly open feel for a 19th-century home. The house is part of a 40-acre development laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, which includes several other McKim, Mead & White houses.

Teresa Fair Oelrichs, one of the wealthiest women in America, commissioned Stanford White to design a house for parties held during her July-August tenure in Newport with her husband, Herman. Rosecliff (1899), based on the pavilion of the Grand Trianon at Versailles, features round-topped terrace doors, Ionic columns, relief wall sculptures, putti, garlands and musical instruments set against walls made from white, glazed terra-cotta, a material White recommended for its ability to withstand the salt air environment.

The plan is all about the procession—from the street to the forecourt, into the vestibule and great hall alongside the grand heart-shaped double stair. Ahead lies the reception room adjacent to the living room with views to the formal garden on one side and the ocean on the other.

The second floor contains nine bedrooms, while the third-floor maids’ quarters, hidden behind the roof balustrade, are invisible from the ground level. From Bellevue Avenue the elegant, flat-roofed house appears low with balanced massing. At the rear a great lawn leads to a curved balustrade overlooking the Cliff Walk, the shoreline houses, and a distant point directly on axis in the ocean beyond. Rosecliff is as formal a house as one could possibly imagine.

As eccentric as it is picturesque, Beacon Rock (1888) should be on every architect’s bucket list. Edward Dennison Morgan III commissioned McKim, Mead & White to design his Newport residence on a precipice whose promontory had to be blasted to fit. Photographs show the house from the side as a colonnaded Greek temple, an Acropolis by the sea.

The approach, which was the brainchild of Frederick Law Olmsted, follows a curving road through a lush landscape that goes over a road bridging a steep ravine. It leads to two, low temple-like pavilions, with marble-faced pediments and Ionic columns, perpendicularly attached to a one-and-a-half-story gabled wing forming a U-shaped forecourt surrounding the main entrance. The house behind goes down the hill another four stories—and yet it is impossible to discern this from the entrance sequence.

From the hall, the plan becomes truly strange. There is an oval reception room with infill paintings of colonial settings on the left, a dining room directly in front, and on a diagonal, the wood-paneled living room as part of a colonnaded apse overlooking the harbor. Hidden from the living room is a short set of stairs leading to another level and the main stairwell to the bedroom wing, almost like another house attached to the house. English Georgian details abound on the second floor.

The rear elevation is a complete change from the entry. Gray granite walls dominate and columns around the apse are constructed of thin layers of the same stone that could only be described as classical primitive.

The organization here is all about the view to the water and the harbor below. The apse itself is meant to be seen from the water as a connecting hinge between two major wings of the house as well as its very structure to a rocky base.

The work of McKim, Mead & White, from its beginnings in the vernacular to the refinement of its white classical structures, relied on knowledge of precedent and architectural history. Both the interiors and exteriors contained elements of surprise, skillfully rendered and sited with unique embellishments all their own their. Their legacy continues to be emulated to this day.