JUNE 2006 » book review

In Transit

The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore
by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker
W.W. Norton, New York, NY; 2006
256 pp.; hardcover; 40 color illus., 200 b&w duotones; $60
ISBN 0-393-73162-6

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

A first monograph has once again appeared on a subject that should have been a slam-dunk monograph topic long ago. Warren & Wetmore practically invented the urban hotel and the loftily welcoming transit center while riffing inventively from the 1890s to the 1950s on skyscrapers, townhouses, country clubs and mansions, courthouses, banks, stores and mausoleums. Robert A.M. Stern, in this in-depth study's foreword, calls the partners "simply amazing in the range of the building types they took on, the ingenuity of their planning in response to new demands of the marketplace, and their ability to renew familiar forms."

And once again a major traditionalist firm of the early 20th century has benefited from the persistent research and lucid prose of Classical architect Peter Pennoyer and historian Anne Walker. Like their magnificent 2003 volume on the previously un-monographed firm of Delano & Aldrich (also from W.W. Norton), this book interweaves architectural and urban analysis and biographies of designers and patrons. Like the Delano & Aldrich study, The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore spins a colorful tale of personalities clashing and a tragic tale of buildings razed. Whitney Warren (like William Adams Delano) was the imperious hothead partner. A Beaux-Arts-trained blueblood, Warren dressed in capes and waistcoats like an 18th-century French nobleman. Married young to a Newport belle, Charlotte Tooker, Warren philandered and joined in Stanford White's bacchanals staffed by underage showgirls.

Charles D. Wetmore, meanwhile, (like Chester Holmes Aldrich) was a stodgier blueblood. A Harvard-trained lawyer and developer with no architectural training, Wetmore helped save Warren early on from professional dilettantism. In the 1890s, the young architect was still freelancing as a draftsman for McKim, Mead & White, while submitting losing entries to competitions for the Baltimore Courthouse and the New York Public Library. Through family connections and an audaciously asymmetrical competition entry, Warren won a commission to build the New York Yacht Club's midtown Manhattan headquarters. At the time, Pennoyer and Walker point out, "Warren was without an office or staff of his own and unequipped to handle the practical aspects of such a large commission." Wetmore stepped in to form a stabilizing partnership that lasted six decades (though the name partners retired during the Depression) and at times had 200 employees.

Pennoyer and Walker have devoted equal attention to the densely packed details and the grand visions of Warren & Wetmore. On the 1898 Yacht Club, amid "bays expressed as sterns of Spanish galleons," the façade "came alive with jumping sea creatures, twisting seaweed, and watery stone wakes that seemed to drip." Just six years later, Warren & Wetmore started perching Grand Central Terminal atop Park Avenue, with near-curtain-walls of arched windows that "formed a modern-day portal to the city." The terminal is everything a traveler could want, upon arrival or departure: it's grounded and reassuring yet light and aerodynamic, the vaulted ceiling painted with constellations.

Though the firm specialized in what was then called "modern French," its repertoire extended to Mediterranean-Revival resorts, Adamesque hotel ballrooms, half-timbered suburban train stations, and near-Deco pyramidal tips for skyscrapers. The staff worked in at least 15 states, from Georgia to Hawaii, and in Canada, Cuba, Jamaica, Bermuda and Belgium. They completed some 220 works, a third of which have been demolished. (At least two now stand vacant and in desperate need of adaptive reuse: a train depot in Detroit and a hotel in Wilkes-Barre, PA.)

The wide-ranging oeuvre caused controversy in its day. In the late 1920s, Lewis Mumford was scorning Warren & Wetmore's "romantic, pseudo-historic posturing," while another magazine critic was marveling at the Grand Central neighborhood's resemblance to "the nave of a mighty cathedral." The partners themselves were controversial and occasionally embroiled in lawsuits and scandals – in fact the AIA expelled Warren in 1920 for fiddling with railroad-design contracts behind a partner firm's back.

Pennoyer and Walker cover the disagreements evenhandedly and objectively. In maintaining their steady tone, however, they don't much critique the design caliber of the buildings, except perhaps to point out which Tudor/classical hybrid mansions are "bizarre yet compelling" or "not always thoroughly coherent." The blur of 1910s and 1920s apartment blocks and office buildings, all competent but not stellar, especially could have used more evaluation. The book would also have benefited from more floor plans and color images – 40 recent color photographs appear in a batch at the front, albeit unpaginated, un-indexed and un-cross-referenced in the text.

An impressive catalogue raisonné and other appendices, though, more than compensate for the volume's minor flaws. Pennoyer and Walker even list 85 longtime staffers. Who knew that Morris Lapidus, the postwar king of swoopy Miami hotels, cut his professional teeth on Warren & Wetmore's stately balustrades and cartouches? TB

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