FEBRUARY 2007 »  book review

Pragmatic Visionaries

Carrère & Hastings, Architects
by Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison and Charles Davock Warren
Acanthus Press, New York, NY; 2006
416 pp. (vol. I), 336 pp. (vol. II), approx. 800 b&w illus., $175
ISBN 0-926494-42-2

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Year after year, Acanthus Press produces must-buy monographs on topics that the major art-book publishers apparently consider unprofitable. Every time I receive Acanthus's forthcoming titles list, I'm amazed. You mean no one's yet monographed houses by John Russell Pope or Horace Trumbauer, or Maison Jansen's interiors, or apartment buildings by Rosario Candela? Among the most surprising longtime gaps in the literature that Acanthus has just filled is Carrère & Hastings. Why has the firm only been the subject so far of a few dissertations? Was the work too varied, the gentlemanly partners too uninterested in fame or were the best surviving buildings too far-flung or too often privately owned and difficult to access and research?

Acanthus brought in four historians to cover a 600-commission oeuvre, located in some 30 states and nine foreign countries (including Mexico, Cuba, Paraguay and China). Their stylistic repertoire encompasses various Renaissances (Venetian, Italian, French, Spanish), a few of the Kings Louis (XIII, XIV, XV), Georgian and Régence, spiced with a little Shingle, Federal and the occasional Italo-Aztec. The architects' feats are all the more impressive considering that John Merven Carrère (1858-1911) died so young, and Thomas Samuel Hastings (1860-1929) micromanaged so obsessively.

They met in 1880 while students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, then apprenticed together at McKim, Mead & White. When they formed Carrère & Hastings in 1884, they at first eked out a living on "occasional drafting work farmed out to them by their staunch supporters Charles McKim and Stanford White," writes William Morrison. Carrère and Hastings, fortunately, both had auspicious upbringings. Hastings' father, a Presbyterian pastor in midtown Manhattan, tended a congregation of plutocrats including Florida real-estate maven Henry M. Flagler and banking tycoon E.C. Benedict. Carrère was a well-traveled cosmopolitan of Portuguese, French, Scottish and Irish descent; born in Brazil, he was schooled first in New York and then at a posh Swiss boarding school.

The personality flaws of both Carrère and Hastings were likewise well matched; neither would have thrived in solo practice. Hastings was bookish and somewhat cold; at age 40, he married Benedict's daughter Helen. A thousand guests attended their wedding, and her veil was trimmed with diamonds. The couple had no children, and she focused on horseback riding at their Long Island estate. Her husband, writes Mark Alan Hewitt, "spent most of his time in Manhattan, either working or cultivating his collections of rare maps and books."

At the office, Hewitt notes, Hastings didn't just hand rough sketches to his 30-odd staffers, but rather "drew all his design concepts in fully drafted, 'hardline' tracings in the manner of a Beaux-Arts esquisse, or schematic design." Hastings agonized so long over every ornament, Charles Warren writes, that accounts have survived of "Carrère quietly removing drawings from Hastings' drafting board to end interminable refinement and revision."

Carrère was the hearty big-picture guy. He supervised the four-story townhouse office and took on large-scale assignments for city plans or world's fair attractions. He helped found and run nonprofit groups including the AIA, the New York Art Commission and the American Academy in Rome. He pushed to improve the lot of the entire architectural profession, calling for fairer competitions and more informed and flexible building codes. Carrère was a bit of a hothead, too. Friends described him as "childlike in his capacity for enthusiasm," known for "fearlessness in speaking the truth under all conditions"; the architect was also plagued, Warren adds, by "extravagant generosity and a short temper." (He married a compatible spirit, a Texas-born real-estate investor named Marion Sedonia Dell, and built an estate in suburban New York for her, with pinwheel-plan wings foreshadowing Frank Lloyd Wright.)

This two-volume study combines extensive biographies with analyses of two dozen building types, including hotels, theaters, city halls, libraries, bridges and tombs. For each type, the authors examine dozens of examples, pointing out where the architects followed precedents and where they broke with tradition. Carrère's grand gestures of boulevard grids and broad malls receive as much attention as Hastings' treillage-lined breakfast rooms, urn-and-swag window trim and seashell-shaped doorknobs. The authors are frank about which clients were megalomaniacs or cruel to their families, and which designs turned out "dry and somewhat stiff" or "so simple and dignified as to appear inevitable."

The historians' research was so exhaustive that the bibliography contains such eye-glazing items as municipal reports on traffic congestion and a periodical called "Insurance Press." Most of the illustrations were excerpted from vintage publications or archives. The grainier originals, alas, have not reproduced well. Equally frustrating, the captions don't give dates, and it's not always clear which structures are extant. The authors did provide floor and site plans for most projects, and these sometimes huge renderings were especially susceptible to fuzziness when shrunk and converted to black and white.

The book's appendices, though, more than compensate for such minor visual flaws. A poignant chronology shows the workload fading in the 1920s. Carrère had died in 1911 from injuries suffered in a car accident on Madison Avenue – he was riding in a taxicab that was totaled by a trolley. Hastings died of appendicitis in 1929, a few days before the Great Depression ruined many of his clients. This book closes with a list of Carrère & Hastings' staff members, including some pivotal figures in the keeping of the 20th-century traditionalism flame: Chester Holmes Aldrich, William Adams Delano, Mott B. Schmidt, cathedral specialist Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, artist N.C. Wyeth, historian Talbot Hamlin.

Out of the ashes of Carrère & Hastings, three alums formed Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and promptly designed the Empire State Building. Some Modernist innovators – Bernard Maybeck and Emery Roth – also emerged from the firm. Acanthus has published a long-overdue tribute to a cornerstone practice that shaped the American skyline, and the books are sensibly, durably slipcased in navy fabric to be cornerstones of your library. TB

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