FEBRUARY 2009 » book review

Whites on White

Stanford White, Architect
by Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White
Rizzoli, New York, NY; 2008
352 pp.; hardcover; 300 color illustrations; $75
ISBN 978-0-8478-3079-4

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Stanford White (1853-1906) and his firm McKim, Mead & White have already been the subject of dozens of volumes, including full biographies as well as studies of single buildings. Three of the best books on the topic have come from architect Samuel G. White (a great-grandson of Stanford) and his historian wife Elizabeth. In monographs for Rizzoli since 1998, the Whites have covered the houses and other masterworks of McKim, Mead & White and now have pinpointed Stanford’s contributions to the firm’s oeuvre.

This volume leaves out the White dirt. That is, it doesn’t mention how Stanford burned through his wife Bessie’s dry-goods inheritance while indulging his notorious fondness for young girls – especially Evelyn Nesbit, whose husband Harry K. Thaw fatally shot the architect with three point-blank bullets during a summer evening show at Madison Square Garden (ironically the building was a White design). Samuel and Elizabeth focus instead on how a gregarious, tireless architect with no formal training built a bustling, influential practice by synthesizing historical design vocabularies. “White was an acute observer of the language of style, but he was also fearless in his disregard for conventional usage,” the authors write.

The five chapters, containing two-dozen building profiles, are organized somewhat confusingly; churches, mansions and clubhouses are scattered under headings like “Collaboration,” “Architecture of Assembly” and “Public Buildings.” Floor plans are few and far between, captions are missing for dozens of intriguing close-up shots, and the current condition and usage of White’s surviving buildings are rarely noted. In fact the whole text seems rather skimpy at first glance – the margins span nearly three inches wide.

Nobody analyzes Stanford White designs as lucidly, thoroughly and open-mindedly as Samuel and Elizabeth. The two-dozen structures profiled range in scale from a single bluestone statue base (for a bronze of Admiral Farragut by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in a Manhattan park) to the short-lived Madison Square Garden where White was murdered (the 1890 complex was razed in 1925). Samuel and Elizabeth White don’t gush, nor do they drone on in National Register nomination-form speak. They just pithily, vividly describe each project’s inspirations, materials and forms and the walk-through experience.

Here’s a typical juicy summation, of the Veterans Room at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, an 1880 gathering space for blueblood regiments: “Described as ‘Greek, Moresque, and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, Persian, and Japanese,’ the decorative scheme was a tour de force in adapting military iconography and materials to ornamental use. Massive columns were tightly wrapped in chains; clusters of bosses were embedded in the wainscoting; and a frieze composed of panels depicting the history of warfare from antiquity to the Civil War, alternating with roundels of military emblems set in a continuous band of Celtic tracery, surrounded the room just below a ceiling of rough-hewn beams originally multicolored and covered with silvery stenciling. Richly carved wood, intricate wrought-iron lighting fixtures, Tiffany stained glass, and brilliant blue tiles heightened the effect.”

Further enlivening the prose are choice quotes from White’s correspondence. He badmouthed clients behind their backs, calling one patron “his royal highness” and complaining about “small hells that encircle us on every side – women who want closets!” The Whites entertainingly quote Stanford’s contemporary critics as well: Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer suggested that the firm change its name to “McKim, Mead, White & Gold,” and Montgomery Schuyler noted that at White’s granite-walled church for a Methodist congregation in Baltimore, “a hood seems to have been dropped down on an unfinished tower.”

But what really puts this book into the buy category are photos by Jonathan Wallen (who also supplied images for the Whites’ previous Rizzoli monographs), plus a well-reproduced stock of vintage shots. Often in full-bleed format or two-page spreads, the pictures reveal the flamboyance and at times mesmerizing strangeness of White’s work. Who else would have cut Piranesian tiers of colonnaded openings into a helical mahogany staircase? Or stretched Venetian Renaissance and Bavarian Rococo gilded filigree across mirrored walls? Or flanked a jewelry store staircase with improbably impassive rams’ heads, or studded house facades with glittering broken glass and anthracite nuggets? White clearly had enormous fun on the job (whatever his personal failings after hours), and left a legacy of hugely enjoyable spaces. TB

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