Heins & LaFarge

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The New York-based architectural firm of Heins & LaFarge, composed of Philadelphia-born architect George Lewis Heins (1860–1907) and Christopher Grant LaFarge (1862–1938) - the eldest son of the artist John LaFarge, famous especially for his stained glass panels - were responsible most notably for the original Romanesque-Byzantine east end and crossing of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, and for the original Astor Court buildings of the Bronx Zoo, which formed a complete ensemble reflecting the esthetic of the City Beautiful movement.

The two young men met at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained together in the Boston offices of Henry Hobson Richardson. In 1886 they opened their office. Heins was the man on the site; LaFarge was the principal designer.

In 1888 a design competition for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the most prominent project of its kind in the US was entered by 68 architectural firms, and won in 1891 by Heins & LaFarge, with an eclectic design, based on Romanesque forms but with many Byzantine and Gothic elements, dominated by a massive spired tower over the crossing [1]. The cornerstone was laid December 27, 1892, but unexpectedly, massive excavation was required before bedrock was hit. Heins & LaFarge completed the east end and the crossing, temporarily roofed by Rafael Guastavino with a tiled dome (still standing). The Chapel of St. Columba was consecrated in 1911, but the death of Heins impelled the Cathedral trustees to hire a new architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose nave and west front would be continued in French Gothic style.

The other prime commission in New York City was the Fourth Presbyterian Church (1893–94), now Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, at West End Avenue and West 91st Street on the Upper West Side, a tribute to their joint master. The rusticated masonry façade with a sparing use of Venetian Gothic and Richardsonian Romanesque details and the square corner bell tower with a crenellated parapet embellished with gargoyle gutter-spouts reveal Richardson's training. Fine stained glass may be from Tiffany studios.

An exercise in a somewhat subdued Richardsonian manner, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, is Heins & LaFarge's Reformed Episcopal Church of the Reconciliation (1890), now the Most Worshipful Enoch Grand Lodge of the Order of Masons. It too has a corner tower octagonal and embedded in the volume of the church in a most Richardsonian manner, though the materials used are tame (now painted) brick rather than Richardsonian rustication.

In 1899, Heins was appointed New York State architect by Governor Theodore Roosevelt, and he designed interiors for the first buildings at the State University of New York, Albany: the Auditorium and the Science and Administration Buildings [2].

LaFarge, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) often served on advisory committees for the schools of architecture at Columbia University, M.I.T. and Princeton University, and also as trustee and secretary for the American Academy in Rome.

Roosevelt was also a prime mover behind the creation of the New York Zoological Society, for whom the partners designed the original nucleus of buildings (1899–1910, now called the Astor Court) as a series of pavilions symmetrically grouped round the large sea lion pool, all in a sturdy brick and limestone Roman Ionic and Doric, with the heads of elephants and rhinos, lions and zebras projecting festively from panels and friezes. The central Administration Building (1910), offering an arched passageway to the zoo's outdoor spaces, has complicated domed spaces formed of Guastavino tile.

In 1899 Heins & LaFarge built the Houghton Memorial Chapel at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, Richardsonian in its recessed entrance, dominating central tower and interpenetrating Romanesque massing, and the same year at the United States Military Academy, West Point, the Roman Catholic chapel of the Most Holy Trinity, also hearkening back to their Richardson apprenticeship with an essay in rusticated granite, with a battlemented corner tower and a heavy arcaded porch. It was enlarged in 1959.

In 1903 Heins & LaFarge were commissioned to design the Municipal Building, for Washington DC.

In 1904 they were commissioned to design the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St James in Seattle by Bishop Edward J. O’Dea whose diocese had purchased property on Seattle’s First Hill and demanded a Cathedral “that must surpass anything in the West.” The Italian quattrocento design features tall paired west end campanili and a central dome halfway between the east and west ends. The firm sent two young architects, W. Marbury Somervell and Joseph S. Coté, to oversee construction on the site; they went on to establish a thriving architectural practice in Seattle. The cornerstone ceremony took place on November 12, 1905. The Cathedral was completed in 1907 and solemnly dedicated on December 22, 1907. Unhappily, under the weight of two feet of wet snow the dome collapsed the afternoon of February 2, 1916, dropping 400 tons of masonry eighty feet into the empty Cathedral, shattering every window and leaving a gaping hole that left the Cathedral exposed to the elements. The Cathedral reopened on March 18, 1917, but with a flat roof over the crossing. The central position of the altar, in response to reforms of the Second Vatican Council, have finally brought the altar to the position envisaged by the architects.

When the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, opened on October 27, 1904. the showpiece station was City Hall, designed by Heins & LaFrage, using uninterrupted sweeping Guastavino-tiled arches and vaults that incorporated shaped skylights and mosaics and polychrome terracotta panels. Throughout the original stations the polychrome faience panels (from Grueby Faience Company) were designed by the firm. The control house for the IRT is at Bowling Green at the corner of Battery Park, in a suitably Dutch Renaissance manner to recall New Amsterdam. A few of the subway entrances en suite survive, notably at 72nd Street.

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