William Adams Delano

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William Adams Delano (January 21, 1874 – January 12, 1960) was a prominent American architect, a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich (Providence, Rhode Island, June 4, 1871 – Rome, December 26, 1940) in the firm of Delano & Aldrich that worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City and Long Island, building townhouses, country houses, clubs and banks, often in the neo-Georgian and Federal styles, combining brick and limestone, which became their trademark.

William Delano was born in New York City, a member of the prominent Delano family of Massachusetts. He was the nephew of John Crosby Brown who was head of Brown Brothers & Company banking/trading group and his father Eugene Delano (1843 – 1920) was a partner in the firm. He attended Yale and Columbia's architecture school and met his longstanding partner Chester Holmes Aldrich at the office of Carrère and Hastings before the turn of the century.

They formed their partnership in 1903 and almost immediately won commissions from the Rockefeller family, among others. Delano & Aldrich tended to adapt conservative Georgian and Federal architectural styles for their townhouses, churches, schools, and a spate of social clubs for the Astors, Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys.

Delano alone won the commission for the second-largest residence in the United States, "Oheka", overlooking Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York for financier Otto Kahn. Built in 1921 in French chateau style, with gardens by Olmstead Brothers, Oheka ranges over 109,000 square feet (10,000 m²) and was staffed with 125 people.

Delano's irreverent sense of humor was subtly expressed in some his architectural details and friezes, such as the low-relief frieze of tortoises and hares in the apartment block at 1040 Park Avenue, and backgammon club rooms ornamented like backgammon boards. At the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, built for Pan American Airways' transatlantic seaplane service in 1939 and the oldest such passenger air facility still in use, his Art Deco terra cotta friezes feature flying fish. "There is as much that is new to be said in architecture today by a man of imagination who employs traditional motifs as there is in literature by an author, who, to express his thought, still employs the English language," Delano wrote in 1928

Epinal American Memorial
Epinal American Memorial

In 1935 Aldrich left the partnership to become the resident director of the American Academy at Rome, where he died in 1940. Delano continued to practice almost until his own death in 1960, aged 85, in NYC.

He was commissioned to design the Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial (1948 – 1956), one of fourteen World War II monuments constructed abroad by the American Battle Monuments Commission. In 1953, the American Institute of Architects awarded William Adams Delano its Gold Medal. The Delano and Aldrich Archive is held by the Drawings and Archives Department in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Surviving buildings (all in New York City unless noted):

  • Kykuit, the principal Classical Revival Mansion in the Rockefeller family estate, Sleepy Hollow, New York, 1913.
  • Knickerbocker Club, 62nd and Fifth Avenue, 1915. A discreet Federal townhouse on Fifth Avenue.
  • Barbey Building, 15 West 38th Street, 1909.
  • Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (1910) Their first major public commission.
  • (Center for Inter-American Relations), 1911. Neo-Federal townhouse, part of a harmonious row continuing a theme set by McKim, Mead, and White next door, in the first flush of buildings along the covered-over New York Central tracks that made Park Avenue.
  • The Willard Straight House, 5th Avenue (1914). Later the headquarters of the National Audubon Society and the International Center for Photography. An English brick block in the manner of Sir Christopher Wren at Hampton Court is Americanized with black shutters.
  • St. Bernard's School, 98th Street, 1915
  • Colony Club, 62nd and Park Avenue, 1916
  • Greenwich House, 1917. A community center' two added floors stretch the Georgian townhouse manner to the limit.
  • The Palmer-Baker house, 93rd and Park (1918; altered with a ballroom wing 1928)
  • The Cutting Houses, 12 to 16 East 89th Street (1919)
  • The Harold Pratt House, 68th and Park (1920), for Harold I. Pratt and now headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations.
  • Third Church of Christ, Scientist, Park Avenue at 63rd Street, 1924
  • 1040 Park Avenue, at 86th; apartment building, where Condé Nast took the penthouse, (1924). In low-relief along a classical frieze, tortoises alternate with hares.
  • The Brook Club, 111 East 54th Avenue, 1925
  • Chapin School, at 84th and East End Avenue, 1928. Neo-Georgian
  • 63 Wall Street, 1929. Vertical bands of windows alternate with ashlar limestone cladding in setbacks to a penthouse with Art Deco gargoyles.
  • Japanese Embassy, Washington, DC, 1931
  • American Embassy, Paris 1931
  • Union Club, 69th and Park Avenue, 1933. A smoothly rusticated Italianate limestone palazzo in the manner of London clubs of the nineteenth century, "one of the last great monuments of the American Renaissance".[1]
  • Pan American Airways System Terminal Building, Dinner Key in Miami, Florida, 1933
  • Marine Art Terminal at La Guardia Airport, 1940

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars (1987).

[edit] References

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