Charles A. Platt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other persons named Charles Platt, see Charles Platt (disambiguation).

Charles Adams Platt (October 16, 1861 – September 12, 1933) was a prominent landscape gardener and architect of the "American Renaissance" movement. Though his garden designs were to complement his domestic architecture, his training was as an artist of landscapes, first at the National Academy of Design in New York and at the Académie Julian with Gustave Boulanger and with Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

Born in New York City, Platt trained as an etcher with Stephen Parrish in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1880. In the Paris Salon of 1885 he exhibited his paintings and etchings and gained his first audience. In the decade 1880–1890 he made hundreds of etchings of architecture and landscapes. He received a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

A trip to Italy in 1892 in the company of his brother to photograph extant Renaissance gardens and villas led to a marked development in Platt's aesthetic approach. Platt published many of these images in his influential book "Italian Gardens" (Harper & Brothers, 1894), the outcome of two articles published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in the summer of 1893. The volume was strong on the surviving gardens of the Renaissance and Baroque and made no attempt to describe their history or their designers. (Platt was unaware of the first history of Italian gardens, W.P. Tuckermann's thorough Die Gartenkunst der italienischen Renaissance-Zeit, Berlin 1884.)

As well, the influences of Reginald Blomfield's The Formal Garden in England (1892) and gardens by Gertrude Jekyll illustrated in Country Life further refined Platt's style. The impact of Platt, and of Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) can be seen in the switch among stylish Americans from country houses set in lawns with shaped beds of annuals, swept drives and clumps of trees typical of 1885 to houses in settings of gravel-lined forecourts, planted terracing, formal stairs and water features, herbaceous borders and pergolas that are typical of the early 20th century.

Platt was a member of the group that gravitated to Augustus Saint-Gaudens at Cornish, New Hampshire, His own garden at Cornish, made between 1892 and 1912, exemplifies a new style, essentially an Arts and crafts setting for Beaux-Arts Neo-Georgian and Colonial Revival architecture.

Platt's clients for grand country estates included Edith Rockefeller McCormick at "Villa Turicum"[1], Lake Forest, Illinois (1912, demolished), and Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, for whom Platt designed a townhouse on East 65th Street in New York in 1907, where, Eleanor Roosevelt observed, "'an architect of great taste' had 'made the most of every inch of space.'" The MIT Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts is a Platt-designed mansion built for H. Wendell Endicott in 1934, in use today as a conference center for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beginning in 1906, Platt also began to receive numerous commissions from the estate of Vincent Astor. Platt turned to professional help in surveying large-scale projects from the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. He received detailed planting plans to fill his borders from Ellen Biddle Shipman, whom he had come to know through her gardening at Cornish and whom he had instructed in presentation drawings by a draftsman from his own office, then sent to Grosse Pointe, Michigan to plant one of his designs. The Italian Renaissance styled Russell A. Alger House, at 32 Lakeshore Dr., designed by Charles A. Platt serves as the Grosse Pointe War Memorial.[1]

Some of Platt's surviving gardens in their full maturity began to be open to the public at the end of the century.

  • Gwinn, Cleveland, Ohio: garden designed by Charles Platt and Warren Manning.

His more visible public commissions include the Freer Gallery of Art (1918) in Washington, D.C. and the campuses of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1822 and 1927), Connecticut College, Deerfield Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover, where he designed the chapel and library and their settings.

Platt's Italian Gardens was reissued in 1993 with additional photographs by Platt and an introductory overview by Keith N. Morgan, whose research into Platt's career generated some new interest in Platt.

Throughout his life, Platt maintained his house and garden in Cornish, New Hampshire, and an office and residence in Manhattan. With his second wife, Eleanor Hardy Bunker, whom Platt married in 1893, Platt had five children. Among the children were William (1897-1984) and Geoffrey (1905-1985), who followed in their father's footsteps and practiced architecture in New York City. Platt died in Cornish, New Hampshire at the age of 72. His drawings and archives, including the original glass plate negatives for "Italian Gardens" are held by the Department of Drawings & Archives in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Contents

[edit] Works

Crandall Public Library- Glens Falls, New York 1931

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Grosse Pointe War Memorial, the Russell A. Alger Mansion. Retrieved on November 23, 2007.

[edit] Further reading

  • The Architecture of Charles A. Platt, 1913. A monograph with an introduction by the art historian Royal Cortissoz to inspire further customers. Reprinted 1998 ISBN 0-926494-17-1
  • C. Jencks, K[eith] N. Morgan, 1985. Charles Platt :The Artist as Architect (MIT Press) ISBN 0-262-13188-9
  • K[eith] N. Morgan, and R. W. Davidson, 1995. Shaping an American Landscape: The Art and Architecture of Charles A. Platt (University Press of New England) A series of essays engendered by an exhibition of Platt's work.

[edit] External links