A Genuine Style: The Beaux-Arts Architecture of Carrère and Hastings

The Flagler Museum has mounted the first-ever exhibition of the architectural work of Carrère and Hastings. “A Genuine Style: The Beaux-Arts Architecture of Carrère & Hastings,” runs January 20 through April 4, 2004, and features many never-before-seen drawings, artifacts and photographs. The exhibition was curated by the Flagler Museum, is sponsored by architect Jeffery W. Smith, AIA.

Best known for their design of The New York Public Library (1897-1911), shown below, Carrère and Hastings designed many well-known landmarks such as the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, The Frick Collection and Neue Galerie in New York; the Carnegie Institution, the Cannon House and Russell Senate Office Buildings and Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.; and the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

“The Flagler Museum is the ideal place for this exhibition, as Henry Flagler was the firm’s earliest and most loyal patron,” says Flagler Museum chief curator, Dr. Laurie Ossman. In 1885, Flagler offered the young architects (ages 26 and 24) a million dollar contract to design and build the Ponce de Leon Hotel in the burgeoning resort community of St. Augustine, Florida. In 1901 they designed Whitehall, Flagler’s Palm Beach residence and now home of the Flagler Museum, a National Historic Landmark, where the exhibition will take place.

“Within a few years of the Flagler commissions, their client list read like the Fortune 500 of the Gilded Age,” notes Flagler Museum Executive Director John Blades. The exhibition will include building designs for such notables as: John D. and William Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Murry Guggenheim, J.P. Morgan, Mrs. Frederick Guest, George W. Vanderbilt, Edward H. Harriman and Alfred I. Dupont. The exhibition not only fills a void in the existing scholarship on American architecture and the classical tradition, but also creates a new context for understanding Henry Flagler’s national importance as a patron of architecture.

Plans are underway to travel the exhibition in 2005, in conjunction with the publication of a monograph of the architects and their work.

Rotunda, New York Public Library
The firm’s most famous design took 14 years to build and drew on a range of classical precedents to create a monument to New York’s intellectual and cultural ascendancy. (Courtesy: the New York Public Library)

Nemours Mansion Garden
DuPont was one of Carrère and Hastings’ most devoted patrons, and his Wilmington Delaware estate, Nemours, features one of the firm’s most spectacular garden designs. (This rendering and the photo of the fountain (above, left) are courtesy of the Alfred I. DuPont Foundation.)

Whitehall

Nemours Mansion - fountain

House of E.C. Benedict, Greenwich, Connecticut. Benedict’s son married Henry Flagler’s daughter Jennie Louise, who died in 1887.
Benedict’s daughter, Helen, married Thomas Hastings in 1900. (Photo: William Hubbell)

Guggenheim House Stairs.
Carrère and Hastings were awarded the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal for the home of
Murry and Leonie Guggenheim near Elberon, New Jersey. (Courtesy: Guggenheim Memorial Library, Monmouth University)

White Eagle, built by Alfred I. DuPont, was later owned by Mrs. Frederick Guest, who renamed it Templeton.
(Courtesy: New York Institute of Technology)