by: Carolyn Sponza AIA LEED AP
Event: Downtown Third Thursday Lecture: Cass Gilbert and History: The Past as Present
Location: New York County Lawyers’ Association, 05.17.07
Speaker: Barbara S. Christen — author, historian, Cass Gilbert scholar
Organizer: Downtown Alliance
The neo-gothic style of the Woolworth Building is just one of many of Cass Gilbert’s appropriated modes.
Jessica Sheridan
Architect Cass Gilbert was a style chameleon, varying his design aesthetic based on location and client. According to author and historian Barbara Christen, Gilbert’s ideas were mined from both his European travels and from his extensive library. “On one level he wasn’t that imaginative,” said Christen, showing a photo of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus next to the similar crown of the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square, one of many Gilbert appropriations.
New Yorkers might associate Gilbert’s style with the Foley Courthouse, or with the sugary, neo-gothic ornamentation he employed on the Woolworth Building and 90 West Street. But residents of Waterbury, CT, would have a completely different impression of Gilbert’s work, as evidenced by the colonial-inspired brick-and-stone civic and commercial buildings he designed for the town. Oberlin College students might have yet another view of the architect’s work, with several Florentine-influenced building springing from Gilbert’s master plan for the campus. Perhaps it is in the buildings that belong to Gilbert’s partially realized master plans (like those for Waterbury and Oberlin) that his mass style realignments become most evident.
In addition to these wholesale shifts in his design approach, Gilbert managed to interpose seemingly unrelated architectural elements, like a Scandinavian dormer he transposed almost directly from his travel notebooks onto a shingle-style sanatorium building in Connecticut. “He comfortably grafted styles,” said Christen. Proving that perhaps Gilbert’s true talent was for graceful assimilation, a lesson architects today can certainly appreciate.
Carolyn Sponza, AIA, is an architect with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners and is the AIANY Chapter Vice President of Professional Development.