September 2009 » book review

The Pursuit of Affordability

The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury
by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2009
288 pages; hardcover; 46 color and 343 duotone photos; $75
ISBN 978-0-393-73222-1

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Oh, the names that Grosvenor Atterbury could have dropped, had the architect been a name dropper. While running a dozen-staffer practice in New York from the 1890s to the 1950s, he built up a roster of repeat clients from families like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys and Havemeyers. The celebrity customers also included Seth Low, a mayor of New York, and the violinist Efrem Zimbalist. Even some of Atterbury's collaborators on 1,300 projects were the bold-face likes of the Olmsteds and Louis Comfort Tiffany.

So why is Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956) himself so little known? "Never heard of him," many bookstore browsers will mutter upon spotting this masterful monograph, or so architect Robert A. M. Stern predicts in the volume's foreword. The authors, architect Peter Pennoyer and historian Anne Walker, have previously written thorough, lively tributes to early-20th-century traditionalist firms: Delano & Aldrich and Warren & Wetmore. This is the research team's first book devoted to a solo practitioner, and Atterbury is also perhaps the most versatile and big-hearted architect they have ever analyzed.

Atterbury, the Yale-trained son of a successful corporate lawyer, didn't drop names much partly because he seems to have regarded his high-end projects – townhouses, country estates, clubhouses, elite school campuses – as testing grounds for proposals to uplift architecture for the poor. "The matter of the housing of the people," he told New York's Republican Club in 1916, "is one of fundamental importance if you wish to create and foster an esthetic sense that can grow and blossom." All society would benefit, he added, when philanthropists help eradicate "dark rooms in slums of the most hideous character."

A short, dapper, imperious character, he spent countless hours trying to improve low-cost housing. The pro bono struggle did benefit his reputation: Lewis Mumford, normally a skeptic of traditionalist architects, described Atterbury as "fully alive to the social responsibilities – and economic conditioning – of architecture." Atterbury retired in the 1950s so impoverished that the Rockefellers ended up paying his medical bills. But his influence on idealistic postwar architects was great, and the tenants in his projects were apparently quite content.

Pennoyer and Walker vividly describe Atterbury's "model tenements" in New York, which were gifts to passersby and occupants alike. Iron balconies, arched windows and stone trim graced the brick facades, and communal gardens thrived on the rooftops. Courtyards let breezes flow through apartments with marble stairwells, private bathrooms and gas ranges that "raised the standards for safety, hygiene, and convenience," the authors note. Atterbury brought advancements to the suburbs as well, designing gabled and trellis-wrapped houses at subdivisions for factory workers and coal miners. The house plans available were full of choices; shutters alone could come with cutouts shaped like windmills, cats, moons, stars, storks or rabbits.

To push the envelope of flexible low-budget design, Atterbury set up a makeshift lab at his Southampton country house and experimented with prefabricated concrete wall panels. He estimated that they would cost a few cents per cubic foot, and require a few days to assemble into fireproof structures complete with molded faux half-timbering. He only won over one client, however: in Queens, an apartment developer incorporated Atterbury's system into the ground floors of a bland 14-building complex. Although the architect did not manage to "change the housing industry on a widespread basis," Pennoyer and Walker observe, "Atterbury proved the viability of prefabrication."

What makes his foresighted inventions all the more extraordinary is that he meanwhile ran such a prolific office. He realized extravagant private homes, barn complexes, churches, office towers, hospitals, museums, national park facilities and civic and institutional gathering spaces scattered from New York's City Hall and Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Rincon Mountain foothills in Tucson, AZ. Pennoyer and Walker detail his construction specs down to the flush joints in ashlar stonework and floors made of Nailcrete (his own formula of nail-able concrete, adopted by other prominent architects including Cass Gilbert and Bertram Goodhue). Atterbury's virtuosity in materials extended from rustic peeled logs and acid-treated broken tiles to formal linenfold paneling and corbels shaped like fairytale creatures. The authors honestly evaluate which designs turned out "ungainly and unresolved," and which amount to "a masterful composition of picturesquely arranged porches, piazzas, towers, and shifting rooflines."

The book could have used more color pictures, more plate references and more notes in the text about which works survive, so that readers do not have to keep flipping to the catalogue raisonné at the back. But while you are rifling the back pages, check out the 400-odd footnotes. Just admire the tenacity of Pennoyer and Walker, plodding through housing authority reports and the minutes of charity board meetings. These scholars have ventured, as Stern points out, into "virtually uncharted territory," in pursuit of "an architect whose name is all but lost to the discourse."  

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