At a banker’s estate in Scarborough, NY, Goodhue created a proto-cubist house out of Manhattan schist. Despite a devastating 1947 fire, the house is intact, and the current owner is restoring its paneled rooms based on a 1920 article in House Beautiful.
For a dilettantish railroad heir, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed a colonnaded villa in Montecito, CA, with Persian-inspired azure pools.
Classical murals fill the villa’s vaulted dining-room ceiling.
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Goodhue’s Universal Genius
Bertram Goodhue: His Life and Residential Architecture
by Romy Wyllie
W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, NY; 2007
224 pp.; hardcover; 91 color and 149 b&w illus.; $60
ISBN 978-0-393-73219-1
Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn
How many architects, after their firm partnerships split up bitterly, get eulogized thus by an ex-partner: “He had a creative imagination, exquisite in the beauty of its manifestations, sometimes elflike in its fantasy, that actually left one breathless…He was an almost universal genius”?
That was how Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924) was portrayed in a 1936 memoir by his ex-partner, Ralph Adams Cram. Goodhue inspired similar rapturous loyalty in his employees – as one staffer wrote after Goodhue’s death, “To know that his men were happy in their work was of great importance to him because he knew that out of happiness would come the best they had to give.”
But the architect had a dark side, too, as Pasadena-based interior designer/historian Romy Wyllie thoroughly documents in this monograph. “I have attempted to discover the man behind the drafting board,” she writes; he was notoriously moody, neurasthenic, “unnecessarily outspoken and high-handed,” with a “tendency to cling to his own opinions and upset clients.”
She has focused her chiaroscuro book on his houses, since they received scant attention in the only other recent monograph on Goodhue, a 1983 volume by historian Richard Oliver. But Goodhue is not known for residential architecture. He produced only two-dozen houses, clubhouses or apartment blocks, and did not much enjoy catering to wealthy homeowners – he wryly called his best residential patrons “very multimillionarish clients.” He preferred, and was famous for, designing churches, campuses and public buildings in Gothic, Tudor, Mediterranean Revival or Art Deco veins. Wyllie has attempted, with mixed success, to chronicle Goodhue's life while comparing his rather obscure, sometimes halfhearted residences to his ecclesiastical or institutional blockbusters.
Wyllie has pored through “previously unknown family archives,” she notes, and has skillfully fleshed out past historians’ biographical coverage of Goodhue. She describes his blueblood ancestry (he descended from a “Master of the Hounds to William the Conqueror” and a Revolutionary War hero) and genteelly impoverished childhood on a Pomfret, CT, farm. His literary, artistic mother home-schooled her three sons, and often let Bertram indulge in what he later called “the habit of sitting on the floor in the library in Pomfret and reading everything I could get my hands on.” As a teenager he tried boarding school for a year or two but, as a classmate later recalled, Goodhue “spent most of this time, when in the school room, drawing caricatures of his school mates, and fancy pictures.” At age 15, he began a seven-year stint at Renwick, Aspinwall & Russell, a Manhattan architecture firm specializing in Gothic Revival churches, first as an apprentice and then as a draftsman renowned for pen-and-ink virtuosity.
Goodhue’s professional trajectory from there was steady, impressive, although not quite meteoric. By 1892, he was a name partner at Ralph Adams Cram’s Boston, MA-based firm while freelancing prolifically as a book illustrator and typographer (he invented the still-popular Cheltenham font). In 1903, he founded Cram’s New York office and, after years of frustration with Cram’s frequent hogging of credit, debuted a solo practice in 1914. He was busier than ever with nationwide commissions when he died of angina, five days short of his 55th birthday.
Wyllie mixes glimpses of the architect’s icons – the Gothic spires of West Point, the tiled domes of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan and the Nebraska State Capitol and the austere ziggurat of Los Angeles’s Public Library – with in-depth analysis of their domestic cousins. For a dilettantish railroad heir in Montecito, CA, Goodhue built a Persian-flavored stuccoed villa with Classical murals across its vaulted ceilings. For a hydroelectric power tycoon on the Gold Coast of Long Island, Goodhue created an Anglophilic compound of fieldstone gables, leaded-glass casements and woodwork carved from trees felled in Sherwood Forest. Wyllie not only supplies floor plans and lists Goodhue’s design precedents, but she also notes the construction budgets (up to $3 million, including landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and John Charles Olmsted, both of Brookline, MA) and the houses’ fates over the decades. Goodhue’s two-dozen residences, it turns out, have an astonishing 80-percent survival rate. Some of the grander ones have been well-preserved as Catholic retreats. For the few that have suffered fires or disfiguring remodels, Wyllie tells of current owners who are devotedly bringing back lost ceiling timbers or herringbone brickwork or tiers of garden fountains. The book comes with about 70 color photographs of extant buildings, most of which Wyllie herself diligently traveled to photograph. It’s a healthy quantity of color, especially for a Norton monograph, and the plates are meticulously cross-referenced in the text.
The book’s only flaw is Wyllie’s prose style; she repeats herself, reminding readers again and again of the “intensely creative” Goodhue, Goodhue’s “creative brilliance” and “creative intensity” and his “exceptional rendering skills” and “special skill in delineation.” She also keeps drawing a highly debatable conclusion: she’s convinced that had Goodhue lived longer, he would have veered Modernist “in his own search for a new architectural language.” Certainly his work became less ornamented late in his career, just like the mid-20th-century buildings by his contemporaries Delano & Aldrich or the successor partners of McKim, Mead & White.
But it’s hard to share Wyllie’s view that Goodhue was actually a maverick, always chafing at the traditional styles imposed by his clients’ tastes. She states that he was bent on “establishing unequivocally an architectural style devoid of historicism” and trying to “cast off the bonds of the past.” If that’s the case, however, why did his late work abound in colonnades, domes, pilasters topped in statuary, crisscrossing window grilles and carved or mosaic sunbursts? He was clearly still speaking the Classical language, just its more spartan dialects. As he wrote to a former staffer in 1918, “due to the passage of years no doubt – I’m getting more and more classical myself.”
Too bad tradition-inspired architects like Goodhue “will not be the subject of more than one monograph in any one or two generations,” as Domiane Forte wrote in a recent issue of Traditional Building. Tell the Ph.D. students you know in architectural history programs to consider gearing up for a comprehensive, photo-laden Goodhue monograph in the 2010s sometime. It would ideally include some of Wyllie’s well-researched house profiles and biographical essays, along with some lively counterarguments from scholars more open to varieties of Classicism. 
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