On the night of June 25, 1906, architect Stanford White attended the opening performance of “Mamzelle Champagne’’ at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, a grand New York entertainment venue that he had designed. As the orchestra played “I Could Love a Thousand Girls,’’ an emotionally unbalanced Pittsburgh millionaire named Harry K. Thaw approached White’s table. Recently married to the beautiful Evelyn Nesbit, a showgirl whom White had seduced some years earlier, Thaw produced a revolver from beneath his overcoat and shot White three times in the head. The newspapers called it the murder of the century.
Saga of three kings of architecture
Over the years, the story of White’s downfall has been told in countless books — many of them tawdry, but others, like E.L. Doctorow’s brilliant 1975 novel, “Ragtime,’’ evocative and deeply insightful. White’s professional career with the firm of McKim, Mead & White — architects to the Gilded Age’s most prominent families, corporations, and civic organizations — has also received extensive attention, primarily in academic works like Leland Roth’s authoritative “McKim, Mead & White, Architects’’ (1983), a history of the firm’s stylistic development, and Paul Baker’s “Stanny’’ (1989), a scholarly biography of White, focusing on his aesthetic sensibility.
In “Triumvirate,’’ New York University professor Mosette Broderick attempts a grand synthesis of all that is best in these trends. She presents the architecture of McKim, Mead & White in a rich social context by interweaving detailed portraits of the three partners, their friends, families, patrons, and other significant personalities. Contending that the firm “gave a distinctive face — at times grand, at times nonchalantly at ease — to a transforming nation,’’ she painstakingly demonstrates how the cultural strivings of America’s elite affected the triumvirate’s architectural style. Unlike the skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan or the prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, the public and private structures designed by McKim, Mead & White did not propose a bold new American building type but harkened back to European precedents — Norman manors, Regency townhouses, Renaissance palazzos — to portray the United States as a natural heir to the Old World’s finest traditions.
Broderick’s discussion of Newport, R.I., the resort community where McKim, Mead & White first made their mark as designers of summer “cottages,’’ provides an excellent blend of storytelling, cultural history, and visual analysis. Likewise, her narration of the politically fraught process behind the construction of the Boston Public Library shows a keen eye for the difficulties that architects face.
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