Chapter 4: Late Works

Schmidt's mastery of the classical language of architecture was an inspiration to a new generation of American architects, among them Allan Greenberg and Robert A. M. Stern. In attempting to re-learn the classical canon, these architects found in Schmidt a master whose strong, rigorous compositions struck a chord -his work was unsentimental, pragmatic and well resolved. In the new generation of American country houses of the 1980s, particularly in the New York area, one can see Schmidt's architectural legacy. As Schmidt learned from Charles Platt, another group of architects have used his work to extend the Georgian tradition.

How does Schmidt's work compare to that of his contemporaries? While not an innovator even in the conservative trends of his time, Schmidt was a torchbearer for principles held by a large number of early twentieth century architects. He was an artist of fastidious integrity and uncommon good sense, but clearly not a designer of surpassing visual brilliance or formal inventiveness - the kind of genius we associate with a Lutyens, for instance. Like Platt, he actually sought to remove visual tension from his designs, to achieve a modest and subtle balance of elements and a solid, quiet pragmatism that were seen as "American" and "classic" in spirit. If these qualities are aesthetically incomprehensible to today's taste, let us not be too quick to condemn them, but seek to understand the societal conditions which made both patrons and architects pursue the eclectic philosophy in design. By 1920 the legacy of eclectic design was so pervasive and culturally sanctioned that Schmidt and other architects around the country could assimilate its principles and find a ready clientele wanting houses in styles which were felt to have significance to the heritage and history of a region. The modern Georgian house, like the modern Tudor or Mediterranean one, had become a genre, a well-defined type, and a symbol for a way of life. Schmidt and other eclectic architects could have flourished only through the patronage chain of American's plutocracy, with its particular tastes for the antique, the "colonial;" the aristocratic and the traditional. His architecture met a need. His art was sustained by clients who felt as he did, that America's early culture should be a model for a modern one.

Schmidt's contribution to the development of the Georgian house and the personal touch which he brought to his handling of the idiom mark him as one of a handful of critically important later classical architects in the United States. This little-known master of "town and country" domestic architecture deserves recognition both for the quality of his achievement and for his place in a movement which continues to have a major impact on American architecture in this century.

During the final ten years of his life, Schmidt continued his professional practice on a limited basis while living in semi­retirement at his home in Katonah. He designed three more houses, an addition to the Caramoor Gallery in Westchester County and a small headquarters for the Colonial Dames of American Reconstruction on East 61st Street in New York, adjacent to the historic Abigail Adams Smith house. Mott Schmidt died on July 23, 1977,at the age of 88. He was honored by a Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects in 1939, and by membership in the National Academy of Design.

In 1980, a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted by the Katonah Gallery, later travelling to New York City. The success of that show at the National Academy of Design was indicative of the place which his buildings held in the consciousness of New Yorkers. In the exhibition catalogue, Philip Johnson called Schmidt "a man of his time who, I am glad to say, lived long enough to see the tastes of a new generation come full circle from the Modern Movement to a new sympathy, nay empathy, with his own work" Paul Goldberger, reviewing the show for the New York Times, remarked that "it has been attracting architecture buffs from all over the metropolitan area" He continued:

Mott Schmidt was an architect who produced no truly great works of architecture, but an enormous number of very fine ones. His buildings were civilized, in the deepest sense of the word - they were ordered, handsome, knowledgeable, serene places, buildings designed to contain lives that bespoke similar qualities ... Schmidt's gift, which he shared with his best colleagues among the revivalists of his time, was his ability to take the classical vocabulary and use it to create original, varied compositions.

The addition was a simple two-story wing (Figures 46 & 47), unobtrusively attached to the main house, with details replicated from the old building, such as the attic balustrade, shutters, and clap­board siding. Grand rooms were inserted in its piano nobile, yet the exterior scale comfortably matched its counterpart. Exterior flourishes included the large, triple-hung windows and the graceful entrance porch, which was flanked by curved stairways and crowned with a canopy supported by composite columns. The design of the porch was adapted from the Lyman House in Waltham, Massachusetts (1793), also the source of inspiration for the great ballroom inside. Other aspects of the portico, including the fanlight above the main door, came from the Tichnor House on Boston's Beacon Hill (1801). But nothing is "copied" These and other distinguished Federal style examples were used as paradigms to be modified and reinterpreted, much as early American builders used examples from pattern books. Like other academic eclectic artists, Schmidt saw himself not as a preservationist or reproduction specialist, but as an architect of original works.

The organization of the wing is straightforward: formal rooms for entertaining are upstairs on the piano nobile, with administrative offices and workrooms in the basement. Both are served by a gracious stairhall, from which all major rooms are accessible. The showpiece of the building, directly on axis with the main stair, is a 50 x 24 foot ballroom. It freely combines Federal and English Adamesque details using the trabeated wall treatment and division of bays of the Lyman ballroom as its starting point. Schmidt's extensive sketches for this room reveal a debt to both McIntire and Adam. His columns are more elongated and refined and the win­dow casings far more elaborate than those at the Lyman House, yet the friezes are closer to the English master's work. The room also feels grander and more spacious than its Federal counterpart.

In September 1966, Gracie Mansion opened with public ap­probation and cautiously positive reviews in the press. Ada Louise Huxtable, who in those years was the nation's most eloquent apologist for progressive design as well as a leading supporter of preservation, was quick to point out that a more farsighted and artistically courageous approach might have been taken. Citing the view that contrast between old and new was the best aesthetic posture and that historical structures "gain by carefully related additions;' she offered Philip Johnson's recently completed wing of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington as a model. At the same time, she was balanced in her assessment of the problem facing the city in building onto a small and modest frame house. She conceded that "Gracie's unpretentiousness might well have resisted a radical contemporary solution."

At Gracie Mansion Mott Schmidt capped off his long career with a modest but distinguished work. A man who preferred to remain out of the limelight, he deftly managed a complex and difficult commission in the midst of considerable public scrutiny.

The commission which would give Schmidt his greatest exposure, and more than a little taste of controversy, came after fifty years of practice. In 1964, amidst the social and political tumult which was to mark the decade, Mott Schmidt was called upon by a citizens' committee to design a new wing for Gracie Mansion, the celebrated, but less than grand, residence of the mayor of New York.

Gracie Mansion was built as the country retreat for merchant Archibald Gracie by an unknown builder in 1798. The city had owned the house since 1896, and it had served many uses. It was a house museum during the 1920s, an early home for the Museum of the City of New York, a refreshment pavilion for Carl Schurtz Park, and was finally restored by Robert Moses in the late 1930s. In 1942 Gracie Mansion was designated the mayor's official residence, with Fiorello LaGuardia its first tenant.

Though charming, the wood frame former summer house was not designed for intensive administrative or social use, and could not even be considered an outstanding example of its type or period. It was neither adequate as a place of entertainment nor well-fitted as a modern family home. It was simply old - and as of 1960 had begun to show its age. Moreover, Mayor Robert F. Wagner and his wife Susan had allowed the house to be used by various civic groups during their long tenure and had kept it open for public tours (it was visited by approximately 2000 persons a year), accelerating its wear and tear. Located adjacent to a popular public park, it invited unwanted guests; reportedly, Mrs. Wagner used to find strangers wandering around the bedrooms and private portions of the house. It was she who initiated the first campaign for a new wing which would allow the old house to be used solely as a residence.

The first plan for the renovation and addition to the house was presented on October 17, 1964, a design which The New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described as having "all the charm and suitability of a suburban garage." The plan, by Edward Coe Embury, was shelved. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Wagner was taken ill with cancer and died a year later. In May 1965 the intention to go ahead with the new wing, to be named in her memory, was made public. After the controversy surrounding the first plan, the new Citizens' Committee for Gracie Mansion had joined with public officials to select architects, with the stated intent that the new design should be "totally in harmony" with the architecture of the old house.

The fund-raising group for the new wing included Senator Jacob Javits, Henry Francis DuPont and Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller. It was hoped that a group of such distinguished antiquarians would make a prudent choice of designers. Implicit in their collective taste was the notion that the addition would authentically replicate the eighteenth-century style and details of the house. However, the idea of doing "reproduction architecture" did not please the general architectural community. Resisting pressure to hire a modernist, in late 1964 the committee appointed the 75-year-old Mott Schmidt as chief architect for the project. The design of the wing, under the careful scrutiny of many interested parties, was a team process, with Schmidt supplying the formal scheme and most of the initial design ideas, while furnishings and interior decoration were handled by other specialists.

Schmidt became financially strained in the late 1940s and was forced to sell Pook's Hill in 1950, moving into a smaller house in Katonah, New York, also of his own design. Tragedy struck in 1954 when his only child, Elena Chandler, died at the age of thirty as a result of childbearing complications. The next year his wife, Elena, died of cancer, and his output slowed for the remainder of the decade. Yet, after a difficult period during the early fifties in which commissions were few, Schmidt's practice experienced a resurgence. A September 1957 article in the New York Times noted his accomplishment as a builder of estates in "the Grand Manner":

Mott B. Schmidt, who has designed town and country houses for Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts and Astors, says that during the last few years he has drawn and ex­ecuted more plans for country homes than at any time since 1921, when he began to specialize in this field of architecture. The plans spread across the drawing boards in his office at 14 East Forty-sixth Street, and the daily round of visitors to his pine-paneled consulting room, furnished with antique French and Italian pieces, confirms the revival of interest in luxurious country living.

This new group of well-to-do clients recognized Schmidt as an architect with the experience and taste to handle traditional houses. As the architect said, "When a person can build without budget worries, he can blend the practical with the esthetic in any way that satisfies him." Thus, in a time governed by frugal, modernistic taste, Schmidt was able to design a series of relatively large houses, costing $250,000 or more, which extended his experiments in the country house to the suburban type. Houses epitomizing luxurious country living were built for Mr. and Mrs. Ralph C. Price, of Greensboro, North Carolina (1953); Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bronfman, Jr., of Seagram fame, in Purchase, New York (1955) (Figure 42); the presi­dent of Chase Manhattan bank, John McCloy, in Stamford (1956) (Figure 43); and William Clay Ford of Grosse Pointe, Michigan (1959) (Figure 44). As a rule Schmidt relied upon models already developed during the 1930s for these works. Both the Price and Bronfman houses were compact refinements of the 5-part formula and are probably the most successful of the 1950s estates. They had large garages, complex mechanical systems, and a surplus of bathrooms - signs of their gadget-oriented times.

Schmidt may well have been more comfortable with compact and restricted programs. Indeed, some of his best late work was done with rather small houses. His 1957 house in Bedford Hills, New York, for newspaperman and historian Donald Marshall and his wife is carefully massed and detailed and fits its wooded site beautifully (Figure 45). A similar design was made for Murray D. Safanie nearby in Katonah (1958). A larger but still trim colonial saltbox house in Connecticut for oilman John M. Lovejoy (1949) was also well sited and proportioned, if very modest in its articulation. This fertile period culminated when Schmidt remarried in 1958. He and Katharine Temple Lapsley had known each other when she was a girl in her hometown of Bedford, New York. After working with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and the Voice of America in New York, and having an ended marriage to Melville Stone, she returned to Bedford in 1957, where she and Mott Schmidt were reacquainted. With his second wife he found renewed energy, support for his work, and happiness. He might easily have retired had it not been for one final challenge.

As early European modernism seemed to supplant all other architectural idioms in the United States during the late 1930s and 1940s, many of Schmidt's colleagues passed away or retired from practice. But what the architectural historian William Jordy has called "the domestication of Modern" did not supplant or even seriously challenge the traditional country house among most con­servative, wealthy clients. Schmidt continued to attract devoted clientele during the 1950s and '60s, even among more progressive thinkers, as the Rockefeller family illustrates. In 1937 John D. Rockefeller, Jr., retained him to design a lavish two-floor apartment at 740 Park Avenue as a showplace for a large part of his collection of European, Oriental, and American art and antiquities (Figure 39). The following year Schmidt was asked to design a first home for Abby, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s daughter, and her husband, David Milton. Located on the Rockefeller compound in Pocantico, New York, Hudson Pines (Figure 40) was a larger variation on the formula developed at Pook's Hill and perfected in the Dillon house (Figure 41). His working relationship with the Rockefellers continued for several decades. When the sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., added to or altered the large Pocantico estate house, Kykuit, in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s they often called upon Schmidt, who gave them the same refined traditional look which graced the other buildings.

The group of New York's elite who, like the Rockefellers, chose tradition running back to their ancestors over the "shock of the new;" would come to Mott Schmidt as one of the last competent eclectic architects still practicing after World War II. He was referred by longstanding clients as well as by fellow professionals. In 1958, Dorothy Dillon Spivak, who wanted a French style house built around a set of 17th and 18th century rooms from a Parisian hotel, was given Schmidt's name by four of the leading architecture schools on the East Coast as the best man for the job.