Dream builder.

In 1978 Suzannah Lessard began an exploration of her family history that led into the work of her great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White. Perhaps more than any other figure, White shaped the aesthetic character and legacy of the Gilded Age. His phenomonally creative yet also destructive personality left an equally lasting imprint on his family, and thus on the author herself By unraveling the personal and professional strands of Tattoos life, Lessard was led to a more complete understanding of her own. The result is a book--The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, published in November by The Dial Press-that is part biography, part memoir, part autobiography.

It is also a contemplation of how architecture embodies the spirit and values of the age and society from which it springs. The buildings White designed and decorated--Madison Square Garden, the Fudson Memorial Church, New York University (in a former incarnation), Newport's Rosecliff mansion, the Bowery Savings Bank--are now landmarks that reflect the love of indeed obsession with, beauty that drove him. But they also testify to his decadent, dangerous extravagance, and that of the society that exalted White in the last decades of the 19th century. The "overspending, bad-behaving nouveaux riches" embraced White because he could provide access to the byways of class and taste that Old Money controlled. And a nation as hungry as high society for symbols of power and status turned to architects like White to embody both its noblest aspirations and most corrupt ambitions.

STANFORD RODE A SURGING NATIONAL sense of imperial greatness, a mood of power and dominance in the world. His career was merged with a fantasy of the United States triumphant. Indeed, architects, because they could give expression to the dream of imperial grandeur through public monuments and buildings, had a kind of heroic stature in the public eye in those days that is hard to imagine today. It was widely believed that the identity of the nation could be formed by architecture, and consequently there was passionate controversy over which style was best suited to its emergent power. The neo-classical style--championed by Stanford's firm, McKim, Mead & White--prevailed, as the architectural character of the official areas of Washington, D.C., attests. The neoclassical style was the worldly style--as opposed to the Gothic style, its principal competitor, which was of the spirit. Nineteenth-century neoclassicism is a style that celebrates exclusive and total power, a style that not only erects buildings but controls the environment around them too. Because every inch works to reinforce the authority of the whole, there is no acknowledgment implicit in the neoclassical style of realities beyond those that it celebrates. The authoritative rationality of the style excludes mystery, puzzlement, wildness, weakness, suffering, and love. With its unself-questioning assertiveness, the neoclassical style aggrandizes society, political power, and the works of man. It became the style that would reflect the nation back to its citizens, teaching them how to think and feel about their country.

McKim, Mead & White was not associated with the neoclassical style from the beginning, however. Indeed the firm fell into it rather casually. In 1881--still early days in Stanford's career--the firm was approached by Henry Villard, a railroad magnate, who wanted an edifice designed for him that would contain six domiciles for himself and his children, with their families, on a lot at Madison Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Stanford drew up plans for a French chateau, but then he had to go out of town and handed the project over to Joseph Wells, who took it only on condition that he have a free hand. While Stanford was gone, Wells scrapped the chateau and replaced it with plans for a cinquecento palazzo. When Stanford returned, he fell in with Wells's plan without protest and the result was one of New York's great landmarks, the Villard Houses, in my lifetime owned for many decades by Random House and by the Archdiocese of New York. (Today it is part of the Helmsley Palace Hotel.) The exterior remained Wells's, but Stanford took on the interior, taking up this new style with a natural fluency: The Villard interiors are perhaps the greatest of his interiors extant today, and they represent his first crack at the Renaissance mode.

As the years passed, Stanford became fanatical about the neoclassical style as the only appropriate one for public buildings, maintaining, for example, that all the Gothic buildings at West Point--West Point is almost entirely Gothic--ought to be torn down and replaced by classical structures. When his advice was not followed, he called it "a public calamity, a body blow to all those who are striving to raise architecture out of the heterogeneous mush." The issue of Gothic versus classic also arose in connection with the neoclassical design of Stanford's Madison Square Presbyterian Church. The design was attacked by critics as pagan and secular; there was a prevailing opinion that Gothic was the most suitable style for a religious building. Stanford retaliated by saying that Gothic reflected a Catholic and medieval mentality--that classicism was closer to the spirit of the early Christians and was therefore the appropriate style for a Protestant nation.

This ideological ardor was uncharacteristic of Stanford, who was not otherwise inclined toward intellectual constructs. Books, for him, were wallcovering. In general, his approach to architectural style was purely aesthetic and playfully eclectic: He could be as lighthearted in his choice of a style, and even in the mixing of styles, as he might be about choosing a costume for a ball. Yet concerning this matter of the appropriate natural style he came to fight with quasimoralistic fervor for the style of secular power against the style that was spiritual, individualistic, irregular, and full of darkness and mystery.

Stanford subscribed wholly to the idea that the new robber barons--the Whitneys, Goulds, and Villards who were McKim, Mead & White's clients--were the American descendants of the great Renaissance merchant princes, a new upper class that would be the backbone of the imperial nation Architects, in his view, fulfilled an additional patriotic mission by building appropriate housing for members of the new class, so that they could better fill their princely roles. The sense of heroic architectural mission was unaffected by such facts as that Villard went bankrupt in the spring of 1884, three months after moving into his mansion, or that, conversely, Ogden Mills (heir to a mining fortune) occupied the 65-room mansion that Stanford had expanded and redesigned for him at Staatsburg, New York--it was completed in 1897--for only a few weeks each year in the autumn. It's hard for us to see a moral mission in such an improvident extravagance, but Stanford, though he was touchy about matters of status, or perhaps because he was touchy about them, was not a clear thinker where issues of class--and particularly excess--were concerned. In 1896, he went to Madison Square Garden to hear William Jennings Bryan, the leader of a pro-labor movement, pitted against Eastern conservative mercantilism. Stanford was swept away and became Bryan's champion--until he realized that Bryan was attacking the clientele of McKim, Mead & White. Abruptly he took a position against Bryan as a demagogue.

In addition to properly housing our new Medicis, the architects of the time, perhaps Stanford more than any other, took on the task of teaching them good taste. This mission included helping them buy suitable furnishings and adornments for their palaces; indeed, Stanford relied for a good portion of his income on dealings in art to fill the houses that he designed. The statue attributed to Michelangelo recently discovered in the French Embassy in New York, formerly the Whitney mansion--designed and decorated by Stanford--exemplifies the service he provided his clients in this respect. He had an eye. But with this went a shamelessness about looting Europe of its treasures. He stripped palazzi not only of objects but of their ceilings, their mosaics, their very doorjambs and window frames, paying their impoverished owners the lowest price that he could. Once, when he saw a fountain in an Italian village square that he wanted for a client, he simply went to the police and made a deal for them to look the other way while he had the fountain wrenched out and carried off. He was of the opinion that it was the prerogative of an ascendant nation to appropriate the treasures of civilization.

A part of the heroic standard of the new merchant class in the Gilded Age was a great deal of extremely silly social life; innumerable costume extravaganzas and improbable theme parties. It was a world in which crushing volumes of wealth were normal. Even with his wife Bessie's money behind him, Stanford was only modestly endowed in this arena, but he was still its impresario. He was a maniac for parties, always available to advise, to decorate, to manage the festivities, as part of his calling to teach the new rich how to be rich in style.

There is gaiety in this picture, but there was heaviness and pretension in these festivities as well. A photograph of the period shows Stanford and Bessie as portly and aging (though he was in his mid-thirties and she was in her late twenties), decked out in the attire of a knight and a Byzantine princess to a point of near-immobility, literally: Stanford was in chain mail. (Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, for whom Stanford built a New York house modeled on the Doges' Palace in Venice, instructed Stanford to design a ballroom in which a person who was not well bred would feel uncomfortable.) And yet mixed in with this kind of stuffiness was behavior that was so bad that one feels embarrassed merely to repeat it. James Bennett, for whose New York Herald Stanford designed a superb building, also in a Venetian style, generated many tales of bad manners. One is that he urinated in the fireplace at his engagement party. His most memorable moment, however, was in a Greek monastery where, on being shown a lighted lamp and told that it had not been extinguished for a thousand years, he snuffed it out and said, "Well, now it has"

Imperial Excess

Stanford, both in his personality and in the causes he served, became merged with the onsweeping imperial mood of the Gilded Age. On Fifth Avenue, at 60th Street, is the Metropolitan Club, Stanford's magnificent monument to the egos of parvenu businessmen. This club was started by J.P. Morgan in a pique, because some of his newly made millionaire cronies were refused admission by the exclusive Union Club. Morgan told Stanford he wanted a "gentleman's club" and "damn the expense." Stanford obliged, though he nearly killed himself trying to get the job done on time; in the last weeks Morgan had made a bet he couldn't do it. He worked around the clock. Tripped up by strikes, he hired scabs on the day before the club opened to bring in mantels made by nonunion workers and other scabs to install them, with charwomen standing by to clean up the mess. Stanford was there himself, overseeing it all. And he was there in the morning too. On February 27,1894, having had no sleep, Stanford was standing in the reception line next to Morgan to greet the members.

The result of Stanford's obsessive work is a miracle. Despite the pretensions implicit in its scale and style, the Metropolitan Club is joyous and light. The courtyard is elliptical. The facade is white marble. The two-story entrance hall is faced in gray-veined marble, and a double staircase that ascends one vast wall is graced with scrolling leafy ironwork banisters to lacy effect. The stairs themselves are still carpeted in burgundy, as they were by Stanford. In some of its details, the club verges dangerously toward a silliness of excess. For example, in a painted relief on the ceiling of the ballroom, bare and amply bosomed angels look down from an elaborate garden. But instead of creating a feeling of glut, the relief has the air of architecture dressed up for make-believe. Large windows with deep insets yield a more serious architectonic pleasure. They look across Fifth Avenue to a statue of General Sherman by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. There is General Sherman riding high on his horse, sword outthrust, led by victory, the trees of Central Park providing a soft texture behind.

The club in which Stanford himself was most comfortable, however, was The Players down on Grammercy Park, a club for people in the theatrical profession, people who at the time were not considered quite acceptable in society. Stanford had a hand in The Players too, but only insofar as he made changes to the preexisting brownstone in 1888. The Players is characterized by the old-fashioned intimacy of its domestic brownstone scale, and its eccentric array of portraits. In other men's clubs there are portraits too, but usually of male worthies dressed in suits. In The Players the portraits are of great actors and actresses (despite the fact that women were excluded from membership) in costume, at the high points of their greatest roles. One sees Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and Edwin Booth as Richard III at full emotional throttle with appropriately high-contrast lighting Taken together so much drama creates a hilarious effect.

One day in February, 1896, the artist Edward Simmons found Stanford sitting in The Players Club all by himself in a puzzled, confused state. When Simmons asked him what was wrong, Stanford "started and came out of his mood" and then told him that he was just back from the University of Virginia. In October, Thomas Jefferson's masterpiece had been devastated by fire and Stanford had been hired to restore it, and to expand the campus as well. On this trip he had had a chance to look at Jefferson's blueprints, and what he had seen had brought him to a halt. "They're wonderful, and I am scared to death. I only hope I can do it right," he said to Simmons. This is the only moment I have found in which Stanford seems to question himself, the only time when he senses limitations and responsibility too. The only time he comes to a stop. There is Stanford alone in The Players Club amidst characters at peaks of theatrical intensity, for one moment truly present, for once in his life encountering himself.

The encounter was insufficient: His contributions to the University of Virginia are today known on campus as "the mutilations of 1896" Both Jefferson and Stanford were attracted to the classical vocabulary but for opposed reasons: Jefferson for the democratic associations of that vocabulary (there is an implicit modesty in his work) and Stanford for the imperial ones. In Jefferson's design, the campus consisted of two rows of pavilions, combined classroom-dormitories that face each other across a green called the Lawn. At one end of the Lawn was the Rotunda, which served as a library, from which the Lawn descended between the embracing pavilions, creating a prospect that was open at the far end to a magnificent view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The campus was organized around that view and took its deepest meaning from it. It was the relation of the architecture to that view that made this cluster of buildings both passionate and contemplative. But right in the middle of the opening to the mountains Stanford erected a big neoclassical building flanked by two others that are connected to the first by walls cutting off the view altogether. This was not something Stanford did without struggle--the University needed new buildings and he had to put them somewhere--but nevertheless he did it. The consensus of time is that he made a very big mistake, but it was perhaps an inevitable mistake in that it reflected the difference between imperial and democratic neoclassicism. In the imperial vision there is no preexisting landscape, no outside power, no mystical cosmos. There is no encompassing mystery and there is consequently no humility either. There is magnificence in the imperial vision, but it is the magnificence of man alone. The neoclassical architecture of imperialism is about power without love and without prayer.

The tragedy of Stanford White is that combined with his softness and sensitivity there was something in him that was hard and unfeeling, something blind and crushing--incapable of the responsiveness that humility brings. One can see how hard he tried with the University of Virginia buildings, and also how doomed his efforts were. He knew how to restrain himself; his buildings are delicate and sophisticated, and reflect in many ways the best he had to give. Yet in the context of the open tenderness and authenticity of Jefferson's architecture, the very sophistication of Stanford's buildings exposes a kind of emptiness--as if the buildings were a performance, a kind of dressing-up; a charade. In Jefferson's architecture, in contrast, there is thoughtfulness, humility, love, and, above all, conviction.

From the book Architect of Desire. Copyright @ 1996 by Suzannah Lessard. Reprinted by arrangement with The Dial Press, an imprint of Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.Suzannah Lessard is contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.