Horace Trumbauer (1868-1931) - Master at Blending Art with Architecture D. Whittaker Born in Philadelphia in 1858, Horace Trumbauer left school at the age of fourteen and joined the architectural firm of G.W. & W.D. Hewitt as an “errand boy.” He was soon promoted to draftsman. Trumbauer’s passion for the field of architecture was evident in his quick acquisition of its theories and practices. His meteoric rise in the firm led to his advancement at a very young age, which in turn enabled him to open his own office in 1890. He was 22. I was seduced by Trumbauer’s design capabilities the moment I stepped into The Elms, a magnificent neoclassical estate he designed in 1899 in Newport, RI. Only later, after I learned more about him, did I truly become inspired by him due to the fact that, like me, he was completely self-taught (taking his place among other autodidacts such as Tadao Ando and Frank Lloyd Wright). In my young mind I thought, “Well, if he can do it, so can I”- but that is a tough road to tow in modern times. I later realized it takes more than talent and ambition to design great buildings and that Trumbauer was a success in part thanks to the times in which he lived. Yet with the Gilded Age long gone and the economy of the Bush Administration giving way to the austerity of the Obama Administration, chances are we won’t see a commissions, ever, like these, but a guy can dream. Although Trumbauer had no formal training as an architect he successfully designed over 1,000 buildings during his illustrious career, many of which became icons of the period. His first commission was for $171.75 for a house near Narberth, Pennsylvania. Soon after that he landed a major commission – a mansion in Glenside, Pennsylvania, for sugar baron William Welsh Harrison. When Harrison’s mansion burned to the ground in 1893, he commissioned Trumbauer to rebuild it. The second home, called Grey Towers (now part of Arcadia University), marked the architect’s rise to prominence in the profession. In 1916 Edward and Eva Stotesbury commissioned Trumbauer to design one of his more famous projects - Whitemarsh Hall. The estate was set on a hill outside Philadelphia in Springfield, Pennsylvania. Stotesbury was a senior partner at the Drexel & Company banking house, an associate of J.P. Morgan, and one of the wealthiest men in America. Whitemarsh Hall was an enormous U-shaped Georgian style mansion set in Jacques Greber’s sweeping informal English and formal French gardens. It had 50-foot limestone columns at the main entrance and contained 147 rooms totaling 100,000 square feet. The ballroom alone was 64 feet long. The grand residence, with three stories above ground and three below, required a staff of 70 butlers, maids, cooks, valets, chauffeurs and gardeners. … his successes were their jealousies. The estate was typical of Trumbauer’s abilities. Many elegant rooms were embellished though collaborations with the best decorators of Paris. But as changes to Trumbauer’s practices demonstrate, the rich had already begun to live differently by the 1920’s. Trumbauer continued to design exceptional buildings until his death in 1938, but he no longer planned the sprawling country estates and elegant seaside palaces which had put him in demand before World War I. Whitemarsh Hall marked both the apex and the end of the Gilded Age. Too expensive to maintain, the mansion, along with many others, was inevitably abandoned. In 1980 the imposing but dilapidated structure was torn down to make way for a suburban housing development. Only a few garden elements and five of the six 50-foot limestone entry columns remain being silent tribute to a luxurious past long faded into time. Trumbauer, like many great artists, was a recluse during most of his professional career, living a life of solitude in a self-imposed exile. Unlike the partners at McKim, Mead and White, with whom he competed, he was uncomfortable in social settings and avoided them like the plague. No matter how successful he became, he remained terribly self-conscious of his lack of professional education, an insecurity only reinforced by his snobby, and most likely jealous critics. Some of Trumbauer’s insecurity may have also stemmed from his personal fear of working exclusively as a Classicist in period styles. While reviving an architecture of distant times and places may have been nostalgic for him and his clients, it was considered passé to his peers by whom he wished so desperately to be accepted. Yet by and large that was not to be. In the first years of the new century, Trumbauer’s firm expanded its scope, designing not only mansions in Philadelphia, New York City, and Newport, but also apartment houses and other large structures. In 1904, Architectural Record, a new publication at the time, published a lengthy account of Trumbauer’s work, naming him one of the country’s most distinguished architects. Yet due to the prejudices of Modernist architects, Trumbauer only achieved real recognition in the architectural field after his death. For the Modernists of the mid-20th century enjoyed the notion that their work sprang from virgin sources and that it owed nothing to the Classical past. With the excitement over Modernism arose a tendency to scoff at the value of classically inspired architecture, much as one sees today. Trumbauer did not escape this general contempt, and many of his allies felt he came in for even more than his fair share of it. Jealousy also played a role in Trumbauer’s lack of recognition. Professional critics doubted his achievements due to his lack of formal academic standing. And with the popular pendulum swinging toward European Modernism, along with the Great Depression, Trumbauer’s practice dwindled in the 1930’s. His staff fell from a high of 30 members down to his longtime associate, Julian Abele (the first African-American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Architecture School), and a few others. Late in his life, Trumbauer took to drinking to relieve his burdens, and he eventually died of liver cirrhosis in 1938 and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. After his death, Trumbauer’s great abilities became evident, and he finally gained the recognition that had eluded him in life. Like his great sprawling mansions, he is gone but not forgotten, even if only by me and other like-minded Classicists. End
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:28:19 +0000
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