Michael Dwyer | |
---|---|
![]() Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River at Barrytown, New York | |
Born | 1954 Philadelphia, PA, USA |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Rose Bay Secondary College, Sydney, New South Wales; Columbia College (B.A.); University of Pennsylvania (M.Architecture) |
Occupation | Architect |
Buildings | Edgewater Pavilion |
Michael Dwyer is an American architect and author of books about architecture, including Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and Carolands (2006).
Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the New York architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis where he helped design several notable projects, including the Saint Thomas Choir School (completed 1987), a fifteen story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, [1] [2] described by architecture critic Paul Goldberger as "among the city's best examples of contextual architecture;" [3] and the Dana Discovery Center (completed 1993), a venue for environmental education, the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–93 restoration of Harlem Meer in Central Park's northeast corner. [4] [5] In a 1993 interview with the journal Progressive Architecture, Dwyer said that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design." [6] [4]
While at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture and a protagonist of its resuscitation. In a 1995 review by The New York Times of architecture's nascent classical revival, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown wrote that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," [7] a house whose new facade Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, characterized as "scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel." [8]
Interviewed by Brown for the article, Stern opined that the young classicists were "perhaps the true radicals of their time," whereas architect James Stewart Polshek, formerly dean of Columbia University's School of Architecture called them "bizarrely backward" and "lacking new ideas." Asked to weigh in, Yale historian Vincent Scully declared that "classicism speaks fundamentally to what people want, to security and dignity and permanence." [7]
In 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, where he supplemented landscape architect Kelly and Varnell's circular oak bosque and Penelope Jencks' bronze statue with granite medallions set into the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her). [9] [10]
In 1997, Dwyer restored the exterior of the George F. Baker Jr. House, completed in 1918 to the design of architects Delano and Aldrich, one of New York City's designated landmarks and one of its more splendid houses.
From 1998 to 2007, he was the consulting architect to the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women, helping to restore its clubhouse, designed by architect Thomas Harlan Ellett, and winner of the Architecture League's gold medal in 1933.
In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer prepared residential designs for New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side ( 960 Fifth Avenue, 720 Park Avenue, and River House); its west side ( The Dakota, The El Dorado, and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as East Hampton, Greenwich, and Nantucket.
The financier and preservationist Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's villa on the Hudson River. Jenrette described them in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:
In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.
Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank. [11]
The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, a new house in Southampton, New York designed by Dwyer for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a decade-long collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins. The principal rooms of Hollyhock's main wing include an entrance hall leading to an enfilade of high-studded rooms facing south: a dining room decorated with inset panels of 19th-century wall paper, a living room with boiserie painted a "rich watery blue," and a 55-foot-long library divided into three spaces by projecting bookcases. The principal feature of the entrance hall is an elliptical staircase (loosely inspired by a stair of Adler's, which in turn was inspired by a stair of architect John Russell Pope's) with a black and white starburst marble floor. [12] [13]
In Hollyhock's garden, designed by landscape architect Quincy Hammond in the grande manière, intended to extend the architecture of the house across the four acre grounds, Dwyer added a guest house (a kind of modern-day Petit Trianon), a garden pavilion in the form of an orangery, an arbor with eight salvaged limestone columns supporting teak lattice panels, and a garage building in the guise of a caretaker's cottage. The tile roofs and stucco facades of all the buildings allude to Red Maples, a house designed by the architects Hiss and Weekes, with gardens designed by Ferruccio Vitale, that stood on the site from 1913 until its demolition in 1947. [12] [13]
Dwyer's cousin, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Dwyer was the Adjutant General of Nevada from 1983 to 1986.
Michael Dwyer | |
---|---|
![]() Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River at Barrytown, New York | |
Born | 1954 Philadelphia, PA, USA |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Rose Bay Secondary College, Sydney, New South Wales; Columbia College (B.A.); University of Pennsylvania (M.Architecture) |
Occupation | Architect |
Buildings | Edgewater Pavilion |
Michael Dwyer is an American architect and author of books about architecture, including Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and Carolands (2006).
Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the New York architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis where he helped design several notable projects, including the Saint Thomas Choir School (completed 1987), a fifteen story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, [1] [2] described by architecture critic Paul Goldberger as "among the city's best examples of contextual architecture;" [3] and the Dana Discovery Center (completed 1993), a venue for environmental education, the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–93 restoration of Harlem Meer in Central Park's northeast corner. [4] [5] In a 1993 interview with the journal Progressive Architecture, Dwyer said that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design." [6] [4]
While at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture and a protagonist of its resuscitation. In a 1995 review by The New York Times of architecture's nascent classical revival, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown wrote that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," [7] a house whose new facade Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, characterized as "scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel." [8]
Interviewed by Brown for the article, Stern opined that the young classicists were "perhaps the true radicals of their time," whereas architect James Stewart Polshek, formerly dean of Columbia University's School of Architecture called them "bizarrely backward" and "lacking new ideas." Asked to weigh in, Yale historian Vincent Scully declared that "classicism speaks fundamentally to what people want, to security and dignity and permanence." [7]
In 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, where he supplemented landscape architect Kelly and Varnell's circular oak bosque and Penelope Jencks' bronze statue with granite medallions set into the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her). [9] [10]
In 1997, Dwyer restored the exterior of the George F. Baker Jr. House, completed in 1918 to the design of architects Delano and Aldrich, one of New York City's designated landmarks and one of its more splendid houses.
From 1998 to 2007, he was the consulting architect to the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women, helping to restore its clubhouse, designed by architect Thomas Harlan Ellett, and winner of the Architecture League's gold medal in 1933.
In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer prepared residential designs for New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side ( 960 Fifth Avenue, 720 Park Avenue, and River House); its west side ( The Dakota, The El Dorado, and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as East Hampton, Greenwich, and Nantucket.
The financier and preservationist Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's villa on the Hudson River. Jenrette described them in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:
In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.
Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank. [11]
The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, a new house in Southampton, New York designed by Dwyer for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a decade-long collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins. The principal rooms of Hollyhock's main wing include an entrance hall leading to an enfilade of high-studded rooms facing south: a dining room decorated with inset panels of 19th-century wall paper, a living room with boiserie painted a "rich watery blue," and a 55-foot-long library divided into three spaces by projecting bookcases. The principal feature of the entrance hall is an elliptical staircase (loosely inspired by a stair of Adler's, which in turn was inspired by a stair of architect John Russell Pope's) with a black and white starburst marble floor. [12] [13]
In Hollyhock's garden, designed by landscape architect Quincy Hammond in the grande manière, intended to extend the architecture of the house across the four acre grounds, Dwyer added a guest house (a kind of modern-day Petit Trianon), a garden pavilion in the form of an orangery, an arbor with eight salvaged limestone columns supporting teak lattice panels, and a garage building in the guise of a caretaker's cottage. The tile roofs and stucco facades of all the buildings allude to Red Maples, a house designed by the architects Hiss and Weekes, with gardens designed by Ferruccio Vitale, that stood on the site from 1913 until its demolition in 1947. [12] [13]
Dwyer's cousin, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Dwyer was the Adjutant General of Nevada from 1983 to 1986.