Customer Reviews

James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (American Monograph)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Yale's Harkness Memorial Quadrangle was hailed as a `Neo-Gothic masterpiece' by Architectural Record in an issue fully devoted to the project in 1921. Yale rewarded designer James Gamble Rogers (a Yale alumnus, `Scroll & Key' initiate, and École des Beaux-Arts graduate) with an honorary Doctorate and the post of Consulting Architect. Over the next eleven years Rogers produced Sterling Memorial Library, numerous residential colleges, and a campus with an enduring (if derivative) institutional ethos.

Rogers was no less influential at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and several other educational institutions. He produced two large insurance company headquarters (Connecticut General and Ętna in Hartford), mansions and the Yale Club and in New York City, several courthouses, banks, a museum, resort clubs and housing, churches and parish houses, and hospitals (36 rural hospitals for the Commonwealth Fund; Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Memorial Sloane-Kettering Hospital in New York City). His work was valued for its comfortable functionality and easily identifiable purpose.

The utility of cultivating social ties with fellow-alumni and wealthy patrons is nowhere better exhibited than in Rogers' able career. He married into an influential Chicago family (relatives of the McCormicks); Edward S. Harkness and John Sterling were both wealthy Yale graduates, as were several other clients. Yet his ability matched his charisma. He successfully moved his practice from the altier (studio) model to a architectural corporate practice that produced profitable, lasting work befitting each commission.

This volume (hardcover) comprises a 234-page text, 225 illustrations, and a Chronology of Work (1893-1946). The only defect is the belaboring of architectural theory (without much context) at the expense of the Rogers' late personal history. Larger issues (e.g. modernists' condemnation of derivative design as heresy) are largely unexplored, as is the birth (and contrasting career) of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1867 (three months after James Gamble Rogers).

Nonetheless, this is the best text on a neglected, important architect whose work remains much-beloved today.

I have never had such pleasure!