The architecture book of the season is Carrère & Hastings, Architects published by the indispensable Acanthus Press.
House Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1908
It is a lavishly produced, two-volume boxed set of 800 pages in total, with 800 illustrations including floor plans and nine gatefold spreads.
The four authors -- Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, Charles D. Warren, and William Morrison -- have given us the first ever monograph on one of the handful of the most important architectural firms in our nation's history. John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings are most famous as the architects of the New York Public Library and of the Henry Clay Frick mansion that now houses the Frick Collection in New York. But their works can be seen across the country and even abroad.
John Merven Carrère (1858-1911)
Thomas Hastings (1860-1929)
What's special about the monograph is that it attempts to cover the full range of the work of Carrère & Hastings, and is broken down by building type: commercial buildings, civic works, libraries, city houses, country houses, churches and tombs, expositions, and academic and institutional buildings. Like McKim, Mead & White, for whom both Carrère and Hastings had worked, the firm was full-service, capable of designing any type of building or place at the highest level of quality and refinement. The Project List compiled for the monograph takes us from 1885 to 1929 and takes us to St. Augustine, Florida; Greenwich, Connecticut; Southampton, New York; Morristown, New Jersey; Richmond, Virginia; Providence, Rhode Island; Chicago; Palm Beach, Florida; Washington, D.C.; Newport, Rhode Island; Tuxedo Park, New York; Aiken, South Carolina; New Haven, Connecticut; Philadelphia; Boston; Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg in Canada; Havana; Mexico City; Asunción, Paraguay; and not least several important commissions in London, England--so you get the idea, this book takes us way beyond the Carrère & Hastings that is all around us in New York City. The paucity of archival materials on Carrère & Hastings is why we've waited so long for a monograph. But there is great virtue in compiling everything we do have and putting it between covers. This book offers a great deal of groundbreaking research, and of course there are the buildings themselves.
In recent years we've seen gaps filled in with the publication of Michael Kathrens's American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, Jeffrey Tillman's Arthur Brown Jr.: Progressive Classicist, and Peter Pennoyer and Ann Walker's The Architecture of Delano & Aldrich and The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore. (Pennoyer and Walker are currently at work on Grosvenor Atterbury.) Add in Henry Hope Reed's trio of monographs on great individual buildings (The United States Capitol, The Library of Congress, and The New York Public Library), and the magisterial series by Robert A.M. Stern et al. on New York (New York 1880, New York 1900, New York 1930, New York 1960, and, now, New York 2000), and I think we can safely say the last few years have been the best years ever for publications on American architecture -- at least the classical tradition in American architecture.