Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers

Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers
An Architectural Appreciation
Third Article

Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In the mid 19th Century the Ecole had the highest esteem of any school in the West teaching the arts. In architecture it offered a rigorous eight-year course in the techniques and aesthetics of the classic Greek and Roman ideal as filtered through the Italian Renaissance. Not only was the course work rigid, but the aesthetics it taught were rigid as well. But there were many artists and architects who felt that it taught students to merely make copies of copies of copies. By the end of the nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor and was considered passé.

Hunt was born in Vermont to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His father, a U.S. Congressman, died when Hunt was six. His mother moved the family to Europe where he developed a love for antique Normandy architecture, a local variation of the Romanesque. That was the style he brought with him when he returned to America. With only one exception he never worked in the Beaux Arts style.

The Normandy style is characterized by large asymmetrical buildings in stone with towers and turrets. Grey Towers, in Milford, built for the James Pinchot family, (in 1886, the same year as The Allegheny County Court House), was an example of a summer country retreat on a domestic scale. A similar building, but on a very grand scale, is his Biltmore Estate in Ashville, N.C.

In essence, Hunt was a society architect, designing homes for the well to do. That is understandable: in those days that was where the money was. Inspired by the work done by Hunt and H.H. Richardson, that generation saw the monumental buildings erected by America’s robber barons to their self glorification. All of those buildings had the requirement that the buildings reflect European models; the most favored being the Beaux arts classic revival and the Gothic. The Woolworth Building in New York City is a Gothic cathedral of commerce. The Pennsylvania State Capitol Building is a masterpiece of Beaux Arts Classic Revival, although that architect never studied there.

Hunt is acknowledged as a good architect. But his work never realized a personal idiom, a signature quality. He is respected because he introduced an aesthetic beyond the prevailing style. By so doing he made it acceptable for others to explore beyond the boundaries of what was the accepted norm. He often worked in partnership with Frederick Olmstead who championed “naturalistic” architecture. We remember Hunt’s name because he was located in the cultural center of 19th Century America, the northeast corridor, Boston to Washington. He was active in arts circles: he opened the first American school for architecture and co-founded The American Institute of Architects.

Before leaving France for the United States, Hunt worked on the extension of the Louvre Museum. In Boston he designed the Fogg Art Museum. He designed the base for the Statue of Liberty and the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, as a man of his time, many of the residential buildings he designed have been razed.

Grey Towers is a National Historic Landmark. It is a fine building and it affords a good example of the work of a man who was important in the history of American architecture. It is built of native stone and it has one interesting detail in regard to its setting, Milford. The cut blocks of local bluestone at the corners and around the windows and doors are staggered quoins, alternating short and long sides of the blocks. They do not appear on the original drawings and might have been added by James Pinchot in reference to his French ancestry. The Pinchot buildings subsequent to Grey Towers, Forest Hall and Normandy Cottage, have that same detail.

That detail can also be found on the Penn DOT facility on Bennett Avenue, 1933. If that references the Pinchot buildings, it acknowledges the contribution of the Pinchot family to the history of the State. In architecture, those detail references are called Quotations and it is a common device of Post Modern Architecture. The Pennstar bank on West Harford street references a 19th Century gable end domestic structure: it is a Post Modern building with a pronounced quotation. The beautiful wisteria planted around the building can be understood as quoting the Pinchot’s Finger Bowl.

Hunt’s contribution aside, the Landmark designation is primarily for the work of Gifford Pinchot. It was there that his father, James, encouraged him to give his thoughts to forestry. When that home was built, the surrounding hills had been clear-cut of their chestnut trees. Photographs in the Pike County Historic Society show the house as the area looked at that time.

The Pinchot family’s interest in forestry can be understood as one of the forces for change in America’s relationship to its natural resources and to its environment. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that the Pinchot’s reverence for the American landscape contributed to that aspect of the development of an American architecture as well. That, and the earlier American architects, Richard Morris Hunt, H.H.Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan, all set the stage for the birth of an American architecture. With the invention of ferrocement in 1895, the year of Hunt’s death, the moment had arrived.

Published in The Pike County Dispatch