McKim, Mead, and White

McKim, Mead, and White was the premier architectural firm in the eastern United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The firm consisted of Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White. McKim and White studied under Henry Hobson Richardson before forming their own firm. They were associated with the City Beautiful and Beaux Arts movements, which aimed to clean up the visual confusion of American cities and imbue them with a sense of order and noble formality. The time tested steadfastness of their design work ought to be revisited in the future and may help to influence a new architectural paradigm for the future.

Related Topics:
Architectural firm - Charles McKim - William Mead - Stanford White - Henry Hobson Richardson - City Beautiful - Beaux Arts

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"McKim, White, and Mead each brought specific and identifiable strengths to the partnership. McKim was a designer with a keen understanding of early American buildings and decorative arts, a powerful ability to simplify forms, and a list of clients and connections that would benefit the firm for the next thirty years. White was a skilled artist, capable of creating elegant details and brilliant arrangements of texture, color and objects based on unconventional juxtapositions. Mead ran the office and, in his own words, "kept partners from making damn fools of themselves."

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It would be misleading to spend too much effort sorting out their individual contributions on specific projects and incorrect to see their work as anything less than a collaboration. McKim, Mead & White's architecture rose to the level of excellence because the strengths and weaknesses of each partner complemented the others, because each architect understood his own role in the process, and because they worked together. Individually, Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White might have been interesting footnotes in the history of late-nineteenth-century American architecture, By their collaboration, they defined it.

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During the period between 1879 and 1912, McKim, Mead & White became the largest and most important architecture office in America, if not in the world. With a staff that grew to over one hundred, the firm became the model for the modern architectural practice. In order to manage multiple large commissions, they established procedures for controlling every stage and detail of the architectural process. During its first thirty years the firm received and executed nearly one thousand commissions, championed the movement to introduce classical order to America's cities, trained the next generation of American architects, created standards of conduct for professional practice in this country, and were awarded, through McKim, the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

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The partners liked to design houses. McKim started out in 1872 as a house architect. By 1879 he had completed summer houses in Elberon, New Jersey, Newport, Rhode Island, and St. James, Long Island. Even after the rapid growth of the partnership, and as he became more identified with the firm's largest institutional and commercial commissions, McKim never abandoned his interest in creating houses for the American landscape.

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Stanford White started out seven years behind McKim, but he eventually became the partner in charge of most residential commissions. White was a better draftsman as well as a more facile and intuitive designer than McKim, and he was not wedded to a single formal paradigm. He saw houses, including their contents, their owners, and even their occupancy, as scenographic elements in the performance of life. He often designed furniture for the elegant houses he planned. Believing that an architect should live better than his clients, White was the only one of the three partners to maintain elaborate country and city residences. He extended the traditional limits of architectural services to include interior decoration, dealing in art and antiques, and even planning and designing parties."

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