Bertram Goodhue

Goodhue by Lee Lawrie, holding the Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago, Illinois

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (April 28, 1869–April 23, 1924) was a renowned American architect celebrated for his work in neo-gothic design. He also designed notable typefaces, including Cheltenham and Merrymount for the Merrymount Press.

Cram and Goodhue

Goodhue was born in Pomfret, Connecticut to Charles Wells Goodhue and his second wife, Helen (Eldredge) Grosvenor Goodhue. Due to financial constraints he was educated at home by his mother until, at age 11 years, he was sent to Russell's Collegiate and Military Institute. Finances prevented him from attending university, but he received an honorary degree from Trinity College in 1911. In lieu of formal training he moved to New York in 1884 to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell (one of its principals, James Renwick, Jr., was the architect of Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral, both in New York City). Goodhue's apprenticeship ended in 1891 when he won a design competition for St. Matthew's in Dallas.

Frieze above Goodhue's tomb, Church of the Intercession, New York City, New York

After completing his apprenticeship, Goodhue moved to Boston, where he was befriended by a group of young, artistic intellectuals involved in the founding of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston in 1897. This circle included Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University and Ernest Fenollosa of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was also through this group that Goodhue met Ralph Adams Cram, who would be his business partner for almost 25 years. Cram and Goodhue were members of several societies, including the "Pewter Mugs" and the "Visionists". In 1892–1893 they published a quarterly art magazine called The Knight Errant. The multitalented Goodhue was also a student of book design and type design. In 1896, he created the Cheltenham typeface for use by a New York printer, Cheltenham Press. This typeface came to be used as the headline type for The New York Times.

Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago

In 1891, Cram and Goodhue formed the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth, and Goodhue, renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1898. The firm was a leader in neo-gothic architecture, with significant commissions from ecclesiastical, academic, and institutional clients.

Independent Practice

When Goodhue left to begin his own practice in 1914, Cram had already earned his dream Gothic commission at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and continued to work in Gothic mode for the rest of his career.

Goodhue, in contrast, departed into a series of radically different stylistic experiments. The first was the Byzantine St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue in New York City, built on the new platform just above the Grand Central Terminal railyards. In 1915, Goodhue re-interpreted a masterful Spanish Baroque complete with Churrigueresque detailing, for El Prado, in Balboa Park for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, for which he was the lead designer. The Panama-California Exposition's style was extremely influential and led to California adopting Spanish Colonial Revival architecture as its unofficial regional style, which continues to this day. Goodhue's designs and his California regional style also dominated the architecture of public buildings and many grand residences during the building boom in Hawaii during the 1920s (Penkiunas 1990).

State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebraska

Eventually, Goodhue’s architectural creations became freed of architectural detail and more Romanesque, although he remained dedicated to the integration of sculpture, mosaic work, and color in his architecture. Towards the end of his career he arrived at a highly personal style, a synthesis of simplified form and a generalized archaic quality, and those innovations paved the way for others to transition to modern architectural idioms. This style is seen in the last two major projects, the Los Angeles Public Library and the Nebraska State Capitol, and in his similarly-styled entry for the Chicago Tribune competition.

Goodhue died in New York City and, at his request, was buried at the building he considered his finest, the Church of the Intercession. There, Lawrie created for him a Gothic styled tomb, featuring Goodhue recumbent, crowned by a halo of carvings of some of his buildings.

Influence

After Goodhue's unexpected death in 1924, many of his designs and projects were brought to completion by former associates like Carleton Winslow, and by a successor firm organized in New York, Mayers Murray & Phillip. Goodhue's office had employed figures like Clarence Stein, Wallace Harrison, Raymond Hood, and others, before their own careers.

Yale College Wolf's Head Senior Society's 'New Hall', designed ca. 1924

Over the course of his career, Goodhue relied on frequent collaborations with several significant artists and artisans. These included sculptor Lee Lawrie and mosaicist and muralist Hildreth Meiere. Their work is central to the aesthetic power and social messages implicit in Goodhue's best work. Lawrie worked with Cram and Goodhue for the Chapel at West Point, Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Bartholomew's, and the reredos at Church of St. Thomas, and then after Goodhue's independence in 1914, on the Nebraska State Capitol, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, D.C., and Christ Church Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the latter after Goodhue's death. Lawrie, Meiere, and "thematic consultant" Hartley Burr Alexander reassembled, in a way, for Rockefeller Center under architect Raymond Hood, who had also worked in Goodhue's office.

Along with Paul Cret and others, Goodhue is sometimes credited with the transition to art deco, as in his design for the Nebraska State Capitol building, by dint of which he may be retroactively classified as an American Modernist. His dedication to the integration of art and architecture was exactly contrary to the spirit of Modernism, and at least partly accounts for the academic and critical neglect of his work. However, a recent dissertation (Penkiunas 1990) on American regional architecture in Hawaii credits Goodhue not only with creating a distinctive California regional style, but also directly influencing the dominance of that style in the public (and much private) architecture of Hawaii during the building boom of the 1920s.

A significant archive of Goodhue's correspondence, architectural drawings, and professional papers is held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Work

Church of St Thomas, New York City, New York

Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

• All Saints' Church, Ashmont, Massachusetts, 1892
• Public Library, Nashua, New Hampshire, 1902
• Grace Church Chapel, Chicago, Illinois, 1904
• The Chapel and the original campus of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, 1906
• Saint Thomas Church in New York City, 1906
• First Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1909
• St. John's Episcopal Church, West Hartford, Connecticut, 1909
• Church of the Intercession, New York, New York, 1913
• St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City, 1913
• Hotel Washington, Colon, Panama, 1913
• Ford Hall, Rutgers University, 1914
• Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia, 1914
• El Prado Quadrangle, Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 1915
• The Fine Arts Building and the California Building (now the "Museum of Man") in Balboa Park for the Panama-California Exposition Buildings, San Diego, California, 1915
• Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, commissioned 1918, built 1925–1928
• the town plan and several buildings for the "Million Dollar Ghost Town", Tyrone, New Mexico
• Grolier Club Library, New York City, 1917
• St. Vincent Ferrer, New York City, 1920
• Oahu College and Kamehameha Schools, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1915–1920
• Naval Training Center, San Diego, California, 1921
• Marine Corp Recruit Depot, San Diego, California, 1921
• Nebraska State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1924
• National Academy of Sciences Building, Washington, D.C., 1924
• Richard Riordan Central Library, Los Angeles, California, 1924
• Master Plan, the Physics Building, Dabney Hall, and other campus buildings for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, California, 1924
• Fraternity House of the Rensselaer Society of Engineers, Troy, New York, 1922–1924
• Trinity English Lutheran Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1924
• Yale University Wolf's Head Secret Society, New Haven, Connecticut, designed ca. 1924, built posthumously.
• Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, commissioned 1919, completed in 1931 by the successor firm of Mayers Murray & Phillip.
• Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, commissioned 1922, completed 1927 by Hardie Phillip.
• Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1925-1928.
• Lihiwai (residence of the governor of the Territory of Hawaii), Honolulu, Hawaii, 1927-1929 (completed by Hardie Phillip).
• C. Brewer Building, Honolulu, Hawaii, completed 1931 by Hardie Phillip.

References

• Oliver, Richard. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 for the Architectural History Foundation. xii + 297 pp.; 146 illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0262150248
• Penkiunas, Daina Julia. American Regional Architecture in Hawaii: Honolulu, 1915–1935. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1990. (Published by UMI, Ann Arbor, 1993.)
• Whitaker, Charles Harris, ed. With text by Hartley Burr Alexander, Ralph Adams Cram, George Ellery Hale, Lee Lawrie, and C. Howard Walker. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue: Architect and Master of Many Arts. New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, Inc., 1996. ISBN 978-1558351479

External links

• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue architectural drawings and papers, 1882-1980. Held in the Dept. of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.
• Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, MI
• Online history of Hotel Washington in Panama
• St. John's Episcopal Church, West Hartford, Connecticut
• Font Designer - Bertram G. Goodhue
• About the National Academy of Sciences Building, Washington, D.C.
• An Alphabet of Celebrities illustrated by Bertram Goodhue, available in full text and with full zoomable page images in the University of Florida Digital Collections

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bertram Goodhue