Michael Middleton Dwyer | |
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 Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River at Barrytown, New York | |
| Born | 1954 Philadelphia, PA, USA |
| Nationality | American |
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| Occupation | Architect |
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Michael Dwyer is an American architect and author of books about architecture, including Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and Carolands (2006).
Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1995 with the New York architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he helped design several noteworthy buildings. Among them was the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987. [1] [2] Writing in The New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger placed the school "among the city's best examples of contextual architecture." [3]
Another project, the Dana Discovery Center, a venue for environmental education, was the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–93 reconstruction of Harlem Meer, an eleven-acre lake in Central Park's northeast corner. [4] [5] In a 1993 interview with the journal Progressive Architecture, Dwyer said that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design." [6] [4]
In his book The Architecture of Additions (1998), architect Paul Byard wrote that the Dana Center "is sized to be not too big for its adopted idiom but at the same time an effective presence and marker for one of the defining corners of the park." To Byard, the building's use of the "spiky polychrome architecture of the [earliest] park buildings, with porches, porticos, a steeply pitched and pinnacled tile roof, and rich, multi-colored ornamentation" served to connect the northernmost end of the park to the more developed southern part. [7]
During his time at Buttrick White & Burtis, Michael Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture and a protagonist of its resuscitation. In a 1995 review of architecture's nascent classical revival by The New York Times, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown wrote that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," [8] a house characterized by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, as "scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel." [9]
Interviewed by Brown for the article, dean Stern opined that the young classicists were "perhaps the true radicals of their time," whereas architect James Stewart Polshek, formerly dean of Columbia University's School of Architecture called them "bizarrely backward" and "lacking new ideas." Asked to weigh in, Yale historian Vincent Scully declared that "classicism speaks fundamentally to what people want, to security and dignity and permanence." [8]
In 1996, Dwyer and interior designer Ungkun Sae-Eng formed Dwyer & Sae-Eng, an architecture and design firm, after which they repurposed a derelict auto-repair garage on Gansevoort Street in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, a newly formed historic district in the northwest corner of Greenwich village. The renovated space did double-duty as a studio for Dwyer's architecture practice, and a venue for Establishment, Sae-Eng's showcase for Southeast Asian art and antiques.
In 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, where he supplemented landscape architect Kelly and Varnell's circular oak bosque and Penelope Jencks' bronze statue with granite medallions set into the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her). [10] [11] At the monument's dedication on October 5, 1996, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the keynote address.
In 1997, Dwyer restored the exterior of the George F. Baker Jr. House, built in 1918 at 75 East 93rd Street The house was designated a landmark in 1969 by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission whose report called it "an outstanding example of a modified Federal style...one of the finest works in New York City by the architects, Delano and Aldrich."
From 1998 to 2007, Dwyer was the consulting architect to New York's Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women, helping to restore its clubhouse, designed by architect Thomas Harlan Ellett and awarded the Architectural League's 1933 gold medal.
On a parallel track, Dwyer prepared designs for the upper strata of New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side (960 Fifth Avenue, 720 Park Avenue, and River House); its west side (The Dakota, The Majestic, and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Rye, Greenwich, and Nantucket.
In 1996, the financier, preservationist, and author Dick Jenrette engaged Dwyer to design a major alteration to his Carnegie Hill townhouse at 69 East 93rd Street, which he described in his memoir, Adventures with old houses:
For the next seven years (1989–1996), I lived quite happily at No. 69 East 93rd Street...I liked the light and the height of the ceilings, but the house lacked a grand ceremonial entrance staircase as I had enjoyed next door at No. 67 East 93rd Street...I even went so far as to commission Michael Dwyer, my favorite young neo-classical architect in Manhattan, to design a new interior layout. His plan 'borrowed' half the six-car garage on the first floor and would have created an elegant entrance hall and elliptical staircase ascending to the piano nobile.
Jenrette abandoned his plan to renovate No. 69 when he bought the house next door for a second time and moved back to 67 East 93rd Street.
In 1997, Jenrette commissioned Dwyer to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's villa on the Hudson River. Jenrette described them in his memoir:
In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.
Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank. [12]
The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, a new house in Southampton, New York designed by Dwyer for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a decade-long collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins.
In Dwyer's plan for Hollyhock's main wing, an entrance hall leads to an enfilade of three high-studded, south-facing rooms: a dining room embellished by Williams with panels of 18th-century wall paper; a living room with boiserie painted a "rich watery blue" by Williams and a 55-foot-long, pine-paneled library designed by Dwyer, divided into three spaces by projecting bookcases in the tradition of David Adler's Wheeler House library (1934); Bigelow & Wadsworth's reading room at the Boston Atheneum (1914); Charles Follen McKim's University Club library (1904); and Christopher Wren's library at Trinity College (1695).
The principal feature of the entrance hall is Dwyer's design for an elliptical staircase, inspired by a design of Adler's that was inspired by a design of John Russell Pope's, to which Dwyer added a black and white starburst marble floor. [13] [14]
In Hollyhock's gardens, designed by landscape architect Quincy Hammond in the grande manière, Dwyer built a guest house (a kind of modern-day Petit Trianon); a garden pavilion in the form of an orangery; an arbor with limestone columns supporting teak lattice panels; and a garage building in the guise of a caretaker's cottage. (Link to photographs of Hollyhock's landscape.)
Hollyhock's tile roofs and stucco facades allude to Red Maples, a house designed by the architects Hiss and Weekes, with gardens designed by Ferruccio Vitale, that stood on the site from 1913 until its demolition in 1947. [13] [14]
In its 2013 review of Michael Dwyer's work, the editors of The Franklin Report wrote, "Dwyer has a strong command of historical reference and is adept at renovating prewar building interiors. Sources praise Dwyer's impressive intellect and charming nature while noting that the firm's 'confidence in its skills' may come across as rigid to unsuspecting clients."
In 2015, the Institute of Traditional Architecture ranked Dwyer No.22 on its list of the world's top 50 architects working in the traditional idiom.
See main gallery at Wikimedia Commons
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