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Charles Donagh Maginnis was born on January 7, 1867 in Londonderry, Ireland. He was the son of Charles and Bridget McDonagh Maginnis.
With his mother, brothers, and sister he immigrated to Canada in 1885; from Toronto he went to Boston in 1888.
With his skill at drawing, learned first at Cusack's Academy in Dublin, Maginnis earned his early livelihood by teaching at the Cowles Art School in Boston from 1895 to 1897, and by writing his Pen Drawing, published in Boston in 1898, went through seven editions.
An expert draftsman, he was welcomed as an apprentice in several Boston offices, most notably that of the city architect, Edmund Wheelwright, which he entered in 1891.
In 1898, Maginnis joined Timothy Walsh (1868-1934) of Peabody and Stearns and Matthew Sullivan (1868-1938) of Wheelwright's company to form their own company. This was the same year he designed St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. This commission started his career designing buildings for the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1906, Mr. Sullivan withdrew and the firm was renamed, Maginnis & Walsh. This firm would become one of the leading architectural firms in the first half of the 20th century. In 1909, Maginnis & Walsh won the competition to build the new campus of Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
The collegiate Gothic design was deemed "the most beautiful campus in America" by The American Architect magazine and established the firm's reputation in collegiate and ecclesiastical architecture. Maginnis & Walsh went on to design buildings at over twenty-five colleges and universities around the country, including the main buildings at Emmanuel College, Boston MA, the chapel at Trinity College and the law school at the University of Notre Dame.
In the Boston area, Maginnis also built the church of St. Catherine of Genoa in Somerville, Massachusetts, St. John The Evangelist in Cambridge and St. Aidan's Church in Brookline, Massachusetts where he was a parishioner along with the Kennedy family and other prominent Irish-Americans. St. Aidan's, the location of the christening of John F. Kennedy, has since been closed and may be converted into housing in the near future.
In other parts of the country, he designed the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C. , the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore and the interior of Emmanual Masqueray's Basilica of St Mary in Minneapolis as well as the sacristy and rectory for the Cathedral of St. Paul in Saint Paul.
Among his other designs are the chancel at Trinity Church in Boston's Copley Square and the high altar at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.
In 1883, Maginnis was awarded the Queen's prize in mathematics given by the South Kensington Museum School of Art in London. His first national recognition came in 1925 and 1927, with gold medals from the American Institute of Architects for ecclesiastical architecture. Other honors included two J. Harleston Parker gold medals, one for the Science Building of Boston College (1925) and another for the Nazareth Home for Children in Jamaica Plain, Massachusets (1954), and a diploma of honor from the Budapest Exhibition of 1930 for the Tower Building of Boston College. In 1900, Maginnis became a member of the Boston Society of Architects and was its president from 1924 to 1926; he joined the American Institute of Architects in 1901, became a fellow in 1906, the first vice-president in 1932, and president from 1937 to 1939.
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Maginnis was an archetypical late Victorian eclectic architect of the generation of Ralph Adams Cram, Charles Follen McKim, and Bertram Goodhue. Like them, he based architecture on careful reproduction of classic historical styles one per building; like theirs, his designs were on a much grander scale than the early nineteenth-century revivals and were detailed with much greater accuracy.
Also like them, Maginnis held definite convictions about beauty, historical continuity in architecture, and the role of architects in society, which set him against the tide of modernism sweeping into the United States from Europe in the 1930's. Maginnis considered himself a conservative. He maintained what he considered the traditional distinction between architecture and engineering.
Long before Lewis Mumford's disenchantment with the great future promised by early twentieth-century science, Maginnis declared that the universal spread of modern architecture produced only universal monotony. Yet he recognized that his era was doomed. "Nothing is more evident, " he wrote in his 1945 address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, "than that the world which is in the making will be an extremely uncomfortable place for the conservative. "
Maginnis was representative of his generation of conservative architects in his feeling of helplessness in the face of the wave of modern architecture. Although the late Victorian eclectics could not accept the idea that forms might have an extrinsic meaning the concept of architecture as a visual metaphor for social and political ideas in retrospect it is plain that Maginnis' inability to conduct a defense against the modern movement arose from his basic acceptance of its underlying premises.
Quite like his modernist opponents, Maginnis took for granted that architecture was a matter of personal sensitivity and aesthetic reactions; he delighted in recounting occasions on which he had talked clients into "better taste. " He differed from the modernists only in his opinion of what was aesthetically pleasing.
He also accepted the premise that good architecture involves a direct expression of the nature of structure and materials.
What Maginnis and his generation seemed unable to understand was that once these two major points are conceded that good architecture is a matter of sensitive aesthetic reactions, produced by judicious manipulation of solids and voids then there really is no reason to maintain any historical style at all. Thus Maginnis not only serves as an admirable example of the last generation of historical architects but also provides some insight into why they were the last.
Quotations:
"Both have their feet on the ground, but the architect's head is in the stars. "
"The high distinction of Greek architecture was the sensitiveness with which it manifested its primitive system of construction. "
"Romanesque was an episode of the great Gothic system which seized a latent structural principle and carried it forward to astonishing integrity. "
Maginnis was a member of the Municipal Art Commission of Boston, Massachusetts State Art Commission, Visiting Committee of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, National Academy of Design, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and many other organizations.
Maginnis was a member of possibly the last generation of self-educated architects: his professional assets consisted of draftsmanship, mathematics, intelligent reading, and great native charm.
Maginnis was married to Amy Brooks Maginnis.
1836 - 1906
27 April 1884 - 11 November 1937
4 January 1909 - 10 November 1992
16 October 1916 - 16 September 2001
20 October 1910 - 25 February 1954
7 July 1912 - 1922
