Chester Holmes Aldrich was an American architect. He was a co-founder of Delano & Aldrich firm, and later director of the American Academy in Rome.
Background
Chester Holmes Aldrich was born on June 4, 1871 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. He was the third son and third of four children of Elisha Smith Aldrich, a merchant, and Anna Elizabeth Gladding. Of an old New England family, he was a distant cousin of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, a first cousin once removed of President James B. Angell of the University of Michigan, and a younger brother of Richard Aldrich, music critic of the New York Times.
Education
Aldrich received his first architectural training at the Columbia College School of Mines, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1893. Later he studied at the École des Beaux Arts.
Career
Early in career Aldrich entered the office of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, where he had acquired his first practical experience. In that office he rendered the firm's prize-winning competition drawings for the New York Public Library and met William Adams Delano, who followed him to Paris when he went back to complete his training. Graduating from the École in 1900, he again entered the Carrère & Hastings office. In 1903, when Delano, too, was graduated from the École, the two founded the firm of Delano & Aldrich. While Carrère & Hastings were famous for their reinterpretation of the French Renaissance, Delano & Aldrich established a reputation of their own by subtly blending elements from the Early Georgian of Sir Christopher Wren's time with the Regency style. It was Delano, however, who saw to it that they got their first big commission, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore (1905), founded by Henry Walters. This splendid opportunity might not have come their way if Delano had not accompanied his friend Cornelius Vanderbilt III to Venice aboard the Vanderbilt yacht. Walters dropped anchor nearby, and he and the architect struck up a friendship while doing the local antique shops.
Delano & Aldrich will be best remembered, however, not for the Italianate Walters Gallery but for the James A. Burden residence at Syosset, Long Island; for the New York town house built by the widow of Willard Straight; and for four clubs in New York City: the Brook, the Union, the Knickerbocker, and the Colony. All of these buildings were in the Georgian-cum-Regency manner; the last, a handsome addition to the Park Avenue of 1915, must be attributed to Aldrich alone. Its success made it possible for him to design the Chapin School, New York City (1927), the Charles A. Lindbergh residence at Hopewell, New Jersey (1931), and the Kips Bay Boys Club, New York City (1930), among a variety of other commissions, both residential and institutional, that came to the firm.
Aldrich was especially interested in the social work carried on by the Kips Bay Boys Club. For twenty years he was its president. He also watched over a farm on Staten Island for boys released from hospitals but in need of rehabilitation before returning to their jobs. He took any public responsibility seriously, and from 1917 to 1919 he was a member of the American Red Cross Commission to Italy.
In 1935, when offered the chance to head the American Academy in Rome, he felt he could not refuse, even though this meant severing his relations with the firm.
He died on December 26, 1940 in Rome.
Achievements
Membership
Aldrich was a fellow member of the American Institute of Architects, an associate member of the National Academy of Design, and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"It was Aldrich who kept the firm together. I was always much too dominating. " - William Adams Delano
Connections
Aldrich never married and lived most of his life with his sister Amey.