Background
Clay Lancaster was born on March 30, 1917, in Lexington, Kentucky, United States.
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, United States
In 1936, Clay attended the Art Students League of New York.
Lexington, KY 40506, United States
In 1938, Clay received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kentucky, and then a Master of Arts in 1939.
(In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primar...)
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of garden ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs. In the original use of the word, these buildings had no other use, but from the 19th to 20th centuries the term was also applied to highly decorative buildings that had secondary practical functions such as housing, sheltering or business use.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CKP6I/?tag=2022091-20
1960
(Comprehensive, street-by-street guide to historic houses,...)
Comprehensive, street-by-street guide to historic houses, churches and public buildings of New York City’s first suburb. Author takes readers down such picturesque thoroughfares as Remsen, Willow, Hicks and Jerusalem Streets, describing over 600 vintage homes. 88 illustrations. Glossary of architectural terms.
https://www.amazon.com/Old-Brooklyn-Heights-Yorks-Suburb/dp/0486238725/?tag=2022091-20
1980
(This classic children's storybook is about Michiko—a litt...)
This classic children's storybook is about Michiko—a little Japanese girl—who, all alone, makes the long journey from a small country village in Japan to her new home and life in Brooklyn Heights.
https://www.amazon.com/Michiko-Mrs-Belmonts-Brownstone-Brooklyn-Heights-ebook/dp/B019M8MZBM/?tag=2022091-20
2015
editor educator writer architector
Clay Lancaster was born on March 30, 1917, in Lexington, Kentucky, United States.
In 1936, Clay attended the Art Students League of New York. In 1938, he received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kentucky, and then a Master of Arts in 1939. During his graduate studies, Clay Lancaster realized his talent for drawing precise floor plans. His master’s thesis was a profile on the eccentric architect John McMurtry. This work was published as a book entitled Back Streets and Pine Trees in 1956. Lancaster was also a student of the arts and ideas of the eastern and western worlds.
After completing his master’s degree, Lancaster moved to Brooklyn Heights and lectured at Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the fifties, he lectured at Cooper Union, Columbia, and the Traphagen art school in New York. In 1968 he originated a course, "Asian Art and its Influence on Europe and America," that was given at New York University.
In the 1960s, he became the curator of Prospect Park. While residing in Brooklyn Heights, Clay Lancaster was recruited by the Community Conservation and Improvement Council (CCIC), area's active preservation forces. He began his work researching and documenting the case for the preservation of Brooklyn Heights. In December 1961, Lancaster's findings were published in a book entitled, Old Brooklyn Heights: New York's First Suburb.
Lancaster left Brooklyn unhappily in the late 1960s after his apartment was burglarized. He then moved to Nantucket, and subsequently moved back to his home state of Kentucky in 1978. He lived at Warwick, his estate on the Kentucky River in Mercer County, in “blissful solitude.” During that time he gave a course on Kentucky architecture at Transylvania University, and it became a seminar in the College of Architecture at the University of Kentucky in the fall. In 1980 he presented a class on "Asian Art and Its Influence on Europe and America" at Transylvania. In 1983, as Morgan Professor at the University of Louisville, he repeated the Kentucky architecture course and conducted a seminar on "Asian Influences on Western Architecture."
Several years prior to his death, Lancaster founded the Warwick Foundation, an organization whose current mission “is to perpetuate and promote the legacy of Clay Lancaster through education, preservation, and facilitation of cross-cultural understanding.”
In addition to previously mentioned Old Brooklyn Heights: New York's First Suburb, Lancaster authored Architectural Follies in America (1960), Ante Bellum Houses of the Bluegrass (1961), The Japanese Influence in America (1963), Prospect Park Handbook (1967), The Architecture of Historic Nantucket (1972), New York Interiors at the Turn of the Century (1976), Nantucket in the Nineteenth Century (1979), The American Bungalow (1985), Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky (1991), The Arts and Crafts of the Animals (1993), The Breadth and Depth of East and West (1995), and Pleasant Hill: Shaker Canaan in Kentucky (2000). A collection of his photographs appears in James D. Birchfield, Clay Lancaster's Kentucky: Architectural Photographs of a Preservation Pioneer (2007).
(In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primar...)
1960(This classic children's storybook is about Michiko—a litt...)
2015(Traces the development of the bungalow, shows a variety o...)
1985(Comprehensive, street-by-street guide to historic houses,...)
1980