Harvey Wiley Corbett

Background

Harvey Wiley Corbett was born on January 8, 1873 in San Francisco, California, United States. He was the son of Samuel James Corbett and Elizabeth Wiley Corbett, both physicians.

Education

Corbett graduated from the University of California with the Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 1895. Like many American architects of that period, he completed his architectural education by attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He began his studies there in 1896 as a pupil of Jean-Louis Pascal and received a diploma in 1900.

Career

After returning from Paris Corbett worked briefly for the architects Cass Gilbert, Hunt and Hunt, and John Du Fais.

In 1903, in partnership with F. Livingston Pell, he formed the firm of Pell and Corbett. From 1905 to 1907 Pell and Corbett designed a building for the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and in 1908 they won a design competition for the civic center buildings of Springfield, Massachussets. In 1912 Corbett joined Frank J. Helmle, creating the firm of Helmle and Corbett. Their design and plans for the Terminal Building, west of Bryant Park in New York City, were approved just before a new city ordinance restricted the shape of high buildings in 1916. Nevertheless, the building was accepted at the time as a prominent example of the sort of structure that the progressive ordinance would bring. In 1920 Helmle and Corbett also designed Bush House in London, which the historian Nicholaus Pevsner said "represents a big-business classicism which the Americans handle more successfully than the English. "

Corbett taught architecture at Columbia University from 1907 to 1911 and from 1920 until 1935.

His firm forecast the form that the largest buildings would take under the new zoning law, and this information was widely disseminated in the form of renderings by the professional delineator Hugh Ferriss. Corbett was optimistic about the future city. Although the details of his vision were neither accurate nor well received by the professional planning community, his traffic proposal and his forecast successfully articulated the image of the futuristic city that held the imagination of Americans in the 1920's.

In 1928-1929 Helmle and Corbett, now joined by Wallace K. Harrison, put up the Master Building on Riverside Drive in New York. This edifice is Corbett's most interesting design. With its high tower, it is still the second tallest building (after Riverside Church) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Its upper floors were terraced in accord with the zoning law, and the brick curtain wall sheathing the steel-frame building was shaded from purple at the base to white at the top. According to Corbett this coloring gave it the character of organic growth. The building represents particularly well the amalgam of Beaux-Arts planning ideals, German expressionism, and a dose of the utopian futurism of the art deco architecture of the 1920's.

In 1930 the firm (further enlarged by the addition of William H. MacMurray), together with Hood, Godley and Fouilhoux, became consultants for the design of Rockefeller Center, for which the firm of Reinhard and Hofmeister had been retained earlier.

In May 1930 all three firms--thereafter known as the Associated Architects--were employed as the official architects of the center. It is difficult to assess what role Corbett played in the design of Rockefeller Center, which was essentially determined by 1932; specific design attributions are complicated because the management exerted an unusually powerful influence on the program. The Beaux-Arts monumentality of Rockefeller Center is offset somewhat by art deco architectural ornament in spandrels, by sculpted reliefs above entrances, and by the extensive mural decoration of the lobbies. The center's overwhelming size is ameliorated by its well-planned urban setting. The Channel Gardens, a promenade with descending pools that lead away from Fifth Avenue toward the skating rink, provides the conglomeration of large office buildings with a calm, restful focal point. The careful separation of traffic circulation and the shopping arcades, as well as some of the earlier plans for rooftop public gardens connected by bridges, seems reminiscent of Corbett's proposals for traffic schemes made in the early 1920's.

He designed the General Exhibits Group Building for the fair, later remarking that in planning this building he abandoned the old dictum that required symmetry and balance in design because such features occur only in coffins.

In 1932 Corbett and D. Everett Waide designed the north building of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on Madison Square in New York. Its faceted terminations recall Corbett's Master Building, although the rich texture provided by the polychrome brick surfaces of the earlier building was replaced here by monochrome masonry.

His last design--in association with Charles B. Meyers--was the Criminal Courts Building (1939) on Center Street in Manhattan. Housing both courts and a prison, it was known as "the Tombs" after its predecessor, a prison in the Egyptian style. The design is even more severe than that of Rockefeller Center.

The evolution of Corbett's stylistic development parallels that of many American architects trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. In the period before 1920 he worked in a generally neoclassical vein. Then, in 1922, his entry in the Chicago Tribune competition was a neogothic design, a shift away from Beaux-Arts principles toward a more freewheeling eclecticism that was characteristic of his Master Building. By the 1930's, however, because of the depression, which led to the replacement of independent patrons by large corporations and municipal and federal governments, and because of a change in taste, his style became more cautious. Even though his later projects were more monumental and awe-inspiring, they were less daring.

Achievements

• He established at the Columbia School of Architecture a Beaux-Arts type of atelier system. In the early and middle 1920's a time of limited building activity, Corbett chaired a committee of architects that proposed a multilevel solution to New York's traffic-congestion problems. Corbett was the chairman of the architectural commission for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, an indication of his ability to work with a committee of architects.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Year Book of the Architectural League of New York and Catalogue of the Twenty-fourth Annual Exhibition

Connections

In 1905 he married Gail Sherman, a sculptor and the daughter of Frederick C. Sherman, treasurer of Syracuse University. They had two children.

Father:

Samuel James Corbett

physician

Mother:

Elizabeth Wiley Corbett

physician

Spouse:

Gail Sherman

sculptor

References

• New York: 15 Walking Tours, An Architectural Guide to the Metropolis