(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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About the Book
Titles in this category dealing with Ar...)
About the Book
Titles in this category dealing with Architecture describe the practice of designing buildings and other structures. Architecture covers ancient civilizations, like Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Asia, and old Islam. In Europe in the Middle Ages, the most challenging buildings were abbeys and cathedrals, which carried through the Renaissance. Styles of architecture include Classical, Greek, Gothic and Modern. Practical architecture also covers hospital, cottage and house design, draughting, the provision of drainage, rendering, and surveying. They cover American (e.g. Rhode Island), English and French architectural styles.
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Henry Van Brunt was an American architect and writer.
Background
Henry Van Brunt was born on September 5, 1832, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Commodore Gershom Jaques Van Brunt, of the United States Navy, and Elizabeth Price (Bradlee) Van Brunt.
On his father's side, he was descended from Rutger Joesten Van Brunt, who emigrated from the Netherlands in 1653 and in 1657, settled in New Utrecht, Long Island (now part of Brooklyn).
One of his mother's ancestors is said to have been Nathaniel Bradlee, a participant in the Boston Tea Party.
Education
Van Brunt was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard University. During his freshman year, he had a serious accident to his hip, which left him at least a partial invalid for the rest of his life.
He graduated in 1854. He then entered the Boston office of George Snell, architect, as a student; in 1856, he went to New York and became a student in the famous office-atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, where he remained for several years.
Career
During the Civil War, Van Brunt was for two years clerk to Commodore L. M. Goldsborough of the North Atlantic Squadron and saw service in Virginia and North Carolina. In 1863, he formed a partnership, Ware and Van Brunt, with William Robert Ware, whom he had met in Hunt's office. The work done with Ware included the First Church, Boston, Memorial Hall, Weld Hall, and the east wing of the college library at Harvard, and the library of the University of Michigan.
Ware retired completely from the partnership in 1881; it was not formally dissolved, however, till 1883. Van Brunt thereupon took into partnership Frank M. Howe, who had been an employee of the firm since 1868, and the remainder of his architectural work was done under the firm name of Van Brunt and Howe.
Commissioned by his friend Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railway (1884 - 90), to design a large number of railroad stations in the West, Van Brunt sent Howe to Kansas City to open an office in 1885 and followed him soon after. Few architects of their training were then settled in the Middle West, and a large amount of work came to them.
It included the railroad stations at Ogden, Utah; Sioux City, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; and Omaha, Nebraska; the store of the Emery, Bird, Thayer Dry Goods Company at Kansas City; large houses for the Armour and Griffiths families and for August R. Meyer, and other work largely residential and commercial.
They were associated with McKim, Mead and White in the New York Life Insurance Building at Kansas City and, as the most important architectural firm west of Chicago, were commissioned to design the Electricity Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 at Chicago. He declined to run for the office a second time because he was planning a long tour in Europe for study and rest, his first trip out of the United States. It signaled his practical retirement from active practice.
Van Brunt's architectural work is characteristic of the eclecticism of his time. He started with a strong bias towards Ruskin-inspired Gothic, but later worked in the popular Romanesque and in various types of classic as well; the work which seems best today, however, is characterized by a strong personal search for original and honest expression.
Van Brunt died in Milton, Massachusetts, survived by his wife and their seven children.
Achievements
Van Brunt had been one of the earliest members of the American Institute of Architects, and a fellow since 1864; he was a secretary in 1861 and president in 1899. His most important contribution was in his writings; many magazine articles on architectural subjects are distinguished for their keen analysis, and their graceful and persuasive style.
Some of these were republished (with other material) in Greek Lines and Other Architectural Essays (1893). Van Brunt was also the translator of Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens sur l'Architecture as Discourses on Architecture (1875).
Quotations:
"The language of architectural forms is one of infinite artifice; it is born of traditions, is shaped by conventions, and speaks in parables and apologues, which are patent only to those who have studied the growth of thought in the development of its signs and symbols. "
"Painting has something to say which sculpture cannot say; architecture has a message which cannot be repeated in music; and vice versa. "
"Architectural ideas and motifs excite in the minds of architects certain emotions, which are rarely shared in their fullness by the laity. "
"If a monument of architecture is like a "song without words, " it certainly touches the mind and heart as much as it moves the senses. "
"Architecture does not reach its highest estate until it is so infused with imagination and fancy - not undisciplined imagination or capricious fancy - that the ordered fabric delights the eye of every intelligent observer and excites emotions like a poem. "
Personality
The courtliness, dignity, and gentleness which so characterized his manner are well expressed in his writing. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in view of the physical disability against which he labored.
Connections
Van Brunt married Alice Sterritt Osborn at Salem, Massachussets, October 6, 1869.
