Background
Grosvenor Atterbury was born on July 7, 1869 in Detroit, Michigan, United States to Charles Larned Atterbury and Katharine Mitchell Dow. He was the only child in the family.
Grosvenor Atterbury was born on July 7, 1869 in Detroit, Michigan, United States to Charles Larned Atterbury and Katharine Mitchell Dow. He was the only child in the family.
Atterbury was educated at the Berkeley School in New York and at Yale University. He received B. A. in 1891.
From 1890 to 1893 he has been studying painting with William Merritt Chase. He spent the six months abroad in Europe and Egypt after his graduation that confirmed his intent to become an architect. From 1892 to 1893, he was a special student at the Columbia University School of Architecture and in 1892 acquired an experience with practical building in the office of McKim, Mead and White. Atterbury's Grosvenor formal training was completed in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Atelier Blondel, in 1895.
Atterbury's enthusiastic intensity attracted the attention of many influential family friends and business associates, allowing him to establish a practice quickly. Primarily residential at the beginning, it included many large country houses on Long Island, where the Atterbury had a summer place at Southampton.
Significant was the group of "Moorish" houses built in 1897 for Henry O. Havemeyer on Bayberry Point, Islip-imaginative in their use of stucco made from the sand on the site so as to blend buildings and setting.
Robert W. De Forest's Cold Spring Harbor residence, "Wawapek" (1898), was a skillful fusion of Adirondack hunting lodge, shingle style, and Colonial revival.
Less exuberant with their severely elegant mixture of motifs were his turn-of-the-century New York City town houses for John Williams Robbins at 33 East 74th Street (medieval and German) and John S. Phipps at 6 East 87th Street (Roman, Venetian, and French).
The picturesque result became the archetype of American garden suburbs.
Later, Atterbury did workingmen's housing in 1916 at Indian Hill in Worcester, Massachussets, for the Norton Company, and in 1916 at Erwin, Tenn. , for the Holston Corporation.
Since 1904 Atterbury had worked on the problem of simplifying cheap housing construction, which he was convinced would lead to the standardization of a relatively few parts made of one homogeneous material.
Atterbury's exhaustive research and experiments, backed by Phipps and then the Russell Sage Foundation, culminated in a series of "demonstrations" of constructed concrete houses, beginning in 1907, and continuing in Sewaren, in 1910 and at Forest Hills Gardens in 1913 and 1918.
These constituted the earliest practical examples of such prefabrication in the country.
Before America's entry into World War I, the range of Atterbury's commissions became wider, embracing churches for his town projects, the picturesque yet practical Parrish Art Museum at Southampton, L. I. (completed in 1913), the continuing restoration of the New York City Hall, especially the freely interpreted cupola of 1917, and the nine-story, vigorously rusticated Russell Sage Foundation Building at Lexington Avenue and 22nd Street in New York City (ca. 1915).
Undertakings such as the inwardly complex American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the rustic Tudor model farm group for John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , at Pocantico Hills, New York (1934) and even the enormous Amsterdam Houses scheme (with Harvey W. Corbett and Thomas S. Holden) of 1949 for the New York City Housing Authority, attest to Atterbury's continuing attractiveness to patrons.
Atterbury's styles tended to become more "correct" and his detail more ponderous, as in the heavy Tudor of the Aldus C. Higgins residence in Worcester, Massachussets (1921 - 1923).
Atterbury was personally and stylistically a conservative, who ran his office as if it were a Beaux Arts atelier. For all his conservatism, however, Atterbury's pragmatic approach to problem solving led him toward structural innovations that have not yet been adequately considered.
Member or National Academy of Design (1940).