Claude Fayette Bragdon was an American architect, author, and lecturer. He is distinguished for his designs for Rochester's New York Central Railroad Station, the Rochester First Universalist Church, and the Rochester Italian Presbyterian Church.
Background
Claude Fayette Bragdon was born on August 1, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio. He was was born of native stock, the only son of George C. and Katherine (Shipherd) Bragdon. He had a sister, May. Both parents had attended Oberlin College, which was founded by his mother's uncle. At the time Claude was born, his father was a journalist, and this profession soon took the family to New York.
Education
While pursuing his career as an architect, Bragdon received a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan.
Career
Living in Oswego, at the age of sixteen, Claude took a job as a letterer, in after-school hours, for A. J. Hopkins, the only architect in town. For a time he intended to become a woodengraver, and he also tried his hand as a cartoonist. When his family moved to Rochester in 1884, he apprenticed himself as a draftsman in the office of L. P. Rogers and, upon demonstrating an exceptional talent, was recruited by the firm of Charles Ellis to become their head draftsman.
According to Bragdon's memoirs, it was Harvey Ellis, brother to the head of the firm, who was most influential in leading Bragdon toward expressing his own ideas in sketches and paintings. At the urging of Ellis, he went to New York City in the first stage of a period of wandering.
Unsuccessful in establishing himself there and then in Buffalo as an architect, he traveled abroad, observing the art and life of Rome, Paris, and London. Returning to Rochester in 1901, he settled down as an architect working in upper New York state and the adjoining provinces of Canada.
The architectural project recalled most vividly in Bragdon's memoirs was the New York Central Railroad Station in Rochester, completed in 1913. In accord with Bragdon's belief that architecture must obey the law of organisms--that form must follow and express function--the facade of this building drew its inspiration from the five large driving wheels of the steam-driven locomotives of the era.
An innovative use of concrete, expressive of its unique qualities, was manifest in his design for the Hunter Bridge across the Otonobee River in Ontario (1918). In pressing his idea that color added a further dimension to architectural design, Bragdon ran afoul of the industrialist George Eastman. Viewing the unfinished interior of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce Building, Eastman decided that he could save money by leaving the white plaster bare. Bragdon immediately dissociated himself from the project.
Other prominent structures which he designed were the Genesee Valley Club in Rochester, the Livingston County Court House, and the parapet of the York-Leaside Viaduct in Toronto. Bragdon's retrospective view was that prevailing eclectic and materialistic tastes in architecture were the fruits of a "vicious and depraved form of feudalism, " but as a practicing architect he had to accede to the demands for Italianate churches and castellated railroad stations.
For him a skyscraper was "only a symbol a condition of consciousness"; all life was a sacrament, full of "ulterior meaning. " The laws of the universe were revealed in pure mathematics and the color spectrum. These ideas led him to a theory of "projective ornament" (mathematically derived designs) and to the use of ceramics in ornamentation.
In 1903 he was the featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Architectural League of America, held in St. Louis. In 1915 he gave the Scammon Lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. In 1934, at the Princeton Architectural School, he gave a series of lectures titled "Design in Space. " His interest in theosophy was fully developed by 1909, when he published A Brief Life of Annie Besant. A year later he brought out The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture.
In 1919, at Hampden's urging, he designed the set for his friend's production of Hamlet. When, in 1923, he decided to give up his practice in Rochester and to move to New York, he became much involved in designing sets for Hampden productions, among them Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice.
Bragdon had also become a writer and lecturer. He published a volume of poetry, The Golden Person of the Heart (1898, 1908), and wrote an introduction to Adelaide Crapsey's collection, Verse (1915). In all, he published sixteen books, on subjects ranging from theatrical set design to yoga, and contributed dozens of articles to periodicals.
On November 3, 1902, Bragdon married Charlotte Coffyn Wilkinson. After his wife's death, he married Eugenie Macaulay Julier, on July 13, 1912; she died in 1920.