William Adams Delano was born on January 21, 1874 in New York City. He was the son of Eugene Delano, a merchant and banker, and Susan Magoun Adams. In 1880 Eugene Delano joined the Philadelphia branch of Brown Brothers and Company and in 1894 became a partner in the firm.
After graduating from Yale in 1895 with the Bachelor of Arts degree, Delano studied for two years at the Columbia University School of Architecture.
Delano also studied with Victor Laloux, then the best-known architect in France. After receiving his diploma in 1902, Delano returned to New York City.
In 1908 he received the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale.
In 1897 Delano was hired as a draftsman by the firm of John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings, which was then competing for the commission of the New York Public Library; Delano was put to work on the competition drawings.
While at Carrere and Hastings he became friends with Chester Holmes Aldrich, who was responsible for the firm's prizewinning renderings of the New York Public Library. He and Delano later formed an enduring partnership. Both Carrere and Hastings, as well as many of their draftsmen, had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and no doubt influenced by this Delano left for France in late 1898 and was admitted to the school in early 1899.
After receiving his diploma in 1902, Delano returned to New York City, where he and Aldrich opened an office in November 1903. From 1903 to 1910 Delano taught design at the Columbia University School of Architecture.
McKim, Mead and White's Renaissance, Georgian, and classical revival work of the 1880's and 1890's and the Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893 initiated an academic trend in American architecture. Delano and Aldrich were among its foremost twentieth-century exponents.
Although their production spanned a wide architectural range, including institutional and public buildings, their chief works were large city and country residences, most of which were situated in the northeastern United States.
Delano appears to have brought in the majority of the firm's commissions, including its first important one, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore (1905). His mature work owed more to English and American sources than to French beaux-arts precedents, but his plans - uncomplicated, coordinated, and easily understood - reflected his rigorous training in Laloux's atelier.
Characteristically, Delano's designs were free interpretations or modifications of the more severe Georgian styles; they were chaste, sometimes austere, and always in good taste. He was greatly influenced by his father's house at 12 Washington Square North, part of the famous Greek Revival row. This influence is strongly felt in the red brick, stone- or marble-trimmed neo-Federal and neo-colonial houses and club buildings for which his firm is best known. These include the Knickerbocker (1914) and Brook (1925) clubs and the Willard D. Straight (1915) and William Sloane (1919) townhouses in New York City, and the James A. Burden residence (1916) in Syosset, New York. By the 1920s the firm was prospering.
Delano created a series of memorable country houses, including the elaborate French cheteau of Otto H. Kahn in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and the classical revival residence of Bertram G. Work in Oyster Bay, New York. In contrast to the formality of these estates, he also did several houses in the casual English country-house tradition.
In 1928 he helped design the generalplan for the Federal Triangle in Washington, including the unfinished Circular Court and the Post Office Building (1930) facing it. He also designed the Japanese Embassy in Washington (1931), and the American Embassy in Paris (1933), which was styled to harmonize with Gabriel's eighteenth-century Place de la Concorde structures.
Delano was on the board of design of the 1939 New York World's Fair, and in that year he became a member of the Art Commission of New York City; he was elected chairman in 1947. In 1948, at the request of President Harry S. Truman, he designed the controversial second-story balcony in the south portico of the White House, and from 1949 to 1952 he was consulting architect to the Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion. Delano and Aldrich were responsible for several air terminals, including stations for Pan American Airways at Miami, Florida (1929), and in the Pacific Islands, and the New York Municipal Airport, La Guardia Field, New York City (1937-1943).
Delano's Marine and Land Terminals at La Guardia represent an interesting amalgamation of the so-called style moderne-exceptional in his work-with a beaux-arts adeptness at handling problems of passenger circulation.
In 1950 he retired as senior partner of Delano and Aldrich but continued to serve as consulting architect until his death in New York City.
William Adams Delano is remembered as one of the leading American designers of sumptuous country houses for the wealthy elite in New England, including the Vanderbilt, Whitney, Rockefeller and Astor families. Delano's many awards and honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him a Gold Medal in 1940. He was also named an officer by the French Legion of Honor and was an academician of the National Academy of Design. In 1953, the American Institute of Architects awarded Delano its Gold Medal.
Delano espoused a traditionalist philosophy during the period when modernism was ascendant. At a time when it seemed to him that the functionalist, engineering element dominated the artistic in contemporary buildings, he argued that architecture was a fine art and the architect an artist.
The developer and the promoter, he believed, had eclipsed the architect. However, he welcomed "the tendency today to create new forms rather than copy old ones" and rejoiced "in the many new materials, which give wider scope to the designers' imagination. "
From 1924 to 1928 Delano was a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts; he served on the United States Treasury's Board of Architectural Consultants from 1927 to 1933; and from 1929 to 1946 he was a member of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
Delano was a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Institute of Architects and the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Sociable and genial, Delano had an attractive personality that endeared him to many of his contemporaries.
On May 23, 1907, Delano married a widow, Louisa Potter Sheffield, daughter of the architect Edward Tuckerman Potter; they had one son.
