International studio (34.1908)

Architectural League

V. Whitney and Mr. Hugo Ballin submitted, hors
concours (Mr. Atterburv being a member of the
committee), a thoroughly charming conception.
The Special Prize of three hundred dollars went to
Miss Evelyn B. Longman, sculptor; Mr. Milton H.
Bancroft, painter, and Mr. Henry Bacon, architect,
whose design was interesting, though not so attrac-
tively presented as the former. The President’s
Prize, a bronze medal for mural painting, was
awarded to Mr. Ballin, with a special mention for
Miss Anna Lang’s beautiful exhibit, which also
was entered hors concours. In sculpture, Mr.
Charles Carey Rumsey captured the Henry O.
Avery Prize.
With all due respect—and that is a great deal—
for the difficulties to be met by the hanging com-
mittee, I believe the value and attractiveness of
such a large exhibition as this one would be greatly
increased by grouping the sculpture, the paintings
and the architectural exhibits separately, with an
additional subdivision of the latter according to the
type of building. It would be a far more nearly
satisfactory arrangement to have all the country
houses so hung as to permit of comparison rather
than in the obviously easier way that prevails.
If all the buildings of a public and semipublic
character could be hung together the result would
surely have been more impressive and more enter-
taining. There was, in fact, a slight attempt at this
sort of an arrangement, as was shown by a formida-
ble array of large office building perspectives at one
end of the main gallery, and by a smaller group of po-
lice courts and fire department buildings “for every
place and purpose”—a distinctly saddening group,
suggesting that the New York police force of to-day
must be in a continual state of siege behind their
stone battlements. A notable exception was the
Second Police Precinct Station, by Messrs. S. B.
Colt and Thornton Chard, associated architects.
Other interesting exhibits relating to buildings of a
public nature were photographs and plans of Mr.
Grosvenor Atterbury’s eminently successful Phipps
Tenement House Number One; the McKinley
Monument, at Buffalo, by Carrere and Hastings;
the simple and dignified buildings for the Phila-
delphia Orphan Asylum, at Wallingford, Pa., by
Delano & Aldrich; the development of the Old
State University site at Seattle, by Howells &
Stokes; the successful competitive design for the
International Bureau of American Republics Build-
ing at Washington, by Messrs. Albert Kelsey and
Paul P. Cret; a perspective drawing of Mr. Magoni-
gle’s stately McKinley National Memorial, at
Canton; photographs and drawings of the Mary-

land Institute, at Baltimore, by Pell &: Corbett—
a design that was adjudged by the League Com-
mittee to be the most successful architectural work
of the year; the classic improvements on the Lin-
coln Farm, by Mr. John Russell Pope; Mr. George
B. Post’s cleverly planned Wisconsin State Capitol;
the Stamford Y. M. C. A. Building, by Gordon,
Tracy & Swartwout; Mr. Sidney W. Wagner’s
wonderful drawings for “A School of Fine Arts,”
which won the 1908 Paris Prize of the Society of
Beaux-Arti xArchitects, and Air. O. R. Eggers’s even
more wonderfully rendered plan of the same
problem.
Commercial buildings were very well represented
on the exhibition walls. There were Clinton &
Russell’s Church Street Terminal Buildings; two
measured drawings of the daringly unconventional
Berkeley Building, in Boston, by Codman &
Despradelle; Air. Aymar Embury’s interesting
bank building for the Palisades Trust and Guar-
antee Company, at Englewood, which has been
described in these pages; several elaborate perspec-
tive drawings of the much exploited Singer Build-
ing, designed by Air. Ernest Flagg; a rather un-
gainly suggestion for a combined department store
and hotel in connection with the uptown terminal
of the AIcAdoo Tunnel, by Howells & Stokes; a
splendid drawing of a massive and dignified build-
ing for the National City Bank, submitted by
Messrs. Jarvis Hunt and W. W. Bosworth; the
distinctly successful terminal station for the Lacka-
wanna Railroad, at Hoboken, by Mr. Kenneth M.
Alurchison, and a perspective drawing of the
National Aletropolitan Bank, in Washington, by
Gordon, Tracy & Swartwout and B. Stanley
Simmons.
Among the most interesting exhibits of ecclesi-
astical work were Alessrs. Allen & Collins’s photo-
graph of a model of the Union Theological Semi-
nary; exterior and interior perspective drawings of
the successful competitive scheme for St. Thomas’s
new church in New AYrk, by Cram, Goodhue &
Ferguson; several rendered detail drawings of the
magnificent chancel furniture for Calvary Church,
Pittsburg, and a charming perspective in crayon
of the chapel for West Point, both by the same
architects; nor would a visit to the exhibition be
complete without a study of Palmer & Horn-
bostel’s splendid synagogue for Pittsburg.
Mr. Donn Barber’s Lotus Club and Gordon,
Tracy & Swartwout’s interesting solution of a
communal residential problem—the Home Club—
were the best new things under the head of club
and society buildings.

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