William W. Bosworth
Encyclopedia
William Welles Bosworth (1868 – 1966) was an American architect
whose most famous designs include MIT
's Cambridge campus, the AT&T Building in New York City, and the Theodore N. Vail mansion in Morristown, New Jersey (1916), now the Morristown Town Hall. Bosworth was also responsible to a large degree for the architectural expression of Kykuit
, the famous Rockefeller family
estate north of Tarrytown, New York, working closely with the architects William Adams Delano
and Chester H. Aldrich and the interior designer, Ogden Codman.
Bosworth is not as well known in the United States as other Beaux-Arts architects of that time, because his career, under the auspices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
, led him to France in the 1920s, where he was put in charge of the restoration of the Palace of Versailles
and Notre-Dame de Reims, projects Rockefeller was interested in and that he generously financed. In time, Bosworth was awarded the French Legion of Honor and the French Cross of the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the few Americans ever to receive such honors.
, and received his architectural training at MIT, one of the leading Beaux-Arts oriented schools in the United States at the time. In 1896, Bosworth left for Paris to study at the famous École des Beaux-Arts
. Attending the École was a must for anyone who wanted to make a name for himself in the United States, especially during the years following the World's Columbian Exposition
of 1893 in Chicago. Richard Morris Hunt
, H. H. Richardson before him as well as Ernst Flagg, Charles McKim
, John Merven Carrère, and John Russell Pope
, had all studied in Paris. Upon his return to the United States in 1900, Bosworth worked for the firm Carrère and Hastings
, which in 1905 was to make a national name for itself with the design of the New York Public Library
.
In 1906 Bosworth was called in to design a garden for the prominent philanthropist, the New Yorker Valentine Everit Macy, who lived at Scarborough-on-Hudson. This led to Bosworth’s acquaintance with Frank Vanderlip (1864–1937), president of the City Bank of New York, and former assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President William McKinley
. Bosworth designed for Vanderlip a gate for his family estate north of Tarrytown, New York
. He also designed a schoolhouse not far from Vanderlip’s estate which is still extant. It is on the Albany Post Road (now Route 9). At about the same time, Vanderlip was appointed to the board of Letchworth Village, an institution for epileptics and the mentally ill founded in 1907. Vanderlip called in Bosworth to lay out the village with its various schools and residences. It is located across the Hudson from Scarborough on a hill not far from the current town of West Haverstraw. For the Rockefellers, he designed Kykuit
, transforming a barren treeless site into a lush and spectacular garden.
In 1912, Theodore Newton Vail
(1845–1920) gave Bosworth his largest and most visible commission yet: the corporate headquarters of AT&T Corporation
, located on a prestigious site in downtown New York City at 195 Broadway, just a few blocks from Wall Street
. It was a modern steel structure clad top to bottom in a Greek-styled exterior, the three-story-high Ionic
columns of Vermont
granite
forming eight registers over a Doric
base. In 1913, Bosworth received the commission to design the new campus for MIT in Cambridge, MIT having outgrown its old buildings near Copley Square in Boston. The plan featured a large paved court (now called Killian Court) that is now, however, planted with grass and trees, at the head of which was a domed structure modeled on the Pantheon
in Rome in the manner of the Altes Museum
in Berlin. It was at the time the largest non-governmental building in the US.
Although some of Bosworth's subsequent American commissions were office buildings, like the Ocean Cable Office Building (1916) (since demolished), most were houses, estates, and townhouses, like the house for William Barclay Parsons (at 121 East 65th Street) , Philip Gossler (on 14 East 65th Street) in New York, a mansion for Walter Farwell (1920), and house alterations and a garden for Charles A. Stone, both in the Locust Valley area. Vail, who was a great admirer of Italian art and had traveled extensively through Italy, asked Bosworth in 1916 to design his home in Morristown, New Jersey. Bosworth also designed extensive gardens for the house of Samuel Untermeyer, a famous lawyer, in Yonkers, New York. In 1925, he designed the unbuilt Egyptian Museum for Cairo. In 1921, Bosworth built his own house on Long Island next to that of Stone.
Bosworth’s U.S. career, promising as it was, came to an end when John D. Rockefeller Jr., traveling in France in 1922, and appalled at the dire condition of French monuments, set up a fund in 1924 to pay for the restoration of the Palace of Versailles
and the Château de Fontainebleau
. Bosworth was put in charge of the project. He also took over the restoration of the Notre-Dame de Reims, and in 1935, he founded the University Club of Paris. In 1934, he supervised the restoration of Queen Marie Antoinette
’s Trianon cottage near Versailles.
Although Rockefeller's project ended in 1936, Bosworth remained in his adopted country in semi-retirement, building a house for himself and his family, Villa Marietta, in Vaucresson
(1935–1936). During WWII, Bosworth was chairman of the Paris committee of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps. In 1945, he was named associate member of the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1949, he headed a fund drive for restoration of Vimoutiers in Normandy, which had been destroyed by error in a World War II bombing raid. These efforts earned him considerable recognition in France.
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
whose most famous designs include MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
's Cambridge campus, the AT&T Building in New York City, and the Theodore N. Vail mansion in Morristown, New Jersey (1916), now the Morristown Town Hall. Bosworth was also responsible to a large degree for the architectural expression of Kykuit
Kykuit
Kykuit , also known as John D. Rockefeller Estate, is a 40-room National Trust house in Westchester County, New York, built by the oil businessman, philanthropist and founder of the prominent Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller, and his son, John D...
, the famous Rockefeller family
Rockefeller family
The Rockefeller family , the Cleveland family of John D. Rockefeller and his brother William Rockefeller , is an American industrial, banking, and political family of German origin that made one of the world's largest private fortunes in the oil business during the late 19th and early 20th...
estate north of Tarrytown, New York, working closely with the architects William Adams Delano
William Adams Delano
William Adams Delano , an American architect, was a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich in the firm of Delano & Aldrich. The firm worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City, Long Island and elsewhere, building townhouses, country houses, clubs, banks and buildings for...
and Chester H. Aldrich and the interior designer, Ogden Codman.
Bosworth is not as well known in the United States as other Beaux-Arts architects of that time, because his career, under the auspices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
John Davison Rockefeller, Jr. was a major philanthropist and a pivotal member of the prominent Rockefeller family. He was the sole son among the five children of businessman and Standard Oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller and the father of the five famous Rockefeller brothers...
, led him to France in the 1920s, where he was put in charge of the restoration of the Palace of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....
and Notre-Dame de Reims, projects Rockefeller was interested in and that he generously financed. In time, Bosworth was awarded the French Legion of Honor and the French Cross of the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the few Americans ever to receive such honors.
Early life
Bosworth was born in 1868 in Marietta, OhioMarietta, Ohio
Marietta is a city in and the county seat of Washington County, Ohio, United States. During 1788, pioneers to the Ohio Country established Marietta as the first permanent American settlement of the new United States in the Northwest Territory. Marietta is located in southeastern Ohio at the mouth...
, and received his architectural training at MIT, one of the leading Beaux-Arts oriented schools in the United States at the time. In 1896, Bosworth left for Paris to study at the famous École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
. Attending the École was a must for anyone who wanted to make a name for himself in the United States, especially during the years following the World's Columbian Exposition
World's Columbian Exposition
The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...
of 1893 in Chicago. Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt was an American architect of the nineteenth century and a preeminent figure in the history of American architecture...
, H. H. Richardson before him as well as Ernst Flagg, Charles McKim
Charles Follen McKim
Charles Follen McKim FAIA was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with Stanford White, he provided the architectural expertise as a member of the partnership McKim, Mead, and White....
, John Merven Carrère, and John Russell Pope
John Russell Pope
John Russell Pope was an architect most known for his designs of the National Archives and Records Administration building , the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.-Biography:Pope was born in New York in 1874, the son of a successful...
, had all studied in Paris. Upon his return to the United States in 1900, Bosworth worked for the firm Carrère and Hastings
Carrère and Hastings
Carrère and Hastings, the firm of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings , located in New York City, was one of the outstanding Beaux-Arts architecture firms in the United States. The partnership operated from 1885 until 1911, when Carrère was killed in an automobile accident...
, which in 1905 was to make a national name for itself with the design of the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
.
Major commissions
William McKinley
William McKinley, Jr. was the 25th President of the United States . He is best known for winning fiercely fought elections, while supporting the gold standard and high tariffs; he succeeded in forging a Republican coalition that for the most part dominated national politics until the 1930s...
. Bosworth designed for Vanderlip a gate for his family estate north of Tarrytown, New York
Tarrytown, New York
Tarrytown is a village in the town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, about north of midtown Manhattan in New York City, and is served by a stop on the Metro-North Hudson Line...
. He also designed a schoolhouse not far from Vanderlip’s estate which is still extant. It is on the Albany Post Road (now Route 9). At about the same time, Vanderlip was appointed to the board of Letchworth Village, an institution for epileptics and the mentally ill founded in 1907. Vanderlip called in Bosworth to lay out the village with its various schools and residences. It is located across the Hudson from Scarborough on a hill not far from the current town of West Haverstraw. For the Rockefellers, he designed Kykuit
Kykuit
Kykuit , also known as John D. Rockefeller Estate, is a 40-room National Trust house in Westchester County, New York, built by the oil businessman, philanthropist and founder of the prominent Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller, and his son, John D...
, transforming a barren treeless site into a lush and spectacular garden.
In 1912, Theodore Newton Vail
Theodore Newton Vail
Theodore Newton Vail was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, has been called Vailism...
(1845–1920) gave Bosworth his largest and most visible commission yet: the corporate headquarters of AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corp., originally American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies. AT&T is the oldest telecommunications company...
, located on a prestigious site in downtown New York City at 195 Broadway, just a few blocks from Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
. It was a modern steel structure clad top to bottom in a Greek-styled exterior, the three-story-high Ionic
Ionic order
The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...
columns of Vermont
Vermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
forming eight registers over a Doric
Doric order
The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...
base. In 1913, Bosworth received the commission to design the new campus for MIT in Cambridge, MIT having outgrown its old buildings near Copley Square in Boston. The plan featured a large paved court (now called Killian Court) that is now, however, planted with grass and trees, at the head of which was a domed structure modeled on the Pantheon
Pantheon, Rome
The Pantheon ,Rarely Pantheum. This appears in Pliny's Natural History in describing this edifice: Agrippae Pantheum decoravit Diogenes Atheniensis; in columnis templi eius Caryatides probantur inter pauca operum, sicut in fastigio posita signa, sed propter altitudinem loci minus celebrata.from ,...
in Rome in the manner of the Altes Museum
Altes Museum
The Altes Museum , is one of several internationally renowned museums on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. Since restoration work in 1966, it houses the Antikensammlung of the Berlin State Museums...
in Berlin. It was at the time the largest non-governmental building in the US.
Although some of Bosworth's subsequent American commissions were office buildings, like the Ocean Cable Office Building (1916) (since demolished), most were houses, estates, and townhouses, like the house for William Barclay Parsons (at 121 East 65th Street) , Philip Gossler (on 14 East 65th Street) in New York, a mansion for Walter Farwell (1920), and house alterations and a garden for Charles A. Stone, both in the Locust Valley area. Vail, who was a great admirer of Italian art and had traveled extensively through Italy, asked Bosworth in 1916 to design his home in Morristown, New Jersey. Bosworth also designed extensive gardens for the house of Samuel Untermeyer, a famous lawyer, in Yonkers, New York. In 1925, he designed the unbuilt Egyptian Museum for Cairo. In 1921, Bosworth built his own house on Long Island next to that of Stone.
Bosworth’s U.S. career, promising as it was, came to an end when John D. Rockefeller Jr., traveling in France in 1922, and appalled at the dire condition of French monuments, set up a fund in 1924 to pay for the restoration of the Palace of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....
and the Château de Fontainebleau
Château de Fontainebleau
The Palace of Fontainebleau, located 55 kilometres from the centre of Paris, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. The palace as it is today is the work of many French monarchs, building on an early 16th century structure of Francis I. The building is arranged around a series of courtyards...
. Bosworth was put in charge of the project. He also took over the restoration of the Notre-Dame de Reims, and in 1935, he founded the University Club of Paris. In 1934, he supervised the restoration of Queen Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette ; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I....
’s Trianon cottage near Versailles.
Although Rockefeller's project ended in 1936, Bosworth remained in his adopted country in semi-retirement, building a house for himself and his family, Villa Marietta, in Vaucresson
Vaucresson
Vaucresson is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the Hauts-de-Seine department from the center of Paris.The people who live in the commune are called Vaucressonais. Vaucresson contains abundant parkland; 22 of its 308 hectares are classed as natural zones...
(1935–1936). During WWII, Bosworth was chairman of the Paris committee of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps. In 1945, he was named associate member of the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1949, he headed a fund drive for restoration of Vimoutiers in Normandy, which had been destroyed by error in a World War II bombing raid. These efforts earned him considerable recognition in France.