Note 287 — CHAPTER 13 H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE

Hunt, of the older generation, was generally recognized as a leader in this camp also, although his energies in these years were principally engaged in designing and building a series of François I châteaux for the Vanderbilts and other millionaires that are anything but academic in their involved picturesqueness.

This curious episode, which has been given exaggerated importance by some historians of American architecture, began with the designing of the W. K. Vanderbilt house in New York in 1879-80 (see Andrews, W., The Vanderbilt Legend, New York, 1941). Other architects were also briefly affected by what was hardly more than a recrudescence of a mode popular in France under Louis Philippe in Hunt’s youth (see Chapter 3).

A few houses by McKim, Mead & White of the early eighties are definitely François I, and Richardson used François I dormers, probably independently of Hunt, on the Albany Capitol. Moreover, the round towers of the ‘Shingle Style’ undoubtedly owe something to Stanford White’s sketching trips in France. This episode obviously parallels the interest in revived Northern Renaissance modes of design in Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia in these decades, and has analogies also to the contemporary work in England of George & Peto and Collcutt (see Chapters 9 and 12).