Platt, Charles Page 1 of 3 Print this page Email this page Updated and revised 27/09/99 Platt, Charles A(dams) (b New York, 16 Oct 1861; d Cornish, NH, 12 Sept 1933). American architect, garden designer, etcher and painter. He was brought up in New York, where he began his artistic training in 1878 at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. The following summer he was introduced to the recently revived art of etching, and he quickly achieved critical recognition for his work in this medium. He continued to etch for most of his life, concentrating on coastal scenes in which he strove to capture the atmospheric interaction of light, air and water. In May 1882 Platt travelled to Paris to continue his training as a painter, working first independently and then after 1883 at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre. Although he exhibited The Etcher (Boston, MA, St Botolph's Club) at the Paris Salon of 1885, Platt eventually rejected his figural training and turned back to his youthful interest in landscape. On his return to New York, he continued to exhibit his paintings and etchings, and in 1894 he was awarded the Webb Prize of the Society of American Artists for his painting Clouds (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). By this time, however, he had become interested in architecture and landscape design. In 1889 Platt joined the summer colony of artists at CORNISH, NH, and the following summer he designed and built there a studio house for himself. His fellow colonists thereafter sought his assistance in designing their houses and gardens. He refined his ideas on architecture and landscape design during a tour (1892) of the Renaissance villas of Italy and published his observations in Italian Gardens (1894), the first illustrated study in English of the Italian Renaissance garden, illustrated with his own photographs and watercolour drawings. The successful reception of Italian Gardens led to further projects for Italian-inspired houses and gardens. By the time of his marriage in July 1893 to Eleanor Hardy Bunker (widow of the painter Dennis Miller Bunker), Platt had begun to consider forsaking his ambitions as a painter for a career in architecture and landscape design. He was encouraged in this by the success of several commissions of the late 1890s, such as his influential gardens (1897-8) for Faulkner Farm, the Charles F. Sprague estate at Brookline, near Boston, MA. Despite his lack of formal architectural training, between 1900 and 1913 Platt established himself as one of the leading country house architects in the USA. His houses and gardens are well-integrated and characterized by clear spatial order; he derived a personal style from Classical Revival sources and the domestic architecture of Georgian file://C:\DOCUME~1\eppro\LOCALS~1\Temp\XJIA4D1K.htm 1/6/2006 Page 2 of 3 England and Colonial America. The most representative (and best-preserved) example from this period is Gwinn (1907-8), the William Gwinn Mather estate, near Cleveland, OH. In 1913 he published Monograph of the Work of Charles A. Platt, an elaborate photographic summary of his works to date. Although Platt's reputation was largely built on his country house practice, he also designed a distinguished group of city buildings variously derived from the model of the Italian Renaissance palazzo. The finest of these commissions is the Studio Building (1905-6) in New York. Most of Platt's projects from the late 1910s and 1920s were, however, for civic and academic institutions: he designed eight art museums, of which his masterpiece is the Freer Gallery of Art (1913-23), Washington, DC; among his many campus designs are the University of Illinois (1921-33), Urbana, IL, and the Phillips Academy (1922-30), Andover, MA. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES New York, Columbia U., Avery Archit. & F.A. Lib., Charles A. Platt Col. WRITINGS Italian Gardens (New York, 1894) PHOTOGRAPHIC PUBLICATION Monograph of the Work of Charles A. Platt (New York, 1913) BIBLIOGRAPHY H. Croly: 'The Architectural Work of Charles A. Platt', Archit. Rec., xv/3 (1904), pp. 181-244 Catalogue of an Exhibition of Etchings and Dry-points by C. A. Platt (exh. cat., New York, F. Keppel, 1907) K. N. Morgan: Charles A. Platt: The Artist as Architect (New York, 1985) E.E. Hirshler and K. Morgan: 'Charles A. Platt: Shaping an American Landscape', Amer. A. Rev., vii/2 (1995), pp. 114-23 K. N. Morgan, ed.: Shaping a New American Landscape: The Art and Architecture of Charles A. Platt (Hanover, NH, 1995) KEITH N. MORGAN file://C:\DOCUME~1\eppro\LOCALS~1\Temp\XJIA4D1K.htm 1/6/2006 720.973 P719 Charles A. Platt of The Artist as Architect Old KEITH N. MORGAN With a Memoir by GEOFFREY PLATT 1985 THE ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY FOUNDATION, NEW YORK THE MIT PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS and LONDON, ENGLAND