Stanford White

Happy Birthday Stanford White!! The Gilded Age architect born in 1853, in America, to wealthy parents, began his career as the assistant to the greatest architect of the times, Henry Hobson Richardson. After spending a year and a half in Europe, White returned to join with architects Charles Follen McKim and William Rutherford Mead to establish the firm McKim, Mead and White. Together they designed numerous buildings, many of which still stand today. Unfortunately a feud between White and Harry Kendall Thaw, involving a previous affair of White and Thaw’s wife, ended with White’s highly publicized, sensational murder at Thaw’s hand in 1906. The building pictured below is indicative of the Gilded Age, the mansion Rosecliff, while smaller, styled after the Grand Trianon, in Versailles.

Gilded Age-term referring to a period of economic growth and rise in population in late 1800’s America. It was a time of great wealth and opulence of the upper class, but also a rise in philanthropy as well, with money poured into universities, opera houses, museums, colleges, charities, etc.