From the late 1870s to the 1920s, the Vanderbilt family employed some of the United States's best Beaux-Arts architects and decorators to build an unequalled string of townhouses in New York City and East Coast palaces in the United States. Many of the Vanderbilt houses are now National Historic Landmarks. Some photographs of Vanderbilt's residences in New York are included in the Photographic series of American Architecture by Albert Levy (1870s).
Henry Hobson Richardson, FAIA was an American architect, best known for his work in a style that became known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture".
The Newport Casino is an athletic complex and recreation center located at 180-200 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island in the Bellevue Avenue/Casino Historic District. Built in 1879–1881 by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., it was designed in the Shingle style by the newly formed firm of McKim, Mead & White. The Newport Casino was the firm's first major commission and helped to establish the firm's national reputation. Built as a social club, it included courts for both lawn tennis and court tennis, facilities for other games, such as squash and lawn bowling, club rooms for reading, socializing, card-playing, and billiards, shops, and a convertible theater and ballroom. It became a center of Newport's social life during the Gilded Age through the 1920s.
Chateau-sur-Mer is one of the first grand Bellevue Avenue mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport, Rhode Island. Located at 424 Bellevue Avenue, it is now owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County and is open to the public as a museum. Chateau-sur-Mer's grand scale and lavish parties ushered in the Gilded Age of Newport, as it was the most palatial residence in Newport until the Vanderbilt houses in the 1890s. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
Norcross Brothers Contractors and Builders was a nineteenth-century American construction company, especially noted for their work, mostly in stone, for the architectural firms of H.H. Richardson and McKim, Mead & White. The company was founded by James Atkinson and Orlando Whitney, who were contracted for their first project in 1869. In all, the company is credited with completing over 650 building projects.
McKim, Mead & White was an American architectural firm that came to define architectural practice, urbanism, and the ideals of the American Renaissance in fin de siècle New York. The firm's founding partners Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909), William Rutherford Mead (1846–1928) and Stanford White (1853–1906) were giants in the architecture of their time, and remain important as innovators and leaders in the development of modern architecture worldwide. They formed a school of classically trained, technologically skilled designers who practiced well into the mid-twentieth century. According to Robert A. M. Stern, only Frank Lloyd Wright was more important to the identity and character of modern American architecture.
The Isaac Bell House is a historic house and National Historic Landmark at 70 Perry Street in Newport, Rhode Island. Also known as Edna Villa, it is one of the outstanding examples of Shingle Style architecture in the United States. It was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, and built during the Gilded Age, when Newport was the summer resort of choice for some of America's wealthiest families.
Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge was a successful architecture firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, operating between 1886 and 1915, with extensive commissions in monumental civic, religious, and collegiate architecture in the spirit and style of Henry Hobson Richardson.
William Shepard Wetmore was an American businessman and philanthropist who was an Old China Trade merchant.
Thomas C. Hubka is an American architectural historian whose primary focus is vernacular architecture and related issues of architecture and cultural meaning.
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner is an architect, architectural historian, and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is known for his research and writing on American architects Henry Hobson Richardson and Lionel H. Pries, and on Seattle architecture; he has also published articles that link architecture and psychoanalysis.
The Bellevue Avenue Historic District is located along and around Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. Its property is almost exclusively residential, including many of the Gilded Age mansions built by affluent summer vacationers in the city around the turn of the 20th century, including the Vanderbilt family and Astor family. Many of the homes represent pioneering work in the architectural styles of the time by major American architects.
The shingle style is an American architectural style made popular by the rise of the New England school of architecture, which eschewed the highly ornamented patterns of the Eastlake style in Queen Anne architecture. In the shingle style, English influence was combined with the renewed interest in Colonial American architecture which followed the 1876 celebration of the Centennial. The plain, shingled surfaces of colonial buildings were adopted, and their massing emulated.
The Alexander Dallas Bache Monument is the tomb of Alexander Dallas Bache, a noted American scientist and surveyor. Bache died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1867 and was transported to Washington, DC's Congressional Cemetery for burial. American architect Henry Hobson Richardson was commissioned to build a tomb in 1868. The tomb is one of only three examples of a monument designed by Richardson and a rare example of a Richardson structure lacking Romanesque design points.
William Watts Sherman was a New York City businessman and the treasurer of the Newport Casino. In 1875–1876 he had the William Watts Sherman House constructed in Newport, Rhode Island.
Joseph Collins Wells (1814–1860) was an English-born architect who practiced in New York City from 1839 to 1860. He was a founding member of the American Institute of Architects, and several of his works have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two of his works, the Henry C. Bowen House and the Jonathan Sturges House, have been designated as U.S. National Historic Landmarks. He also designed First Presbyterian Church, a New York City Landmark in Greenwich Village.
Redwood is a historic summer house at 10 Barberry Lane in Bar Harbor, Maine. Designed by William Ralph Emerson and built in 1879, it was the first Shingle style house built in Bar Harbor, and is one of the oldest of the style in the nation. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
Seth C. Bradford (1801-1878) was an American architect from Newport, Rhode Island.
Sophia Augusta Brown Sherman was an American heiress and socialite who was prominent in New York and Newport society during the Gilded Age.
