HYBRID IN-PERSON AND ONLINE PROGRAM

Connecting The Dots: Mckim, Mead & White in Baltimore

Samuel G. White, FAIA

Of nearly one thousand commissions received by McKim, Mead & White between 1879 and 1920, fifteen were for projects in Baltimore. Twelve of those designs were constructed, and seven buildings remain, of which three—the Ross Winans and Garrett Jacobs houses and Lovely Lane United Methodist Church—are important contributions to late nineteenth-century American architecture. Each of the Baltimore designs, particularly those three, can be celebrated for beauty alone, but they also can be explored for dimensions other than pure aesthetics. How did a three-year-old New York firm get a commission in Baltimore? Who did they know? What other projects were they working on? What were they looking at? Did they have a formal paradigm, and did it evolve? Who were their collaborators? Who actually designed the building?

This talk will approach the Baltimore commissions as a lens for observing the artistic and professional development as well as the internal organization of a partnership that had its origins with Henry Hobson Richardson in the 1870s and that, over the next forty years, would become the largest and most famous architecture office in the world.

$15 fee for guests and subscribers (no fee for members)