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William Adams Delano |
| William Adams Delano | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Name | William Adams Delano |
| Nationality | American |
| Birth date | January 21, 1874 |
| Birth place | New York City |
| Date of death | January 12, 1960 (aged 85) |
| Place of death | New York City |
| Work | |
| Practice name | Delano & Aldrich |
| Significant buildings | Oheka Kykuit Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, Yale Divinity School |
William Adams Delano (January 21, 1874 – January 12, 1960) was a prominent American architect, a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich (Providence, Rhode Island, June 4, 1871 – Rome, December 26, 1940) in the firm of Delano & Aldrich that worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City and Long Island, building townhouses, country houses, clubs and banks, often in the neo-Georgian and Federal styles, combining brick and limestone, which became their trademark.
William Delano was born in New York City, a member of the prominent Delano family of Massachusetts. He was the nephew of John Crosby Brown who was head of Brown Brothers & Company banking/trading group and his father Eugene Delano (1843 – 1920) was a partner in the firm. He attended Yale and Columbia's architecture school and met his longstanding partner Chester Holmes Aldrich at the office of Carrère and Hastings before the turn of the century.
They formed their partnership in 1903 and almost immediately won commissions from the Rockefeller family, among others. Delano & Aldrich tended to adapt conservative Georgian and Federal architectural styles for their townhouses, churches, schools, and a spate of social clubs for the Astors, Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys. They designed a number of buildings at Yale University.1
Delano alone won the commission for the second-largest residence in the United States, "Oheka", overlooking Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York for financier Otto Kahn. Built in 1921 in French chateau style, with gardens by Olmstead Brothers, Oheka ranges over 109,000 square feet (10,000 m²) and was staffed with 125 people.
Delano's irreverent sense of humor was subtly expressed in some his architectural details and friezes, such as the low-relief frieze of tortoises and hares in the apartment block at 1040 Park Avenue, and backgammon club rooms ornamented like backgammon boards. At the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, built for Pan American Airways' transatlantic seaplane service in 1939 and the oldest such passenger air facility still in use, his Art Deco terra cotta friezes feature flying fish. "There is as much that is new to be said in architecture today by a man of imagination who employs traditional motifs as there is in literature by an author, who, to express his thought, still employs the English language," Delano wrote in 1928.
In 1935 Aldrich left the partnership to become the resident director of the American Academy at Rome, where he died in 1940. Delano continued to practice almost until his own death in 1960, aged 85, in NYC.
He was commissioned to design the Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial (1948 – 1956), one of fourteen World War II monuments constructed abroad by the American Battle Monuments Commission. In 1953, the American Institute of Architects awarded William Adams Delano its Gold Medal. The Delano and Aldrich Archive is held by the Drawings and Archives Department in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.
Surviving buildings (all in New York City unless noted):
Delano also built Frank Porter Wood Home - now Cresent School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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