Stanford White-America's Renaissance Master

Stanford White co founder of Architecture firm McKim Meade & White, was a master of interpreting European Renaissance architecture in a modern US context and spanned the 19th and 20th Centuries. His grandson, upon seeing the villas in Florence, Italy remarked 'Why they are pure McKim Meade & White!' such was the borrowing of design elements from Italy that White incorporated in his American town houses and skyscrapers. Yet he made them distinctly American and his influence on American Urban Design in the last 150 years is immense.

Born in 1853 in New York, Stanford White was trained as an architect under Henry Hobson Richardson where White helped design seaside houses in the shingle style but his renaissance style works such as Madison Square Garden 1891, won him early acclaim. It was at Madison Square Garden that White was later shot dead by a jealous husband of Evelyn Nesbit whom White had had an affair with.

Penn Station 1910-McKim Meade & White

Many of the iconic buildings have since been demolished but the ones that remain are a testament to an architect and an architecture firm that set the rules for american city architecture for decades.

'Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed'

"Farewell to Penn Station," New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963

Madison Square Garden 1890

Ref- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanford-White
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON004.htm