William Adams Delano (January 21, 1874 – January 12, 1960) was an American architect and a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich in the firm of Delano & Aldrich. The firm worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City, Long Island and elsewhere, building townhouses, country houses, clubs, banks and buildings for colleges and private schools. Moving on from the classical and baroque Beaux-Arts repertory, they often designed in the neo-Georgian and neo-Federal styles, and many of their buildings were clad in brick with limestone or white marble trim, a combination which came to be their trademark.
Early life and education
Delano was born in New York City on January 21, 1874, and was a member of the Delano family of Massachusetts. His parents were Eugene Delano (1844–1920) and Susan Magoun (née Adams) Delano (1848–1904). His father was an 1866 graduate of Williams College and a partner in Brown Brothers & Company banking and trading group. Among his siblings was Moreau Delano, also a banker with Brown Brothers, and two sisters: Caroline Delano, who married Augustus B. Wadsworth (a director of the Wadsworth Center), and Susan Delano, a botanist who married Charles W. McKelvey.[1][2]
His paternal grandparents were Moreau Delano and Sarah Ann (née Abrams) Delano.[1] He was a distant cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Through his maternal aunt, Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown, he was the nephew of John Crosby Brown, the head of Brown Brothers & Company. Mary Elizabeth Adams (Brown) was the minister William Adams sister, who was Delano's maternal grandfather, and for whom he was named. The minister William Adams'[3] wife was Martha Bradshaw Magoun, who was the maternal grandmother of Delano, and she was the daughter of Thatcher Magoun (associated with the Thatcher Magoun clipper and 60 State Street) and Mary Bradshaw. Previously the minister William Adams was married to Susan Patten Magoun, sister of Martha Bradshaw, before Susan Patten died. A further connection between the families resides in the offspring of John Crosby Brown and Mary Elizabeth's six children, with a son Thatcher Magoun Brown named in honor of Thatcher Magoun, along with daughter Mary Magoun Brown, and their eldest child William Adams Brown, who like Delano was also named in honor of their grandfather the minister William Adams. Furthermore, Delano's father Eugene had made partner with the Philadelphia house of Brown Brothers & Co., meanwhile his mothers middle name is Magoun.[citation needed]
He met his longstanding partner, Chester Holmes Aldrich, when they worked together at the office of Carrère and Hastings in the years before the turn of the 20th century. They formed their partnership after Delano's return from Europe 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 its townhouses, churches, schools, and a spate of social clubs for the Astors, Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys. Separately (Delano was the more prolific) and in tandem they designed a number of buildings at Yale.[5] Delano taught at Columbia University from 1903 to 1910.
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 from 1914 to 1919 in French chateau style, with gardens by Olmsted Brothers, Oheka ranges over 109,000 square feet (10,000 m2) and was staffed with 125 people.
In 1922, Delano designed the interiors of the Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists' cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others.[6] Eight years later Delano and Aldrich were asked by the organization to design the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.[7] The purchase of the land, design, and construction was paid for by the Galleries and personally supervised by Clark. As he wrote in the 1934 catalog:
Pursuing our purpose of putting American art prominently before the world, the directors a few years ago appropriated the sum of $25,000 for the erection of an exhibition building in Venice on the grounds of the International Biennial. Messrs. Delano and Aldrich generously donated the plans for this building which is constructed of Istrian marble and pink brick and more than holds its own with the twenty-five other buildings in the Park owned by the various European governments.[8]
Delano's sense of humor was 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 Decoterra 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.[citation needed]
Delano continued to practice almost until his death in 1960. Aldrich had left the partnership in 1935 to become the resident director of the American Academy at Rome.
Marriage and descendants
Delano married Louisa Millicent Sheffield (née Potter) on May 23, 1907.[11] His son, William Richard Potter Delano, was born on July 31, 1909.[11] His son married Dorothea Frances Lehmann in October 1939.[12]
Delano died on January 12, 1960, aged 85, in New York City.[13]
^He was a son of John Adams (educator), Yale College 1795 (1772–1863), who was an American educator noted for organizing several hundred Sunday schools, and his wife Elizabeth Ripley, the daughter of Gamaliel Ripley and Judith Perkins and a great-great G=granddaughter of Governor William Adams was a president of Union Theological Seminary.
^Yale Banner and Pot Pourri. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1923. p. 192.
^Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 2013): Appendix B, 543.
