This is where to see commercial, residential and institutional buildings by America\u2019s most revered trio of architects.<\/b>
\nBUFFALO \u2014 Crazy about American architecture? This is where to see commercial, residential and institutional buildings by America\u2019s most revered trio of architects \u2014 H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright \u2014 all built during the city\u2019s Gilded Age heyday. And the classic downtown is loaded with more fabulous survived\/revived structures saved from the wrecking ball.
Buffalo has long trumpeted architectural tourism, but upping that game this summer is the opening of Hotel Henry, an upscale hotel 3 miles north of downtown. It\u2019s retrofitted into a hulking monolith built in the 1870s as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.
Add an after-dark thunderstorm and the exterior of the four-story, twin-towered main building looks ready to host cast and crew for a horror movie. Inside, though, common areas are already the domain of wedding events.
Local preservationists acquired the derelict property from the state and partnered with a local hotelier that has navigated National Historic Landmark restrictions to launch a chic \u201curban resort conference center.\u201d High-ceiling rooms are fully wired and dressed in cutting-edge modern. Two or three former patient lodgings have been combined to form each new guest room. Wide and spruced-up corridors lead to small common areas and then to larger open areas in the towers.
The hotel occupies a third of the asylum, which at peak capacity housed about 2,000 patients and staffers.
Three things point to the Henry\u2019s asylum origins: The still-in-place preservation-mandated floor plan makes for a maze worthy of any hospital. Original wooden hallway floors have, in places, necessarily been replaced. And \u2014 when dawn arrives \u2014 the amount of natural light is spectacular.
The old asylum was progressive in its design. For fire-safety reasons, wings were segmented into \u201cpavilions\u201d (hence the maze and scattered common areas) ; light was thought to be therapeutic for patients, so windows are enormous \u2014 so tall in high-ceiling guest rooms that pull-down blinds are remote-controlled.
Acres of green space abound outside the windows.
To pull this off 150 years ago, Henry H. Richardson was brought in to design the asylum. He is considered the first truly American architect; while the exterior looks Ivanhoe medieval, his tweaked Romanesque Revival design stressed functionality and native materials (the exterior is New York State sandstone) . The Hotel Henry is named in his honor.
To plan the grounds, Richardson turned to long-time collaborator Frederick Law Olmstead, considered the father of American landscape architecture, who designed Manhattan\u2019s Central Park, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, and more.
The Wright stuff
Buffalo\u2019s salad days were between the Civil War and World War I, when the city was America\u2019s eighth-biggest and local big shots had a yen for promoting it. The Larkin soap empire was a major player in the early 1900s, and one of its top executives wanted to build a home near Richardson\u2019s asylum, in an area Olmstead planned. He chose a young Midwestern architect whose design did not please neighbors who lived in Queen Anne-style dwellings and the like in the high-rolling Parkside area.
Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Darwin Martin house still stands out \u2014 a sprawling, low-slung two-story of Prairie School design. One of Wright\u2019s first major projects in the eastern U. S., it proved a door-opener for more commissions and was the flexing ground for touches Wright refined on later iconic projects.
The Martin complex holds the main house, two other original buildings and three reconstructions. The main residence \u2014 revolutionary in 1903-1905 \u2014 is an abode a tasteful bigwig could crave more than a century later.
On guided tours from the new onsite visitor center, you see Wright\u2019s plan to integrate living space with the outdoors. A pergola at the back of the main residence leads to a conservatory flanked by a carriage house and sister\u2019s smaller dwelling. Note the profusion of Wright\u2019s casement windows and decorative motifs.
Though the Martin complex draws more than 30,000 visitors a year, it\u2019s off the radar for many Wright fans because it was abandoned for a period (the Martins lost their shirt during the Depression) .
That makes the 15-year restoration all the more interesting: Materials, technologies and artisanship had to match the 1907 standards. Woodwork in the main house \u2014 there are 8.5 miles of trim \u2014 had to be white oak, stained. Special roof tiles had to be imported from France. A glass facing on a fireplace had been crafted by a long-gone company in Chicago; restorationists got what they required from that firm\u2019s still-in-business century-old rival. For reconstructed exteriors, custom-molded bricks of varying hues were pre-palliated to copy Wright\u2019s arrangement.
Wright was difficult to work with, the Martins learned. He demanded and received final say on d\u00e9cor and furniture, what grew in the garden, and so on. As house executive director Mary Roberts says, \u201cFrank Lloyd Wright was a freak for the details, but the genius is in the details.\u201d
The soap magnate nonetheless remained friends with Wright \u2014 and hired him 20 years later to design the Martins\u2019 summer home, on a bluff just south of Buffalo. Though smaller and less extravagant, Graycliff is a stunning relic another preservation group is restoring.
The preserved downtown
The link between Romanesque Revival Richardson and radical Wright is Louis Sullivan \u2014 the \u201cfather of the skyscraper\u201d and the third icon of American architecture. He learned from Richardson and mentored Wright.
Sullivan\u2019s main accomplishment in downtown Buffalo is the Guaranty Building (1896) , a 13-story, steel-frame masterpiece not as stark as later skyscrapers evolved. The external vertical lines are eased by elaborate terra cotta panels. Within are a stained-glass skylight and marble mosaics. The building was threatened with demolition in the 1970s, restored a decade later and renovated in 2008.
Take a walking tour of downtown; you can see more than 50 notable buildings from the 1830s to the 1980s. Explore Buffalo \u2019s Masters of American Architecture tour visits 10 to 12 of them.
Among the coolest:
\u2022 The massive Daniel Burnham-designed 1896 Ellicott Square Building was billed at opening as the largest commercial office building in the world and contained restaurants and an early cinema for a reason, Explore Buffalo director Brad Hahn says: \u201cIt was promoted that people could do two days of work in one day because they didn\u2019 t need to go far from their desks.\u201d
\u2022 The dome of the Buffalo Savings Bank (1901) retains its original glint from 140,000 sheets of gold leaf. Across the street, at 14 stories, the 1912 Electric Tower remains a lit-at-night landmark. It was inspired by the long-gone Tower of Light at the 1901 World\u2019s Fair, which sported a dome inspired by the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt.
That 1901 Pan American Exposition is where anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley.
\u2022 Hahn notes that the Old County Hall (a Gothic Revival pile from the 1870s designed by Richardson\u2019s supervising architect at the Buffalo State Asylum) was where McKinley\u2019s body lie in state \u2014 and where Czolgosz was tried and sentenced. Wake, trial and death-sentencing took a total of 11 days.
For more info: visitbuffaloniagara.com<\/p>\n

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