page_title: Carrère and Hastings
section_title: Collaboration and beyond
hierarchical_section_title: Carrère and Hastings / Collaboration and beyond
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of architect Thomas Hastings of the firm of Carrere and Hastings, New York City. Courtesy of the New York Public Library, the main building of which was designed by Carrere and Hastings.
context_page_description: Carrère and Hastings, the firm of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, was one of the outstanding American Beaux-Arts architecture firms. Located in New York City, the firm practiced from 1885 until 1929, although Carrère died in an automobile accident in 1911.
  Both men studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in France and worked at the firm of McKim, Mead and White before they established their firm. The partnership's first success was the Ponce de León Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, designed for Henry Flagler. They went on to establish a successful practice during the 1880s and early 1890s, and rose to national prominence by winning the competition for the New York Public Library in 1897. The firm designed commercial buildings, elaborate residences, and prominent public buildings in New York, Washington and as far afield as Toronto, London, Paris, Rome, and Havana.
context_section_description: The firm's first major commission came from a parishioner of Rev. Hastings, Henry Morrison Flagler, the Florida developer and railway tycoon, for whom the partners built the Ponce de León Hotel (1885–1888) in St. Augustine, Florida (now part of Flagler College). This was followed by the Alcazar Hotel (1887–88 now the Lightner Museum), as well as the Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church (1887), both in St. Augustine, and a house for Henry Flagler nearby. In 1901 they designed a second house for Flagler, Whitehall, in the resort he developed, Palm Beach, Florida. Whitehall was completed in 1902.  Whitehall is a Mediterranean-flavored house faced with white stucco, with palatial interiors in various styles ranged round a grand entrance hall with double staircase.
  Carrère and Hastings were among the best-connected New York architects, and benefited from associations with the richest and most powerful of the city's citizens. Clients included Elihu Root, the noted attorney and cabinet secretary under Theodore Roosevelt, Edward H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon, Thomas Fortune Ryan, one of Wall Street's notorious capitalists, and several members of the Blair family of New Jersey. The early work of the firm was eclectic but always succinctly organized, an inheritance of their École des Beaux-Arts training. Following the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, and its influential classical themes, the firm's style began to exhibit modern French and Renaissance revival attributes. The attention to sculpture and surface embellishment in their work was always closely tied to the axial planning that ensured the functionality of the interior spaces and circulation. They were among the earliest users of new technologies, from structural steel to electrification, even employing passive air conditioning systems. But their major interest was in the adaptation of the classical language of architecture developed in Europe to the American scene, creating a modern American architecture out of centuries-old traditions.
  One of the largest contributions of the firm was in the realm of urban design, a result of Carrère's abiding interest in the Beaux-Arts "City Beautiful" movement. An early advocate of comprehensive planning, he designed downtown plans for Baltimore, Hartford, Cleveland and Atlantic City. In collaboration with Hastings, he was largely responsible for carrying out the firm's major public commissions: the New York Public Library (1897–1912), the House and Senate Office Buildings in Washington (1908–09), the planning of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), the McKinnley Memorial in Buffalo, Richmond Borough Hall on Staten Island (1904–06), and the Paterson (New Jersey) City Hall (1896). 
  he architects were also noted for their contributions to the country house and garden movement of the early 1900s, where they introduced both stylistic and compositional ideas that shaped domestic architecture for decades to come. Their garden designs were extensively published, and they created a comprehensive staff to handle interior design in large houses, one of the first offices to offer these services. Their largest and most notable country houses included Blairsden (1898) in Peapack, New Jersey, Bellefontaine (1897, altered) in Lenox, Massachusetts, Arden (1905–09) in Harriman, New York, and Nemours (1910) in Wilmington, Delaware.
  The office's significant skyscrapers were not designed until the late 1910s and early 1920s when, in association with other architects, Hastings' office worked on the Cunard Building (1917–21) and the Standard Oil Building (1920–28), which stand across the street from each other on Broadway at Bowling Green. Hastings was a critic of tall buildings in cities, warning that buildings over six stories (the height of Parisian hôtels particuliers) produced alienation by removing references to human scale, and destroyed the urban streetscape.
  Changing styles and the rise of International Modernism led architectural historians to neglect the work of Carrère and Hastings for half a century after the firm closed. Today t
caption: Bust of Thomas Hastings, New York Public Library
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