Michael Dwyer (architect)

Michael Middleton Dwyer
Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River at Barrytown, New York
Born	1954 Philadelphia, PA, USA
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Rose Bay Secondary College, Sydney, New South Wales Columbia College (B.A.) University of Pennsylvania (M.Architecture)
Occupation	Architect
Buildings	Edgewater Pavilions, Barrytown, New York. Hollyhock, Southampton, New York.

Michael Dwyer is an American architect and author of books about architecture, including Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and Carolands (2006).

Architectural Practice

Buttrick White & Burtis

Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the New York architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he helped design several notable projects including the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987. Writing in The New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger placed the school "among the city's best examples of contextual architecture."

The Dana Discovery Center, Central Park. (Buttrick White & Burtis Architects)

Another project, the Dana Discovery Center, was a venue for environmental education in New York's Central Park, the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–93 restoration of Harlem Meer, an eleven-acre lake in the park's northeast corner. In a 1993 interview with the journal Progressive Architecture, Dwyer said that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design."

Classical revival

While at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture and a protagonist of its resuscitation. In a 1995 review of architecture's nascent classical revival by The New York Times, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown wrote that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," a house characterized by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, as "scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel."

Interviewed by Brown for the article, dean Stern opined that the young classicists were "perhaps the true radicals of their time," whereas architect James Stewart Polshek, formerly dean of Columbia University's School of Architecture called them "bizarrely backward" and "lacking new ideas." Asked to weigh in, Yale historian Vincent Scully declared that "classicism speaks fundamentally to what people want, to security and dignity and permanence."

Meatpacking District

Establishment at 30 Gansevoort St. in New York's Meatpacking District, designed by Ungkun Sae-Eng.

In 1996, Dwyer and interior designer Ungkun Sae-Eng formed Dwyer & Sae-Eng, an architecture and design firm. In 1999, they repurposed an auto-repair garage on Gansevoort Street in the newly formed Historic Meatpacking District to do double-duty as a space for Dwyer's architecture studio and a venue for Establishment, Sae-Eng's showcase for Southeast Asian art and antiques.

Cultural and preservation projects

George F. Baker Jr. House, at 75 East 93rd Street, New York City, a restoration project.

In 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, where he supplemented landscape architect Kelly and Varnell's circular oak bosque and Penelope Jencks' bronze statue with granite medallions set into the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her).

In 1997, Dwyer restored the exterior of the George F. Baker Jr. House, built in 1918 and designated a landmark in 1969 by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission whose report called it "an outstanding example of a modified Federal style...one of the finest works in New York City by the architects, Delano and Aldrich."

From 1998 to 2007, he was the consulting architect to the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women, helping to restore its clubhouse, designed by architect Thomas Harlan Ellett and winner of the Architectural League's 1933 gold medal.

Residential projects

On a parallel track, Dwyer prepared designs for the upper strata of New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side (960 Fifth Avenue, 720 Park Avenue, and River House); its west side (The Dakota, The El Dorado, and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Rye, Greenwich, and Nantucket.

Edgewater

Above, the entrance to the garden pavilion at Edgewater; below, the portico (built 1997).

The financier and preservationist Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's villa on the Hudson River. Jenrette described them in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:

In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.

Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank.

Hollyhock

The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, a new house in Southampton, New York designed by Dwyer for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a decade-long collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins.

In Hollyhock's main wing, an entrance hall leads to an enfilade of three high-studded, south-facing rooms: a paneled dining room decorated with early 19th-century wall paper, a living room with boiserie painted a "rich watery blue," and a pine-paneled library, 55-feet-long, divided into three spaces by projecting bookcases. The principal feature of the entrance hall is Dwyer's design for an elliptical staircase (inspired by a design of Adler's that was inspired by a design of John Russell Pope's) to which he added a black and white starburst marble floor.

In Hollyhock's gardens, designed by landscape architect Quincy Hammond in the grande manière, Dwyer built a guest house (a kind of modern-day Petit Trianon), a garden pavilion in the form of an orangery, an arbor with eight limestone columns supporting teak lattice panels, and a garage building in the guise of a caretaker's cottage.

Link to photographs of Hollyhock's landscape.

Hollyhock's tile roofs and stucco facades allude to Red Maples, a house designed by the architects Hiss and Weekes, with gardens designed by Ferruccio Vitale, that stood on the site from 1913 until its demolition in 1947.

Project List

• 35 Meter Cruising Yacht (interior architecture; completed 1994).
• Nureyev Apartment; The Dakota, New York City (interior architecture; completed 1995).
• Eleanor Roosevelt Monument, Riverside Park, New York City (granite medallions and bronze plaques; completed 1996).
• Windsong; Shimmo Beach, Nantucket, MA (new house; completed 1996).
• George F. Baker Jr. House, 75 E 93rd St, New York City (roof replacement and window restoration; completed 1997).
• Edgewater, Barrytown, NY (Garden Pavilion and Pool House; completed 1997).
• Maisonette duplex, 960 Fifth Avenue, New York City (interior architecture; completed 1999).
• Longview; 27 Gin Lane, Southampton, NY (new garden facade, new wing with indoor pool, and interior architecture throughout; completed 2000).
• Mead Point; Indian Field Road, Greenwich, CT (new house; completed 2001).
• River House Apartment (apartment alterations; completed 2003).
• Stone Cottage; Toylsome Place, Southampton, NY (new house and interior architecture; completed 2004).
• 720 Park Avenue, New York City (apartment alterations; completed 2006).
• Cosmopolitan Club, New York City (alterations to the entrance hall, ballroom, and garden penthouse, from 1998 to 2007).
• New Sommariva; East Hampton, NY (new house; completed 2009).
• Hollyhock; Southampton, NY (new residence, guest house, garden pavilion, and arbor; completed 2017).
• Triplex penthouse; The San Remo, New York City (alterations completed 2017).

Gallery

See main gallery at Wikimedia Commons

• 
  Venetian window at the Edgewater Garden Pavilion.
• 
  Pool House at Edgewater.
• 
  Longview, on Lake Agawam in Southampton, New York.
• 
  Detail of entrance door at Longview.
• 
  Detail of staircase at Longview.
• 
  Stone cottage in Southampton, New York.
• 
  Classical house in East Hampton, New York.
• 
  The portico at the entrance to Hollyhock.
• 
  The entrance court at Hollyhock in Southampton, New York.
• 
  Garden gate and guest house at Hollyhock, Southampton, New York.

Critical reception

• In 2015, the Institute of Traditional Architecture ranked Michael Dwyer No. 21 on its list of the world's top 50 traditional architects.
• In its 2024 review of Michael Dwyer's work, The Franklin Report wrote, "...Dwyer has a strong command of historical reference and is adept at renovating prewar building interiors. Sources praise Dwyer's impressive intellect and charming nature while noting that the firm's 'confidence in its skills' may come across as rigid to unsuspecting clients."

Bibliography

Publications (as contributor)

• Carl A. Pearson (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Up in Central Park on the Shore of Harlem Meer," Architectural Record (March 1990).
• Mark Alden Branch (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Flirting with Folly in Central Park," Progressive Architecture (August 1991): 23.
• Michael Dwyer (contributing illustrator). "A View of the Dana Discovery Center, Central Park, New York," Architecture in Perspective No. 8 (American Society of Architectural Illustrators, 1994): 10.
• Michael Dwyer (author). "Buildings in Public Parks," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1995): 26, 28, 30; ISSN 0898-0284.
• Michael Dwyer (contributing illustrator). "New Master Plan - Trinity School," Architecture in Perspective No. 11 (American Society of Architectural Illustrators, 1996): 83.
• Michael Dwyer (author). "Building with Stone," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1996): 25–26; ISSN 0898-0284.
• Michael Dwyer (author). "The Arts and Crafts in Architecture Today," Classicist No. 3 (1996–97): 90–96; ISBN 1-56000-936-5.
• Michael Dwyer (editor) with a preface by Mark Rockefeller. Great Houses of the Hudson River (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, in association with Historic Hudson Valley, 2001).
• Michael Dwyer (author) with a foreword by Mario Buatta. Carolands (Redwood City, CA: San Mateo County Historical Association, 2006).

Publications (as subject)

• Clem Labine. "A Townhouse in the Corinthian Order," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (September/October 1991): 48, 49; ISSN 0898-0284.
• Lee Goff. "Manhattan Townhouse," Stone Built (New York: Monacelli, 1997): 40. ISBN 9781885254696.
• Richard H. Jenrette. Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston: Wyrick, 2000): 8, 105, 161. ISBN 0-941711-46-3.
• Elizabeth Pochoda (author), Pieter Estersohn (photographer). "The Long View," House & Garden (August 2001): 76-82.
• Editors of The Classicist, with an introduction by Robert A.M. Stern. A Decade of Art & Architecture 1992–2002 (New York: Institute of Classical Architecture, 2002).
• Dan Shaw. "Top Tier Design Team Breathes Elegance into a Southampton Estate," Architectural Digest (July 2018).
• Bunny Williams. "Hollyhock," Love Affairs with Houses (New York: Abrams, 2019):13-35. ISBN 9781419734649.

Relatives

Dwyer's cousin, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Dwyer was the Adjutant General of Nevada from 1983 to 1986.

See also

• Francis F. Palmer House (75 East 93rd Street, New York City)
• George F. Baker Jr. House (69 East 93rd Street, New York City)
• Edgewater (Barrytown, New York)

External links

• Michael Dwyer on Instagram
• Institute of Traditional Architecture 2015 Rankings.