American Classicist: The Architecture of Philip Trammell Shutze by Elizabeth Meredith Dowling (review)

59 Book Reviews Elizabeth Meredith Dowling. American Classicist: The Architecture ofPhilip Trammell Shutze. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. vii+ 239 pp. 247 illus. (94 color). Now that the grip of International Modernism has lessened and the blinders it imposed on our vision have been lifted, the variety of architectural creation that developed outside its narrow dogma is being rediscovered. First to be examined was the work of major firms such as McKim, Mead & White, Daniel Burnham, and a handful of nationally known architects of the generation who died early in this century. Now another generation is being rediscovered, architects who adhered to a traditional architecture and whose best work was done from about 1915 to 1950. Some, like the subject of this study, returned to their home communities and established secure practices among their own people. Because they tended to work outside the major metropolitan areas, but more especially because their work countered the rising critical tide focused on modernism, they tended to slip into obscurity, as architectural critics, the professional press, and polemical historians focused their critical attention on the radical architecture of European emigres and their followers. Philip Trammell Shutze (1890-1982) was one of these ignored and largely forgotten architects. During the years preceding the onset of the Depression of the 1930s, and even during it, Shutze was one of the major architects working in Atlanta, Georgia. He and his partners enjoyed a strong regional reputation and built throughout the Southeast He was born in Columbus, Georgia, to an upper-middle class family whose Bavarian predecessors had emigrated in 1854. Shutze's father died when he was ten, placing a great financial burden on Shutze and his mother as caretakers of the family. As a result, Shutze's rise to prominence was due solely to his academic and design ability that won for him a succession of scholarships and prizes. He achieved high honors in high school and then won a scholarship to attend the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta where the architecture curriculum was based closely on the French academic program at the University of Pennsylvania. Shutze completed his architecture degree with high honors, and then worked for several years in the office of the Atlanta architectural firm of Hentz and Reid. He managed to tour Europe briefly and then won a scholarship for study in the architecture program at Columbia University, New York, where he won second place in the Paris Prize competition of 1913. Shutze then returned to Atlanta where he continued to work for Hentz and Reid while also teaching at Georgia Tech. In 1915, however, he won the Rome Prize competition, and this was to redirect his career. The five years that Shutze spent at the American Academy in Rome gave him the opportunity to study closely a number of Roman buildings, as well as allowing him to visit a number of Italian villas and gardens of the seventeenth century. His elaborate notes, taken while measuring buildings and gardens in Rome and its environs, show the broad extent of his knowledge. Fortunately he saved his student projects and kept detailed fieldwork notes, the beginning of the library of sixtyseven notebooks and scrapbooks to which he turned again and again in his later designs (of these, thirtyfour were devoted entirely to Italian buildings and gardens). In his Introduction to the book, Scully draws particular notice to the photographs showing Shutze and his Academy fellows perched on high ladders and suspended from platforms pursuing their painstaking investigations. During his extended career, Shutze also assembled a remarkable library of volumes on architecture and garden design, eventually numbering 1,756 items. Of these, the titles relating to English and Italian architecture and landscape design are listed in Appendix I. Although Shutze became intimately familiar with the whole range of Italian architecture from 1400 through the eighteenth century, he was at first particularly drawn not to the robust High Renaissance urban monuments but rather to the lesser known villas and gardens of the Mannerist and Baroque periods, and it was from these that he repeatedly drew inspiration for the large landscaped suburban residences which became his forte when he resumed work with Hentz and Reid in Atlanta in...