Arts and Letters

On revisiting the ancient fortified city of Avignon at dusk on a September day a decade ago, I remarked to my discerning companion, "Harry Shepley may have found, in the fourteenth-century fortress Palace of the Popes, his inspiration for the design of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center." My companion replied: "You may be right; but certainly the Hospital-Center is the more handsome." And so it is, both as to its setting on the East River, the majesty of its form and the simple dignity of its detail. It may be said to be the most distinguished among the notable tall buildings in this fabulous city, and I venture to predict that the design is timeless. This Academy has honored architects, as in 1959 they honored Henry Richardson Shepley, with their Gold Medal for the design of distinguished and lasting buildings; many of these were inspired by monuments abroad.

Harry Shepley, a grandson of Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect of Trinity Church in Boston, was honored by this Academy for his life work, which includes the design of many distinguished structures built during the half century that he practiced the profession of architecture. I opine, from conversations with him, that he considered the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center his most satisfying accomplishment.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard in the Class of 1910, he was among the last of a long line of students of architecture from the United States to receive the Diplôme of the École des Beaux Arts; this came to him in 1914 and, as a result of his student years in Paris, he returned to France in 1917 with the American Army to aid in the defense of a country he deeply loved. Harry Shepley recognized his profession not as one sufficient unto itself but rather as a sturdy branch of the broader area of the arts of design. In a letter dated June 21, 1961, he wrote: "We have, I am sure, the finest advisory group that could be gotten together and I would trust and back up any one of you in his own field even if I were not enthusiastic. In this way only can we do something creative and not end up in a series of dull compromises." His philosophy, respecting his approach to architectural design, is best expressed in a statement that he prepared at the height of his career:

The only modern architecture that deserves the name is found in those fresh creations evolved from a background of tradition. One cannot do traditional architecture now because it is not of our time and it is therefore without meaning today. On the other hand, architecture that is revolutionary may be dramatic when first built but, when the novelty wears off, there is no quality to sustain it in the test of time to which all architecture must submit.

In addition to the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Harry Shepley designed many distinguished buildings throughout this country including the Chapel, Dunster and Adams Houses, the McKinlock and Strauss dormitories, Vanderbilt Hall for the Medical School, the Fogg Museum, the Biology Institute and the Undergraduate Library, all situated on the campus of Harvard University. He also designed new buildings for the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and others elsewhere in this country too numerous to mention in this brief tribute. In his professional practice he experimented with new architectural forms up until the time of his death, the while he also was absorbed with studies related to the restoration of the west front of the Capitol of the United States, that it might reflect, in every detail, the spirit of Thornton, Latrobe, Bulfinch, and Walter. Earlier he was a collaborator in the task related to the reconstruction of the now completed east front of the Capitol.

A project that absorbed Harry Shepley's attention over a period of several years was the memorial that has been erected by the American Battle Monuments Commission at Margraten in Holland in memory of more than eight thousand members of the Armed Forces who were killed in action in one of the great theatres of World War II. Their remains rest and the names of the missing are recorded in this distinguished American Military Cemetery. To this task he gave tireless and devoted attention; the result is an eminently appropriate, simple, and lasting monument to his genius and to his wholehearted and friendly collaboration with the artists he selected to work with him. A captain with the Air Service of the Army in France during the First World War, Harry Shepley demonstrated in this monument that he understood in full measure the great sacrifices that were made by the men in uniform who followed those of his generation to France a quarter century later.

He rendered distinguished services outside of his exacting professional practice of architecture; they included a term of four years as a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts and as a consultant to the United States Treasury Department, to the Federal Works Administration, to the Architect of the United States Capitol, to the Department of State and to the Department of National Defense. To these public agencies he gave unstintingly of his time and talents over a long period of years. For more than a decade he served as a trustee of the American Academy in Rome and of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1953 France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and in 1957 Harvard University recognized his distinguished career by awarding him the honorary degree of Doctor of Arts.

Henry Richardson Shepley, elected to this Academy in 1942, lived a long, useful, and happy life; he was deeply dedicated to a noble profession requiring a rigorous discipline necessary for the establishment of a firm foundation in an enduring culture devoted to the ever changing creative art of building.

Aldous Huxley, writing of Sir Christopher Wren, stated:

Everything that [he] did was the work of a great gentleman; that is the secret of its peculiar character. For [he] was a great gentleman; one who valued dignity and restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity; one who desired that men and women should live with dignity, even the grandeur befitting their proud human title; one who despised meanness and oddity as much as vulgar ostentation; one who admired reason and order, who distrusted all extravagance and excess. A gentleman, the finished product of an old and ordered civilization.

This statement, concerning the greatest English architect of the seventeenth century, is wholly true of Henry Richardson Shepley.

In his tribute to Paul Philippe Cret, read in 1945 before this Academy, Shepley said: "He was a noble and courageous character, a fine spirit, a distinguished artist, an Academician who brought us honor and of whom we shall always be proud." The distinguished architect whose memory we honor here today is worthy of his own encomium descriptive of a friend and distinguished fellow Academician.