Arts and Letters

Thomas Hastings, architect, was the seventh of that name in direct line, all of whom were of the Presbyterian faith, his father being a distinguished preacher and president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City where "Tom," as he was usually called, was born. From his grandfather, Thomas Hastings, who was a well known composer of sacred music, we have the beautiful "Rock of Ages" and to this background, in a measure, may be due the grandson's scholarly approach to his architectural work.

Hastings's greeting to his friends was a virtual benediction, so full was it of geniality and good will. At his office he would come bustling out to greet a visitor, grasping both hands in his and establishing at once an understanding of friendliness. He was thus a man of temperament and enthusiasm. His sense of honor and his integrity were not confined to the affairs of his profession, but were the controlling influence of his life. He was one of the most attractive figures of his time in New York City in artistic circles. He was much beloved by those who worked with him, and his generosity to his associates and employees is attested in these not altogether trifling lines:

There was a hard master named Hastings,
Who gave his staff regular bastings.
If one had a cough,
He would give a year off,
And charge it to savings and wastings.

It was while a student at Columbia that he received his first impulse toward education in architecture. This was after meeting a gentleman named Maybeck, at the office of Herter Brothers, who suggested to him that he should go abroad to study. This he did in 1880, when he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, studying in the atelier of Jules André. While in Paris, he made the acquaintance of John M. Carrère. Upon his graduation and receipt of the French government diplôme, in 1884, he returned to New York and entered the office of McKim, Mead and White, then the leading architects, where he found Carrère already at work. In 1886 the two formed a partnership, and in 1887 they were approached by a friend of Dr. Hastings, Henry M. Flagler, who had a project for developing Florida. From this contact came their first important commission for the design of the Ponce de Leon Hotel, and later the Alcazar in 1888.

These hotels were recognized by the profession generally as a novel success in American construction. They were, indeed, a sensation, and turned the attention of other architects to the resources of the Spanish style as adapted to the Southern climes of the country. The firm immediately took its place among the leading architects of America, and its success grew rapidly, as did the range and variety of its work.

It is always difficult to distinguish the individual activities of the members of an architectural firm. But, in the case of two men so sympathetic as were John M. Carrère and Thomas Hastings, one will not go far afield in assuming an intimate collaboration in their work. Mr. Carrère's death in 1911 left Mr. Hastings in supreme control of the work of the firm. In general, changing fashions and economic conditions produced a growing departure from the strict French inspiration of the earlier work of the firm, and the Tower of Jewels at the Panama Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, 1914, was characteristic of this trend in its use of the classic orders to give the note of gaiety for an exposition building. The Memorial Amphitheatre in the national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, is in a style almost Palladian Classic, with its sweeping, elliptical colonnade. It is one of the many monuments designed by Hastings. Among other buildings with which he is particularly identified, besides many churches and private dwellings, are the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, the New York Public Library, and the Frick residence. In the last few months of his life he completed the work on Devonshire House, London, a palatial apartment house.

On June 26, 1922, Hastings was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honor only twice before conferred upon an American.

In one of his published essays, Hastings made the following statement with which I may appropriately conclude this all too cursory tribute:

There is beauty in nature, because all nature is a practical problem well solved. The truly educated architect will never sacrifice the practical side of his problem. Emerson realized the truth when he said, "It is a rule of the largest application, true in plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism any real increase of fitness to its end is an increase of beauty.''

Hastings further said, "The practising architect, if he continues, as he should, to be a draftsman all his life, must realize that beauty of design and line builds well in construction, and with greater economy and endurance than construction, which is mere engineering…. Following the natural laws of the survival of the fittest, if undertaken in art, beauty will predominate in the end, and so deliver us from the defacement of nature."

Such were the ideas and ideals of Thomas Hastings who was deeply interested in our Academy, and was for several years a devoted member of its Board of Directors.