Arts and Letters

The distinguished late member of the Academy, for whom this memorial has been done devotedly but, I fear, inadequately, crossed the Atlantic many times as a student, as a teacher, as an architect in the service of his clients abroad and as one in quest of rest and relaxation amidst the classical monuments that he loved to visit over and over again. It would not seem inappropriate, in these circumstances, that this tribute to his memory be written, as it was written, during an Atlantic crossing.

In 1956 one of William Adams Delano's steadfast friends [Henry Irving Brock] wrote the following citation to mark his election to Honorary Membership in an association of which he had been a member for more than half a century:

A great gentleman adorned with all the graces of the old school; matching courtesy with kindness; a genial companion and firm and considerate friend; a scholar apt with the right word at the right time, in prose or verse; an architect who has given distinction to the least and greatest of his works covering a wide range and representing, in the judgment of his peers, an achievement in our time second to none in the art to which his long life has been devoted.

Mr. Delano was born in New York City on January 21, 1874. He was the son of Eugene and Susan Magoun (Adams) Delano; it is said that he was a descendant, on his paternal side, of Philippe de la Noye, a French Huguenot who crossed the Atlantic on the ship "Fortune" and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1621. His maternal grandfather was the Reverend William Adams, a descendant of Henry Adams, the ancestor of John and John Quincy Adams.

"Bill" Delano was graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1891, and in that year delivered the "Lawrenceville Class Ode," his first attempt at verse; it appears with other poems from his pen in a little book entitled Random Rhymes privately published in June 1952 for his son and a few friends. In 1895 Mr. Delano was graduated from Yale University and then spent two years at the Columbia School of Architecture; following one year with the architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from which he received the diploma in 1902.

Upon his return from Paris Mr. Delano formed a partnership for the practice of architecture with Chester Holmes Aldrich; this lasted for thirty-seven years until the death of Mr. Aldrich in Rome, where he had been the Director of the American Academy. During the early years of this fruitful association, Mr. Delano was for seven years a professor of architecture at Columbia University.

In his long and successful partnership with Chester Aldrich, the designs for many distinguished buildings issued from their drafting boards. Mr. Delano was alone responsible for a number of structures bearing the Delano and Aldrich label which still stand and serve admirably the purposes for which they were built; they remain as mute testimony to the designer's taste and skill and include the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, India House and the Brook, Union, and Knickerbocker Clubs in New York. The Knickerbocker Club was one of the first commissions awarded to Mr. Delano upon his return from Paris. When we were sitting there not many years ago he told me that the tall windows extended to the floor because of a special request of some of the members. These old gentlemen, he indicated, wished to have an unobstructed view of the ankles of the ladies passing up and down Fifth Avenue; then he added, "How times have changed!"

At Yale, Mr. Delano designed the Forestry School, the William L. Harkness Lecture Hall, the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory and the Divinity School, the latter one of the most charming Georgian quadrangles. He designed also many buildings for the Lawrenceville and Hotchkiss Schools.

In the Nation's Capital he was the designer of one of the important monumental elements of the so-called Triangle Group, the building for the United States Post Office Department; in Washington he also designed the Japanese Embassy. In Paris he was the architect of the distinguished Chancellery of the United States of America situated prominently at one corner of the Place de la Concorde.

Mr. Delano was especially noted for many charming and eminently distinguished city and country houses; a number of these still stand in this, the city of his birth, and will be preserved to serve a variety of uses. They include the William Woodward mansion, now the Town Club; the Willard D. Straight house, now the headquarters of the Audubon Society; the Harold I. Pratt house, now the Council on Foreign Relations; and the George F. Baker house, now owned by the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia. It is a tribute to Mr. Delano's talents as an architect that these monuments, which he created many years ago, still stand the tests of time and changing uses and remain substantially as they were built.

In August 1948 President Truman decided to add a balcony to the south portico of the White House. The National Commission of Fine Arts disapproved this suggestion; they believed firmly that the original design by Hoban should not be changed. Realizing that Mr. Truman intended, in spite of their reasoned protest, to go forward with the project, the Commission, in a communication to the President, indicated that they hoped he would arrange to engage the services of a distinguished architect; they recommended Mr. Delano. Fortunately this suggestion met with the President's favor and subsequently he arranged for Mr. Delano's appointment. The design was done with the greatest restraint, in excellent taste and in keeping with this, our most important national monument. When it became necessary, in 1951, to reconstruct the entire interior of the central section of the White House, Mr. Delano was appointed Consulting Architect to the Commission appointed by the Congress to oversee this project; to him the country owes a debt of gratitude for having retained, in the reconstructed building, the character and the charm of the old.

No one enjoyed more rendering gratuitous services to the Government in Washington. Mr. Delano was generous with both his time and talents, devoting four years to the work of the National Commission of Fine Arts and, subsequently, nearly eighteen years to the exacting tasks of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. He was the recipient of many honors, among them the Gold Medals of the American Institute of Architects and of the Institute; he was an Officer of the French Legion of Honor, an Honorary Corresponding Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Corresponding Member of the Acadèmie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France.

William Adams Delano was a great gentleman; he lived a richly dedicated and happy life and "died full of years and of honors" in his eighty-sixth year on January 12, 1960. "Death hath not touched the spirit which remaineth changeless forever." These words, carved on a wall in the chapel of the American Military Cemetery at Brookwood in England, designed by one of his colleagues [Egerton Swartwout] at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, seem singularly appropriate as his epitaph.

Great dignity e'er clothed this noble man; His charm and genial manner made him friend To many men. His heart was big and warm, His greetings full of cheer until the end. How brave he was! He lived with pain, but still He smiled and e'er belied his suffering. He wrought rich beauty through his mind and will And left great buildings of his fashioning. Encomiums were many and deserved; He heard them with consummate modesty; A star in heaven's galaxy's reserved To mark his place in art's long history.

Here was a soul who lived abundantly; His spirit still walks on in majesty.