THE ARCHITECT DAMNED

White is not the only victim here: His entire tribe comes under indictment, both the dead and the living. White was killed at Madison Square Garden in 1906 by “Mad Harry” Thaw, whose wife, Evelyn Nesbit (the “Girl on the Swing”), had had an affair with White. They called it the “Crime of the Century,” and Lessard holds that it left indelible marks on White’s descendants. She warns in a “Note to the Reader” that “the names of some of the individuals in this book have been changed to protect their privacy and the privacy of their families.” Then she wades into it, with solemnity and self-righteousness and not a little vulgarity. For someone who sprang from such a (presumably) polite background — Lessard grew up in a compound on Long Island — she seems not to have learned proper manners.

Her leaden self-righteousness is most evident in her embrace of the pathetic fallacy about architecture: that inanimate objects (e.g., buildings) bear human traits. In a typical comment, she says that “[White’s] neoclassical architecture is about power without love and without prayer.” And she contrasts her great-grandfather’s work with Thomas Jefferson’s this way: “In the context of the open tenderness and authenticity of Jefferson’s architecture, the very sophistication of Stanford’s buildings exposes a kind of emptiness — as if the buildings were a performance, a kind of dressing-up; a charade. In Jefferson’s architecture, by contrast, there is thoughtfulness, humility, and, above all, conviction . . .” Lessard depicts wealth as evil, decoration as conspicuous consumption, and grand buildings as imperialism.

This message is not unfamiliar. We have heard it before, from the modernists in the 1930s, who were eager to banish tradition in architecture, particularly the classical tradition. To them, classical architecture was rich man’s architecture. The classical architect, unlike the enlightened modernist, was indifferent to public housing, to the problems of the poor, to the necessity of reforming society.

And Stanford White stood for all of this, for everything that was to be rejected. Moreover, he was a notorious womanizer, as his greatgranddaughter amply documents — and this, she believes, gives his architecture the taint of immorality. Her book has been rightly seen as fixed on the “psychology of architecture,” and it will therefore bring smiles to the faces of art historians who have a way of turning to economics, to sociology — to anything but the essence of art. These days, the sexual is viewed as the source of practically every human activity. This is not entirely new, admittedly: Lewis Mumford gave us the sexual interpretation of city planning (in which a straight street is “male”). But whatever direction this brand of psychologizing takes, we can be certain that it will depend on the misattribution of the human to the inanimate.

The Architect of Desire exhibits yet another curious phenomenon of books on architecture: the mockery, even disdain, of the wealthy client. Lessard (and others) have condemned White for associating with the rich. Perhaps they should consider how an architect makes his living. The rich act as patrons (or should; if they do not, they are in some sense failures). The Vanderbilts lined Fifth Avenue with their mansions, and to Mr. Duke we owe a splendid Gothic campus by Horace Trumbauer in North Carolina. When it comes to patrons, however, Lessard can only snigger.

Still, the book is not entirely useless. It offers a glimpse of White at his firm, among his partners, from whom it is not easy to isolate his work. Today, we set a high premium on the individual’s role in painting, sculpture, and (it follows) architecture, but White insisted that “no member of our firm is ever individually responsible for any design which goes out from it.” And Lessard is good enough to include a passage from John Jay Chapman, a shrewd and cultivated observer of the first decades of this century. For him, White ” had the vitality of a giant. He had the same divine frenzy that great politicians are born with. He was pervasive. Not a day passed without one’s hearing something new about him.” And this, truly, is one of the few crumbs of value to be found in this cheerless volume.

Henry Hope Reed is president of Classical America and author of the forthcoming United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration.