Architecture
Archibald Gracie built the two-story wooden mansion in the Federal style. The design of the structure is attributed to Ezra Weeks, a prominent builder or John McComb, Jr., the architect of New York City Hall and Hamilton Grange, Alexander Hamilton's country home in Harlem, New York.
By suggestion of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr.'s wife Susan, plans were initiated for a new west wing, completed in 1966. The architect of the Susan B. Wagner Wing, as it is now called, was Mott B. Schmidt. Though criticized at the time for not being "modern," the wing has come to be regarded as an appropriate solution to the problem of expanding the small house for official functions. The Gracie Mansion Conservancy restored portions of the building during 1981-84, and made substantial decorative and functional restorations in 2002.
Read more about this topic: Gracie Mansion
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
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—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit—if totally different in form—from all the romantic architecture of the past.”
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“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)