Carrère and Hastings
As a boy Carrère was sent to Switzerland for his education until 1880, when he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he was in the atelier of Leon Ginian until 1882.
Carrère was most active in the firm's large civic and commercial projects, including the House and Senate office buildings on Capitol Hill, the Manhattan Bridge and its approaches, and the New York Public Library Main Branch.
In the 1890s he worked with other leaders of the American Institute of Architects to persuade the US Treasury Department to implement the Tarsney Act, which had been passed by Congress in 1893 to allow the federal government to award architectural commissions for its buildings through open design competitions.
Later, Carrère and Hastings produced a plan for the City of Hartford, Connecticut, which was completed in 1911, just prior to his death, which occurred when a streetcar collided with the taxi in which he was riding.
There he met his future partner, and both maintained ties to Europe throughout their lives (Hastings earning the French Legion of Honor as well as the Gold Medal of the RIBA).
Whitehall is a Mediterranean-flavored house faced with white stucco, with palatial interiors in various styles ranged round a grand entrance hall with double staircase.
Clients included Elihu Root, the noted attorney and cabinet secretary under Theodore Roosevelt, Edward H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon, Thomas Fortune Ryan, one of Wall Street's notorious capitalists, and several members of the Blair family of New Jersey.
Following the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, and its influential classical themes, the firm's style began to exhibit modern French and Renaissance revival attributes.
The attention to sculpture and surface embellishment in their work was always closely tied to the axial planning that ensured the functionality of the interior spaces and circulation.
[4] One of the largest contributions of the firm was in the realm of urban design, a result of Carrère's abiding interest in the Beaux-Arts "City Beautiful" movement.
In collaboration with Hastings, he was largely responsible for carrying out the firm's major public commissions: the New York Public Library (1897–1912), the House and Senate Office Buildings in Washington (1908–09), the planning of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), the McKinnley Memorial in Buffalo, Richmond Borough Hall on Staten Island (1904–06), and the Paterson (New Jersey) City Hall (1896).
The architects were also noted for their contributions to the country house and garden movement of the early 1900s, where they introduced both stylistic and compositional ideas that shaped domestic architecture for decades to come.
Their largest and most notable country houses included Blairsden (1898) in Peapack, New Jersey, Bellefontaine (1897, altered) in Lenox, Massachusetts, Arden (1905–09) in Harriman, New York, and Nemours (1910) in Wilmington, Delaware.
Changing styles and the rise of International Modernism led architectural historians to neglect the work of Carrère and Hastings for half a century after the firm closed.
