[4][5] In a 1993 interview with the journal Progressive Architecture, Dwyer said that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design.

"[6][4] In his book The Architecture of Additions (1998), architect Paul Byard wrote that the Dana Center "is sized to be not too big for its adopted idiom but at the same time an effective presence and marker for one of the defining corners of the park."

[7] During his time at Buttrick White & Burtis, Michael Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture and a protagonist of its resuscitation.

In a 1995 review of architecture's nascent classical revival by The New York Times, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown wrote that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side,"[8] a house characterized by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, as "scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel.

Asked to weigh in, Yale historian Vincent Scully declared that "classicism speaks fundamentally to what people want, to security and dignity and permanence.

The renovated space did double-duty as a studio for Dwyer's architecture practice, and a venue for Establishment, Sae-Eng's showcase for Southeast Asian art and antiques.

On a parallel track, Dwyer prepared designs for the upper strata of New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side (960 Fifth Avenue, 720 Park Avenue, and River House); its west side (The Dakota, The Majestic, and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Rye, Greenwich, and Nantucket.

Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver.