Building of the Day: 199 Ryerson Walk

Photo: S. Spellen

by

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Memorial Hall, Pratt Institute
Address: 199 Ryerson Walk
Cross Streets: Willoughby and DeKalb Avenues
Neighborhood: Clinton Hill
Year Built: 1926-27
Architectural Style: Art Deco
Architect: John Mead Howells
Other Buildings by Architect: On Pratt Campus – Engineering Quadrangle, Willoughby Hall. Also with partner William Hood -Daily News Building, Manhattan, Tribune Tower, Chicago.
Landmarked: No, but on the National Register of Historic Places

The story: John Mead Howells was the son of 19th century author and editor William Dean Howells. He spent his undergraduate days at Harvard, before going on to graduate school there for architecture. In the mid-1890s, he went to Paris and attended the prestigious L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he completed his architectural education. When he came back to New York, he opened up a firm with fellow Paris student, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, the eldest son of millionaire Anson Phelps Stokes.

While partners, Stokes designed St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, while Howell designed Stormfield, a vacation home for Samuel Clemens, who was a close friend of Howell’s father. Both the chapel and the home were very different from the work both would do later in their careers, but showed that they had a mastery of traditional form, and a knack for tweaking that form to a present-day, and very modern result.

In 1913, the partnership was dissolved and Howells partnered with another L’Ecole student, Raymond Hood. The two began exploring the possibilities of the new Art Deco style of architecture which was beginning to intrigue architects more and more. That style turned out to work very well for the new skyscrapers that were going up in metropolitan areas like New York and Chicago. Howell and Hood won the commission for Chicago’s Tribune Tower in 1922, and then snagged the prestigious Daily News Building right afterward. That iconic Art Deco office building is on 42nd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. Hood would later go on to design Rockefeller Center.

When he wasn’t designing sky scrapers, Howell was busy with buildings for institutions, such as Pratt Institute. Beginning in 1909, he began building the Engineering Quadrangle at Pratt, built in a series of phases, and finished in 1928. In 1927, he began work on Memorial Hall, designed to be Pratt’s main auditorium. It stands on Ryerson Walk, in the middle of the campus, next to the Main Hall, one of the original buildings built on campus; that building designed by Lamb & Rich in 1887.

Art Deco lends itself well to civic architecture, and this building is a great example. It’s not all that large, but has a nice sense of place and scale, due to Howell’s use of several different styles within the Art Deco framework. The soaring arched window, with the tripartite inner window gives the building an illusion of greater height, and the statues of Art and Science that look down on passersby are a great realization of the goals of the Institute: an education in the arts, paired with engineering and other science disciplines.

Many of the graduates of the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts had a special affinity with taking the best of the past and marrying it to designs of the future. Howell’s Memorial Hall is not pure Art Deco, as we generally think of it, but a wonderful combination of Venetian and other Italian Renaissance forms as filtered through the lens of Art Deco. The result is a very fine building.

(Photo:S.Spellen)

GMAP

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: S.Spellen

Photo: S.Spellen

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: S. Spellen

Photo: Jim Henderson for Wikipedia

Photo: Jim Henderson for Wikipedia

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