Michael Middleton Dwyer

Michael Dwyer is an American architect known for renovating historic structures and designing new ones in traditional vocabularies, and considered to be an advocate of classical architecture. He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001), and the author of Carolands (2006).

Michael Dwyer
Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River
Born1954
NationalityAmerican
Alma materColumbia College (BA)
University of Pennsylvania (MArch)
OccupationArchitect

Education and career

Michael Dwyer graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1975 and received a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.[1]

He was associated from 1981–96 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he was a member of the project team that designed the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987.[2][3] He helped design the Dana Discovery Center in New York City's Central Park, completed in 1993 as part of the Central Park Conservancy's rehabilitation of the Harlem Meer. In an interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture in December 1993, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" reinforced the park's "romantic landscape design."[4] In 1992–93, he was part of the team of architects that restored Bonnie Dune, the Southampton residence of Ambassador Carl Spielvogel and his wife, the preservationist Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a project executed in collaboration with the interior designer Jed Johnson.[5]

During his time at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture. In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of New York's then-emerging neoclassical school of architecture, the reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht and an $8.95 million town house on the Upper East Side and is renovating Rudolph Nureyev's former apartment in the Dakota."[6]

In 1996, after establishing his own firm, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York City's Riverside Park, designed by the landscape architects Kelly/Varnell, with a statue sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by Dwyer, including a quotation from Roosevelt's 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights.[7] In 1997, he restored the exterior of the George F. Baker House, a designated New York City landmark, and from 1998–2008, he was the architect for the restoration of the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.

In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer designed residential projects for the upper strata of New York's private sector, working for clients such as Eddie Lampert, Scott Bessent, Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. The financier Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's Hudson River Valley villa.[8] The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's design for a new house in Southampton for the real-estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, comparable in scale and detail to the pre-war houses of architects such as David Adler and John Russell Pope.[9][10]

Architectural works
  • 35 Meter Cruising Yacht (completed 1995).[11]
  • Nureyev Apartment, The Dakota, New York City (completed 1995).
  • Eleanor Roosevelt Monument, Riverside Park, New York City (dedicated 1996).[12]
  • George F. Baker Jr. House, 75 East 93rd St., New York (restoration completed 1997).
  • Garden Pavilion and Poolhouse, Edgewater, Barrytown, New York (completed 1997).[13]
  • Longview (Residence), Gin Lane, Southampton, NY (completed 2001).[14]
  • Mead Point Residence, Greenwich, CT (completed 2001).[15]
  • Lampert Residence, Greenwich, CT (completed 2001).
  • Stone Cottage (Residence), Toylsome Place, Southampton, NY (completed 2004).
  • Cosmopolitan Club, New York City (restoration completed 1998–2008).
  • New Sommariva (Residence), Jefferys Lane, East Hampton, NY (completed 2009).
  • Hollyhock (Residence), Ox Pasture Road, Southampton, NY (completed 2015).[16]
  • Triplex Penthouse, San Remo, Central Park West, New York City (completed 2017).[17]
  • Meadowlark Lane Residence, Bridgehampton, NY (completed 2017).

Written works

See also

References
  1. "Thank you to our FY16 CCT donors". Columbia College Today. Fall 2016. Retrieved November 10, 2020.
  2. "St. Thomas Choir School," Progressive Architecture, March 1992 (Supplemental Issue).
  3. Joseph Giovannini (September 17, 1987). "Young Voices Soar at the New St. Thomas Choir School". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-05-01.<
  4. Arcidi, Philip (1993-01-12). "Learning by the Rules" (PDF). Progressive Architecture. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-05-01.
  5. Jay Johnson, Jed Johnson: Opulent Restraint (Rizzoli, 2005).
  6. Patricia Leigh Brown, "Architecture's Young Old Fogies," The New York Times, February 9, 1995.
  7. Jean Parker Phifer, Public Art New York (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).
  8. Richard H. Jenrette, Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston, SC: Wyrick & Co., 2000).
  9. Dan Shaw, "Top Tier Design Team Breathes Elegance into a Southampton Estate," Architectural Digest, July 2018.
  10. Bunny Williams, Love Affairs with Houses (New York, NY: Abrams, 2019).
  11. Editors of The Classicist, with an introduction by Robert A.M. Stern, A Decade of Art & Architecture 1992-2002 (New York, NY: Institute of Classical Architecture, 2002).
  12. Jean Parker Phifer, Public Art New York (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).
  13. Richard H. Jenrette, Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston, SC: Wyrick & Co., 2000).
  14. Elizabeth Pochoda. "Taking the Long View." House & Garden (August 2001).
  15. Laura Beach, "Sojourn on the Sound." Antiques & Fine Art (Summer 2006).
  16. Dan Shaw, "Top Tier Design Team Breathes Elegance into a Southampton Estate," Architectural Digest (July 2018).
  17. Kathryn Brenzel, "Inside the World of Luxury Renovations," The Real Deal (February 16, 2016).

[[Category:Neoclassical architects

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