Cass Gilbert

Cass Gilbert (Zanesville, Ohio November 29, 1859 - New York, New York May 17, 1934) attended MIT and worked for a time with the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. His public buildings in the Beaux Arts style reflect the optimistic American sense that the nation was the heir of Greek democracy, Roman law and Renaissance humanism. Gilbert is rated as a skyscraper pioneer, but the cladding of his buildings looked back to Neoclassicism rather than embracing modernity. His high reputation plunged among professionals during the age of Modernism, but ordinary people have always been uplifted by the reassuring sense of continuity that his rich and sober but slightly bland designs offer.

His works include:

• Minnesota State Capitol, Saint Paul, 1895 - 1905, in High Renaissance style, was not a mere replica of the US Capitol. Local newspapers made a fuss when Gilbert sent to Georgia for marble, but the result, in which a hemispherical dome caps a high drum not unlike Saint Peters over a range of buildings expressing the bicameral legislature, was so nobly handsome that West Virginia and Arkansas contracted for Gilbert capitols too. Its brick dome is held in hoops of steel.
• Woolworth Building, New York, New York, 1913, his Gothic skyscraper clad in terracotta panels, the tallest building in the world in its time.
• University of Minnesota campus, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, New York, New York
• Saint Louis Art Museum, Known as the Palace of the Fine Arts, for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri
• Plans for cladding the George Washington Bridge, New York, in classicizing masonry, 1926, fortunately not carried out
• New York Life Insurance Building, 1928.
• United States Supreme Court building, Washington, DC (illustrated, right), Gilbert's last major project. He died a year before it was completed. A vast Roman temple in the Corinthian order is penetrated by a cross range articulated with pilasters in very low relief. The central tablet in the richly sculpted frieze reads EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. The pediment sculptures Liberty attended by order and Authority (great lawgivers Moses, Confucius and Solon are on the West Portico) were executed by Herman A. MacNeil.
  • architectural tour

Gilbert's drawings and correspondence are preserved at the New-York Historical Society.