Charles Adams Platt

Charles Adams Platt 1861-1933, American architect, landscape architect, painter, and etcher, b. New York City. He studied etching with Stephen Parrish and painting, in Paris, under Boulanger and Lefebvre. He won distinction in both fields before travels in Italy turned his interests toward architecture and garden design. His architectural designs are based upon Italian and Georgian traditions. Platt's works include numerous important city and country residences, the latter complete with their gardens; the Freer Gallery of Art at Washington, D.C. (1918); an addition to the Corcoran Gallery; a building for the Leader News in Cleveland; buildings for the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana, including its library; and a number of buildings (e.g., chapel, library) for Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. He wrote Italian Gardens (1894)

Bibliography: See study by K. N. Morgan (1985).

Platt, Charles Adams (1861–1933). American architect and landscape-designer. His Italianate gardens of the 1890s and early 1900s were famous, with buildings and gardens beautifully integrated (e.g. Faulkner Farm, Brookline, near Boston, MA (1897–8), and Gwinn, near Cleveland, OH (1907–8). He advised on the designs of the campuses of Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Rochester Universities, and was architect of the Freer Gallery, Washington, DC (1913–18). His earlier architectural work was informed by Classicism, and especially by Italian exemplars, but he also designed in a restrained Georgian Colonial style, as with the Pratt House and Garden, Glen Cove, NY (1910–13). He designed the campus and buildings for the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL (1919–30—a particularly fine work in which axes, symmetry, and composed vistas are fully exploited), and for the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA (1922–33), the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (1925); and the Deerfield Academy, CT (1930–2), among many other distinguished works. He published his influential Italian Gardens in 1894, based on his travels in 1892, and a monograph on his work in 1913.

Bibliography

ARe, xv (1904), 181–244;
K. Morgan (1985, 1995);
Platt (1913);
Jane Turner (1996);
van Vynckt (ed.) (1993)