William Rutherford Mead
William Rutherford Mead (August 20, 1846 – June 19, 1928) was a united states architect who had been the “Core Office” of McKim, Mead, and White-colored, a noted Gilded Age architectural firm. The firm’s other two founding partners were Charles Follen McKim (1847-1909), and Stanford White-colored (1853-1906).
Mead was created in Brattleboro, Vermont. He would be a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, hence his middle name. His sister, Elinor, later married novelist William Dean Howells, and the more youthful brother Larkin Goldsmith Mead grew to become a sculptor. William Mead was handsome, authoritative and quiet. His father would be a prominent lawyer, and the mother was the sister of John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Utopian. Mead attended Norwich College for 2 many finished Amherst College in Massachusetts within the type of 1867. He later learned architecture under George Fletcher Babb in Russell Sturgis’s office in New You are able to City.
In 1872, Mead partnered with Charles Follen McKim, another New You are able to architect, but Mead’s talent was more for running a workplace instead of designing. This collaboration with McKim created certainly one of Mead’s only known commissions, a home to have an Amherst classmate, Dwight Herrick, from Mead’s hometown of Chesterfield, Nh.
Around December 1877, the firm required on William Bigelow, the elder brother of McKim’s new wife, Annie Bigelow, like a partner, becoming McKim, Mead and Bigelow, with offices at 57 Broadway. In 1879, Bigelow withdrew in the firm, however they were became a member of by Stanford White-colored to create McKim, Mead, and White-colored. Mead was the partner who “hired and fired”, “steered the ship”, and spent his time “attempting to keep the partners from making damn fools of themselves.”
In 1883, Mead married Olga Kilyeni (c.1850-1936) in Budapest, Hungary. They gone to live in Rome, Italia, where he was heavily active in the American Academy in Rome – McKim’s favorite project and legacy – until his dying. He was an AAR charter member, as was McKim, a Trustee from 1905-1928, and it is President from 1910-1928. In 1902, King Victor Emmanuel conferred on Mead the decoration of Dark night Commander from the Crown of Italia for his pioneer operate in presenting the Roman and Italian Renaissance architectural style in the usa. In 1902, Amherst College conferred upon Mead the honorary amount of LL.D. In 1909, he received a diploma of M.S. from Norwich College in Vermont. In 1913 he received the gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mead upon the market in 1920, and died on June 30, 1928, inside a Paris accommodation from cardiac arrest, after a disease of countless days, together with his wife at his side. Mead was all of the the firm’s founding partners to die, as McKim died in 1909, after White-colored in 1906. At his dying, his estate of $250,000 visited his wife, Olga. Olga moved along with her sister in New You are able to City, and died on April 10, 1936, in New You are able to City in her own apartment within the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. She left her entire estate towards the trustees of Amherst College. The cash was utilized to construct the Mead Art Building, that was created by James Kellum Cruz of McKim, Mead and White-colored. Your building was finished in 1949 and houses the Mead Art Museum.
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