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A third school is developing an architecture based on modern structural necessities—steel and concrete. There are skyscraper specialists, of whom Holabird & Root of Chicago and Ralph Thomas Walker of Manhattan are examples. A still more advanced group follows the lead of Le Corbusier of France who once declared that a house should be "a machine in which to live." George Howe and William Lescaze of Manhattan and Philadelphia employ glass, metals and stone in a severely utilitarian architecture, an arrangement of rectangular and curvilinear masses, devoid of superimposed ornament, which suggests a sort of plastic geometry.
With such various schools, the architecture of the future might be any man's guess. It is safe to say, however, that the typical architecture of the present emanates from the median school, that which adapts traditional decorative forms to a modern structural foundation. In this practice no office ranks higher in the estimation of the profession, none has attracted a more distinguished clientele or done more noteworthy work, than Delano & Aldrich of New York.
Architecture is practiced in little offices and big ones, which are satirically referred to as "factories" by draftsmen who work in them. Rarely does an office remain little when the demand for its services warrants its becoming big. But holding the belief that architecture, like all fine art, is an individual, intimate, scrupulous affair which suffers from large scale, mass methods. Delano & Aldrich have kept their office small enough so that at frequent intervals they can personally inspect the work of each & every draftsman. Today, at the height of their careers, Mr. Delano and Mr. Aldrich maintain a force of only 67 people, including their clerical staff. Both of them are constantly to be seen watching the progress of $35-a-week assistants.
Their office consists of a rehabilitated stable in the Murray Hill residential district. Out of it, after the most deliberate processes of craftsmanship, has come an impressive array of plans. Besides the Rockefeller mansion, they designed Otto Hermann Kahn's great French château at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., and James Abercrombie Burden's Georgian home in Syosset, which won the Architectural League Gold Medal for 1920 and housed Edward of Wales in 1924. Other Long Islanders who live in D. & A. residences are Vincent Astor, Editor Julian Starkweather Mason of the New York Evening Post (a bungalow), Harold Irving Pratt, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Harrison Williams (public utilities). Editor Conde Nast (Vogue, Vanity Fair) inhabits a Park Avenue penthouse by D. & A. The entire Labrador missionary plant of the International Grenfell Association was designed by them, as was Dwight Whitney Morrow's home in Englewood, N. J. Railroad-man Leonor Fresnel Loree occupies a D. & A. house in West Orange, N. J. William Hallam Tuck, of the Solvay Company, will soon occupy another on the battlefield of Waterloo.