MAY 2007 » book review

Architectural Spectacle

Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers
by Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA; 2007
274 pp.; hardcover; 70 color, 96 b&w illus.; $34.95
ISBN 0-8122-3951-2

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

A trio of obscure young designers descended on a Miami, FL, bay around 1912: a blueblood failed painter turned decorating adviser named Paul Chalfin; a blueblood architect named F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., who had trained with Carrère & Hastings; and a Colombian-born half-Italian landscape architect named Diego Suarez. None ever collaborated with each other again and none ever worked on any project more famous than the multi-million-dollar Vizcaya (romantically named for a Spanish Basque province). It had just one bachelor inhabitant: James Edward Deering, a retired heir to the International Harvester fortune. His design team synthesized a dozen pre-1840s styles into what Witold Rybczynski calls "a curious blend of architecture and theatricality" as well as a "subtle fusion of history, historicism, and historical memory."

Rybczynski, a prolific architecture critic and professor at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), has analyzed Vizcaya and its hundreds of acres of statue-studded gardens with Laurie Olin, a renowned landscape architect and UPenn professor. If only every American Renaissance mansion had such an elaborate intact design, and such capable storytellers.

Deering did not make an easy subject for biographical research. Some intimates remembered him as warm, generous and gregarious, "punctilious and honorable," while others considered him an aloof, "astringent little man." His surviving correspondence gives few insights into his tastes or architectural aspirations, and instead fusses over the likes of bathtub pipes and billiard-table locations. His private life, although little documented, was apparently colorful: Vizcaya had 130 staffers so that Deering, as Chalfin later jealously complained, stayed busy "always entertaining, always pretty women."

Chalfin was openly gay, and "an aesthete of the first order," Rybczynski writes. Hoffman was allowed to design only the house shell, and was then dismissed. He produced a restrained, Veneto-inspired, quoin-trimmed composition of loggias and asymmetrical towers, with no two façades alike. Chalfin filled the rooms with compatible borrowings from design traditions of various eras and regions, especially Italy. The guest-room furnishings alone, Rybczynski notes, range from "whimsical chinoiserie" to "an eighteenth-century Venetian interpretation of French rococo décor, with carved and gilded wood furniture, panels painted in the style of Watteau, a silk Tabriz rug, and a gray marble fireplace." Chalfin also experimented with marble stripes and checkerboards on the walls and floors which, Rybczynski observes, "anticipated the luxurious geometrical abstraction of French Art Deco."

Chalfin gradually spread his jazzy eclecticism across the property. The primeval terrain, Olin explains, encompassed a hardwood grove, limestone ridge, "sandy pine woodland" and "a frequently inundated wet prairie of grasses with mangrove." Hoffman drew up schematics for terraces and allées, which Suarez fleshed out. Someone on the team, somewhere along the way, dreamed up a breakwater shaped like "a gigantic stone boat encrusted with figures, balustrades, obelisks, urns, great-carved swags, and enormous masks, with mermaids at each end." Chalfin quickly demoted Suarez to draftsman and took credit for the whole landscape, which eventually included scrollwork iron railings by Samuel Yellin and animal sculptures by Gaston Lachaise and Alexander Stirling Calder.

At times, 1,000 workers crawled the site. Deering had quarries opened nearby, railroad lines extended and harbors dredged to speed deliveries. Fortunately his International Harvester pockets were deep. Rybczynski calculates that building Vizcaya cost well over $60 million in modern currency – about $4 per cubic foot, "at a time when an expensive country house cost $1/cubic foot." Deering died in 1925, and still had millions left to bequeath to relatives and charities.

Most American architectural spectacles of this scale have come to sorry ends, succumbing to fires or bulldozers. Vizcaya, despite some bouts of hurricane damage, has been lucky. In 1952, Deering's nieces turned it into a county-owned house museum. Only the grounds have lost some of their splendor, due to "disappointingly dull development," Olin laments. He particularly bemoans a spot where a "spectacular lagoon creation – every last bay and bridge, tree, vine, and shrub, every path, stair, road, and dock – disappeared under landfill."

Olin's and Rybczynski's essays sometimes repeat each other's content, but their tones are distinct. Rybczynski can occasionally be gushy: in the entrance loggia, "there are precious objects, but no preciousness; there is history, there is connoisseurship, but above all, there is pleasure." Olin, for his part, can be turgid: "Successful projects of the scope of Vizcaya generally result from an iterative process with different individuals taking the lead on different issues at different times with ideas going back and forth in a teamwork of sorts in an effort to achieve a commonly understood and shared purpose." If such fatty prose had been trimmed, there might have been more room for photographs. Recent and vintage images of the Chalfin-Hoffman-Suarez masterwork are tantalizingly reproduced just a few inches square.

Perhaps Rybczynski and Olin were trying to discourage coffee-table-book buyers; after all, Rybczynski writes, "Vizcaya has not been taken seriously by most architectural historians." The book's predominantly gray pages will undoubtedly keep away some newbies, but with just a little more investment in color printing, the publisher could have drawn in readers just learning about Vizcaya's tale of a peculiar, fortuitous meeting of minds, taste and money.

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