Charles A. Platt architectural research library

The life and career of architect Charles Adam Platt (1861-1933), an autodidact who designed landscapes, country houses, and institutional buildings, embodies a Centurion's commitment to the arts and letters.

The precocious Platt was exposed to the arts at a young age through the social circles of his father John H. Platt, a corporate lawyer and founding member of the Century. By 1881, he had joined the New York Etching Club; he also enjoyed a relatively successful career as a painter, training in New York City at the National Academy of Design, the Arts Student League, and, most impressionably, at the Académie Julian in Paris.

After studying independently and formally in Europe since 1882, Platt returned to New York with his wife Annie following the death of both of their fathers. He was elected to membership at the Century in 1887. Upon his return to Paris, Annie fatally succumbed to complications in childbirth.  In 1889, friend and Centurion Henry O. Walker invited Platt to Cornish, the summer art colony gathered around the sculptor and Centurion Augustus Saint Gaudens in New Hampshire. Platt advised Walker on the design of his home, before purchasing nearby land and beginning work on his own house, furnishings, and landscape. Fellow colony members quickly commissioned him as designer for their country estates.

Two opposing camps of garden design had emerged in the United States and England in the 1890s. Platt had become concerned about his younger brother William’s tutelage under fellow Centurion Frederick Law Olmsted. To best present a corollary to Olmsted's picturesque approach towards landscape design, Platt took his brother for a tour of Italy in the spring of 1892, during which they took photographs and made measured drawings of the studied, Renaissance-inspired formality of Italian gardens. His photographs, portraying the garden in its natural state, often neglected and run down, depicted classical architectural details for study and adaptation. Tragically, William died shortly after in an accident.

In 1893, Platt married Eleanor Hardy Bunker, with whom he would have five children. He wrote two articles based on this research trip for Harper's Magazine, who urged him to expand them into a book. Platt's Italian Gardens, published in 1894 and featuring his own photographs, drawing, and watercolors, was the first English-language illustrated introduction to the concept. It is considered one of the landmark studies of the subject alongside his friend Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), which solidified the fashion launched by Platt.

Through the sympathetic and interested audience created by Italian Gardens, Platt quickly established himself as a preeminent, and quite busy, architect and landscape designer. Influential commissions included Charles Feer, Charles F. Sprague, Rev. Joseph Hutcheson, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Vincent Astor, William G. Mather, and Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick (for whom he created Villa Turicum, considered the culmination of his country house creations). In 1913, he was the subject of the first commercial publication of a large-scaled portfolio on the work of a contemporary American architect: The Works of Charles Platt (McKim, Mead, and White were the subject of the second).

After World War I, Platt moved into institutional architecture, achieving further renown for museum, library, and campus designs, including the Smithsonian Institute’s Freer Gallery of Art, Phillips Andover Academy, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Platt served as the ninth president of the Century, between 1928 and 1930, before ill health forced him to resign. Over ten of his direct relatives and descendants have been elected to membership: thus, the Platts have spanned the entire lifespan of the Century. Wrote Alexander Dana Noyes in his 1934 Century Yearbook memorial, "Among the Centurions who will always be associated with the traditions of reading room and dinner table, Charles Adams Platt was a distinctive figure [...] Platt had none of the ostentation that sometimes comes with high professional repute. Along with his unfailing kindliness of manner, modesty regarding even his proficiency in art was part of his character. He never forced into conversation his own ideas or his own achievement; indeed, his personal contribution to the talk, even when art was the topic of discussion, was usually such that fellow-Centurions who did not know him may have supposed themselves to be listening to a self-restrained amateur. But all such hesitancy vanished when his imagination applied itself to the artistic task before him."

While many firms in Platt's architectural generation maintained a large office library, relatively few have been maintained or catalogued.  Platt heavily utilized a library in his offices at 36 East 20th Street, and later at 101 Park Avenue. Clients would be greeted in this room, and commissions discussed, during which books could easily be pulled off the shelf to illustrate ideas. Despite the prominence and continual growth of the firm, Platt insisted that he alone handle client contacts.

While it appears Platt purchased some of the books during his student days in Paris, the collection was begun in earnest around 1900. The books were acquired in New York and on the frequent trips Platt made to Europe throughout his career. The most common book dealers sourced in the collection are William Helburn (New York) and B.T. Batsford (London).

As Platt's experience, travel, and visual education were extensive, the books were important for communicating these influences to his assistants. His chief draftsmen, G.T. Goulstone, is said to have meticulously inspected every volume that entered the collection. 

Platt's library supplemented his lack of a professional education. For the first house that Platt designed, he asked friend, Centurion, and architect of the Century clubhouse Stanford White for technical advice on the structure and a "book that would help me in regard to detail." His renderer Schell Lewis recalled, "At the mention of contemporary architecture, C[harles] A[dams] P[latt] would say, 'Go to the original sources.' It had to be in the book. The book, any book with the work of the old boys. C A P: 'If you got one idea out of a book, it was certainly work the price.'" 

Geoffrey Platt further elaborates: “Basic to the design process was his architectural library […] These sources provided a vocabulary natural to C A P and his designers, who molded the material in their own way. Whatever detail or design they found relevant to the project at hand was only a starting point. It was studied exhaustively, modified, and adapted to be a part of the new composition. The process was creative. The fitness of detail, its scale and its freshness, together with C A P’s perfect sense of proportion gave all his houses and his buildings their distinctive character.” 

According to scholar Keith N. Morgan, underlinings and margin notes highlight the ideas which impressed Platt or members of his office. Sketches in margins and on end papers show the transformation of a particular image to a Platt design. In some cases, drawings for a certain project were inserted in the book that contained the design source. (None of these annotations, however, have been catalogued.)