Inception: The Vision and Design Team
George Vanderbilt began planning what would become Biltmore House at thirty years old. The project would become the major work of his life and would ultimately consume the vast majority of his personal fortune. The Vanderbilts, as a family, had formed a familial tradition in the nineteenth century of building grand, palatial homes that showcased their affluence and status as the wealthiest family in the nation.
Why Asheville?
Asheville had been connected by rail to the rest of the country in 1880; its easy accessibility by rail resulted in an influx of visitors and tourists. The temperate summers and relatively mild winter weather were attractive inducements to affluent travelers anxious to escape scorching summers and frigid winters. The clean and mild mountain air was also thought to be restorative and the city was advertised as a healthcare destination, now easily accessible by railroad, to people of means suffering from a wide variety of illnesses. An 1886 promotional booklet for the city by Hinton Helper (as cited in Chase, 2007, p. 34) was titled, "Nature's Trundlebed of Recuperation" and described some wildy miraculous restorative effects the atmosphere of the city was rumored to be capable of bringing about:
"The climate in summer is simply delicious, while in winter it is invigorating and health-giving. It is highly recommended as a place of resort for consumptives, many of whom have been entirely cured in the first stages of disease by a residence in this place….
This climate is so invigorating and the air so pure that a residence here of a few months will rid the system of malaria, and some cases of pronounced dyspepsia have been cured by its effect. Its advantages in pulmonary and throat affections are attested by scores who have sojourned here…."
There are not many details known about exactly why and how George Vanderbilt chose the Asheville area as the site for the massive building project that would become Biltmore Estate; it is certainly a far cry from the NY city palaces and Rhode Island retreats being built by other Guilded Age millionaires. What is known is that the reserved, bookish George visited Asheville for the first time with his widowed mother, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt, in the winter of 1887-88, staying in the Battery Park Hotel. The mother and son pair might have been traveling south to avoid the more harsh New York winter and the elderly Mrs. Vanderbilt was most likely also seeking medical advice and treatments.
George Vanderbilt described his own remembrance of that first visit in 1887-88 and his attraction to the Asheville and its general surroundings to Frederick Olmstead, who would serve as Biltmore's landscape architect, when touring the property together in 1888:
George Vanderbilt described his own remembrance of that first visit in 1887-88 and his attraction to the Asheville and its general surroundings to Frederick Olmstead, who would serve as Biltmore's landscape architect, when touring the property together in 1888:
"I came to Asheville with my mother. We found the air mild and invigorating and I thought well of the climate. I enjoyed the distant scenery. I took long rambles and found pleasure doing so. In one of them I came to this spot under favorable circumstances and thought the prospect finer than any other I had seen. It occurred to me that I would like to have a house here. The land was beyond the field of speculation and I bought a piece of it at a low rate. Then when I began to consider the matter more seriously I saw that if I built upon it I should not have pleasant neighbors, so I sent Mr. McNamee down here to buy some of them out, and step by step, without any very definite end in view, I have acquired 2000 acres. Now I have brought you here to examine it and tell me if I have been doing anything very foolish" (NRHP, 102).
A Collaboration of Visionaries...
George Vanderbilt had chosen a vast swath of Buncombe county, near Asheville, NC as the site for a new private estate of his very own. Ultimately he would build the largest private home in the United States in a monumental undertaking.
Vanderbilt would call on two great artists to help him create his dream estate. These men were both considered visionaries and the best in their respective fields. He did not need to look far; the Vanderbilt family had previously commissioned both of them to help fashion a more patrician aura, by creating several splendid testaments to their wealth and refinement. When George began purchasing property in western North Carolina on which he would Biltmore, the nation's preeminent architect and landscape architect were practically old friends of the family.
Vanderbilt would call on two great artists to help him create his dream estate. These men were both considered visionaries and the best in their respective fields. He did not need to look far; the Vanderbilt family had previously commissioned both of them to help fashion a more patrician aura, by creating several splendid testaments to their wealth and refinement. When George began purchasing property in western North Carolina on which he would Biltmore, the nation's preeminent architect and landscape architect were practically old friends of the family.
Frederick Law OlmsteadWhen George Vanderbilt and Frederick Law Olmstead traveled together in August 1888 to Asheville and inspect the property on which Vanderbilt wanted to build his estate, they were embarking on an unique endeavor to cultivate the grounds of what would become Biltmore Estate. Olmstead was well-known to the family; at the time, he was working on no less than 5 separate projects for members of the Vanderbilt family (Rybczynski, 380). Like Richard Morris Hunt, Olmstead's work on Biltmore Estate was done at the pinnacle of a career in which he was considered the preeminent authority and artist in his field of landscape architecture. |
Frederick Law Olmstead was born to an wealthy and well-respected Massachusetts family. Similar to the family roots of Biltmore architect Richard Morris Hunt, and in stark contrast to G.W. Vanderbilt, Olmstead's family was proud to trace its roots to seventeenth century Puritan colonists. While Hunt's mother would encourage traditional artistic pursuits, Olmstead grew up with parents who were most fond of enjoying the outdoors and adamant that their children would do the same; Frederick was encouraged to spend as much time as possible outdoors and was allowed to wander freely. As recounted by Roper (1973, p. 10),
"several times before he was 12, Fred got lost on a ramble and stayed overnight with strangers. His parents assumed that he was safe in some familiar or friendly household; they did nothing to discourage his adventurous bent".
While Fred was deeply affected and interested in the outdoor life, he was not equally interested in formal schooling. He was never to obtain much of a formal education of any sort. As recounted by Rybczynski (1999, p. 28), Frederick, when writing about his schooling stated,
"I was strangely uneducated, miseducated… when at school, mostly as a private pupil in families of county parsons of small, poor parishes, it seems to me that I was chiefly taught how not to study, how not to think for myself."
As a young man, Olmstead would go on to attend classes Yale University intermittently, become an apprentice to a surveyor as and an importing firm, and travel abroad. Eventually, he would decide that what most interested him was agriculture. Farms were purchased for him by his father in 1847 and 1848. Olmstead was interested in applying modern and scientific farming methods; he took multiple trips abroad to study farming methods in Europe.
It was during these trips abroad investigating the European countryside that Olmstead began to become interested in understanding "exactly how natural elements could be manipulated to create an effect of picturesqueness" (Rybczynski, 1999, p. 87). He was especially interested in European parks. All across the continent, European citizens had access to the gardens of private aristocrats or parks that had been private estates, but had since been donated to cities. Most striking to Olmstead was Birkenhead Park in England, which was designed specifically for the public's use and paid for by the citizens themselves. He was to observe that democratic America had nothing equivalent to Birkenhead Park, which was what Olmstead termed a "People's Park" (Rybczynski, 1999, p. 93). This experience was the germination of the theme that would become his life's work and through which he would become known as "the father" of his profession in America.
It was during these trips abroad investigating the European countryside that Olmstead began to become interested in understanding "exactly how natural elements could be manipulated to create an effect of picturesqueness" (Rybczynski, 1999, p. 87). He was especially interested in European parks. All across the continent, European citizens had access to the gardens of private aristocrats or parks that had been private estates, but had since been donated to cities. Most striking to Olmstead was Birkenhead Park in England, which was designed specifically for the public's use and paid for by the citizens themselves. He was to observe that democratic America had nothing equivalent to Birkenhead Park, which was what Olmstead termed a "People's Park" (Rybczynski, 1999, p. 93). This experience was the germination of the theme that would become his life's work and through which he would become known as "the father" of his profession in America.
Landscape architecture was not part of the American vocabulary in the early to mid-nineteenth century. It wasn't a concern within the country at all; landscaping and beautification efforts were loosely based on English or European models and precedents and there was very little serious planning put into landscaping efforts. The problem, however, was that while the vast majority of the country was rural, more and more Americans were living in crowded cities. Those urban residents, most of them of very little means, had no easy access to green spaces, trees or even grass. When in the 1850's a movement was undertaken to create a vast park space in New York City, it was Frederick Law Olmstead's design which was selected from a field thirty three entrants in 1858 as the plan on which the new part would be based. The park, created according to Olmstead's design, would become Central Park.
Having made a name for himself with his work on Central Park, Olmstead would continue on to design the campuses of numerous universities (the University of California at Berkley, Stanford and the Massachusetts Agricultural College- Amherst , to name a few), planned residential communities such as Tarrytown Heights in NY and Riverside in Illinois, and work on the Capitol grounds in Washington, DC, but his greatest interest continued to be public park design. In all of his endeavors, he preferred a natural, pastoral and picturesque sensibility to planned, formal gardens. |
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Richard Morris HuntRichard Morris Hunt is widely recognized as the father of American architecture. At the time that he began work on for George Vanderbilt on Biltmore House, he was at the peak of his 40 year career as the preeminent architect in the country.
Born in Vermont in 1827, he spent his early years growing up in a wealthy family who traced their roots in America back to the early colonial period. While his father died when we was a very young boy, his mother was an artistic woman, keen on granting her children the best education possible; to her that included training in and exposure to the arts (Volk, 1984). This desire to encourage her children in their artistic pursuits might help to explain the extensive amount of time that Ms. Hunt and her children spent traveling in Europe. The family eventually settled permanently in France in 1843 (Rose, 2013). Hunt was especially interested in architecture as a young man and he became the first American admitted to study at the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux-Arts. After graduating and working in the field in France for a time, Hunt returned to the US in 1855. At the time of Hunt's return to his homeland, the field of architecture in the United States was very much different from that in France; architecture in America was not considered an art, but was classified as an occupation similar to any other construction related trade. At this time, "anyone who wished to call him-or herself an architect could do so. This included masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and other members of the building trades. No schools of architecture or architectural licensing laws existed to shape the calling" (AIA, 2013). Hunt was one of a handful of founding members of the American Institute of Architects, the first professional association of architects, and would continue throughout his career to successfully raise the standards and prestige of his profession. |
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While architecture was not yet respected as a valuable and exalted American art form upon Hunt's first arrival, "the climate was ripe for this French-trained architect to step ashore in New York" (Broderick, 216). There was a growing class of very wealthy Americans, eager
to show off their wealth by building classically inspired, European style homes. Particularly after the civil war, and the
economic down turn it inevitably caused was over, "Hunt discovered men and women with
seemingly limitless purses who were delighted by his visions of aristocratic
residences" (Broderick, 216). Hunt was to become best known for palatial homes built for American millionaires; these robber barons were eager to camoflage their newly minted fortune with classically designed mansions that looked as if they had been designed for European royalty.
Hunt had extensive professional connections to the Vanderbilt family, in particular; he is often described as "the Vanderbilt architect". He had built two fabulously opulent "summer cottages" in Newport, RI, The Breakers and Marble House, for Vanderbilt family members as well as an imposing mansion on 5th Avenue in New York City for George Vanderbilt's father. At the time that George Vanderbilt commissioned him to work on Biltmore, he was in the midst of plans for a grand Vanderbilt masoluem in New York. Hunt's Beaux-Arts style, which is heavily reminiscent of French renaissance castles and chateaux of the Loire Valley, appealed to the need of America's nouveau riche to create for themselves an illusion of old world lineage and ancestry. According to Volk (1984, p. 52), "Hunt was responsible for the grand manner in which the upper crust of society lived, entertained and judged one another".
Hunt gained nationwide acclaim in the latter part of the nineteenth century; he was chosen as the architect of the base of the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for many projects at universities such as Yale, Harvard and West Point. He also designed the Administration Building for the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, which is widely considered to be his masterpiece.