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, drawings, 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 cataloged.  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 cataloged.) 

The Platt architectural research library contains 454 monographs, book series, and journals dating as early as 1655, and 52 photograph albums of material Platt used as design inspirations. Nearly every item is illustrated; the collection was chiefly assembled as a visual resource. Research strengths lie in the tracing of historic styles employed in the interiors, gardens, and buildings of Western Europe, notably Renaissance, Classical, Gothic, Neo-Classical, Georgian, Baroque, and Rococo. Illustrated surveys and histories of gardens, primarily in France and Italy, are another key focus. In addition to the “White Pines” series of American architecture, the collection contains books on American colonial furniture, interiors, gardens, and buildings. Platt was also a consistent patron of publications on excavations and restorations of ancient monuments, represented in the collection. The collection does not include architectural theory, or treatises on construction, structure, and mechanics. 

Each photograph album was arranged and labelled by Platt based on subject, generally a specific architectural detail and/or style. They offer a guide to what Platt was looking at and often provide specific sources for various commissions. Begun circa 1901-1906, the albums feature images likely purchased from American and European photographers and then inserted by Platt into the appropriate album. 

Platt returned from his pivotal 1892 trip to Italy with at least 470 photographs from his survey of Italian landscape architecture and design, with some supplemental prints he purchased by Brogi and Alinari. Twenty-four of the images were reproduced in his landmark monograph Italian Gardens (1894). While Columbia University is home to 75 of the plate glass negatives, the Century Archives hold all the original albumen prints, contained in two of Platt’s albums, along with images from other trips to Europe and the Middle East. Aside from a few divisional indications, Platt did not identify the gardens captured in his photographs. Attempts have been successful to identify many of the locales. The photographs are instructive, with special attention paid to terrain, architectural details and their scale, appropriateness in the use of plantings as to density and shade, terracing and balustrades, as well as approach avenues and how they set off the houses. 

Three boxes of supplementary material related to Platt and the management, conservation, exhibition, and research of the collection are also present. These include the preliminary catalog of the collection, documenting Platt’s original classification scheme, prepared by Keith N. Morgan (Cen. 1989-2008) in the 1970s as a thesis project. Morgan, an art history and preservation studies professor, later emerged as the leading authority on Platt. 

The personal and professional papers of Charles A. Platt are maintained by the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. Finding aid available here.

This collection description is greatly indebted to Platt scholar Keith N. Morgan and former CAAF archivist Russell Flinchum. 

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