Blue Ridge Chateau: the Conceptual Design Evolution of Biltmore House
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Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses December 2020 Blue Ridge Chateau: The Conceptual Design Evolution of Biltmore House R. Chad Stewart Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Recommended Citation Stewart, R. Chad, "Blue Ridge Chateau: The Conceptual Design Evolution of Biltmore House" (2020). All Theses. 3468. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/3468 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BLUE RIDGE CHATEAU: THE CONCEPTUAL DESIGN EVOLUTION OF BILTMORE HOUSE A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts History by R. Chad Stewart December 2020 Accepted by: Dr. Stephanie Barczewski, Committee Chair Dr. Pamela Mack Dr. Vernon Burton Abstract This thesis explores the early conceptual designs for Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. Examining architect Richard Morris Hunt’s surviving floorplans, elevation drawings, and a handful of other renderings, this thesis chronicles the evolution of Biltmore House on the drafting tables of the Hunt office from a luxurious but typical colonial revival mansion into the largest house ever constructed in the United States. Additionally, the thesis explores the European precedents that inspired the design of Biltmore House by comparing its details with those of buildings frequently referenced as having inspired its design in several secondary sources. The result is a deeper understanding of how the largest home in the United States came to take the shape it did. ii Dedication To Landen and Laney iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my ever patient and long-suffering thesis advisor and committee chair, Dr. Stephanie Barczewski, and committee members Dr. Pamela Mack, and Dr. Vernon Burton. Your support has been invaluable. I would also like to thank all of the faculty of the Clemson University History Department for your support during my time at Clemson, especially Dr. Paul Anderson, current university historian and former graduate program director. Thank you for believing in me and giving me a chance. To my family and friends, thank you for your unwavering love and support. Special thanks is due to Mari Nakahara in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. Thank you for your days of assistance digging through the archive of Richard Morris Hunt in the AIA/AAF collection. Additionally, I would like to thank several the museum services staff at Biltmore House, particularly Jill Hawkins, archivist; Lauren Henry, associate curator; and Leslie Klingner, curator of interpretation. Your patience with my many inquiries and interest in this project is most appreciated. Hannah Dale, assistant archivist at Waddesdon Manor in the United Kingdom also deserves thanks for her assistance in providing documentation to help establish the relationship between that house and Biltmore. iv Table of Contents Page Title Page .......................................................................................................................... i Abstract ........................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: Blue Ridge Plutocracy: George W. Vanderbilt and Biltmore Estate ...................................................................................................... 10 Chapter II: Becoming Biltmore: The Conceptual Evolution of America’s Largest Home ......................................................................................... 31 Chapter III: From the Loire to the French Broad: Old World Inspiration at Biltmore House ...................................................................................... 88 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 120 v Introduction Biltmore House in Asheville, NC, has always been an outlier. Its scale and design, as well as the creators who brought it into existence, make its presence in the late-nineteenth-century North Carolina backcountry extremely unlikely. At a time when most residents of western North Carolina lived their lives in modest circumstances typified by rough cabins and overworked farmland, Biltmore House stood as the private home of a family of three and an army of servants who kept the enormous domestic machine running in the manner of a large hotel or ocean liner. However, Biltmore did not only overshadow the domestic architecture of its nearest neighbors; it also outdid its contemporaries in wealthy urban power centers such as New York and Newport. No other single family home in America could compete with its size, even those built by owners of substantially more wealth than Biltmore’s owner George W. Vanderbilt. Not only did Biltmore House represent the top tier of domestic architecture in Gilded Age America, it was the absolute pinnacle. Built during a period of massive wealth disparity, Biltmore represents a lifestyle available exclusively to America’s wealthiest families for a brief period of history at the turn of the twentieth century. However out of place Biltmore House was at the time it was built and lived in, it is even more so today when many of the contemporary mansions of America’s Gilded Age have long since been lost to the wrecking ball and the way of life they represented is now a distant -- and poorly understood -- memory. Even those great houses that do survive in the twenty-first century do so predominately in the care of public or non-profit institutions, while Biltmore House remains in the hands of George W. Vanderbilt’s descendants, who operate the 8,000-acre estate as a tourist attraction with the chateau as its principal draw. Not only does the house survive in 1 family hands, it also retains the vast majority of its original contents intact and in situ. This is another factor that makes Biltmore House an outlier and a particularly effective lens through which to glimpse the lost world of America’s Gilded Age. The era in which Biltmore House was created, the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, has many parallels to the modern day. Great wealth disparity and inequality, where those at the very top -- the 1% -- have more wealth and power than everyone else, are hallmarks of both periods. As the ne plus ultra of the Gilded Age domestic architecture, a more comprehensive understanding of Biltmore House and its creation can be illustrative in understanding the complexities of our own twenty-first century society. Nineteenth-century millionaires and the architectural legacy they left behind have much in common with the twenty-first century billionaire class whose wealth outweighs that of the masses who make up the vast majority of American society. Plutocracy, a system in which power is derived through wealth, remains a very harsh – however lavish – reality in American society in the twenty-first century. With American public policy geared toward the benefit of large businesses and billionaires at the expense of those less fortunate, plutocratic principles remain on stark display just as they were at the time Biltmore House was built. The architectural expressions of plutocracy may have changed over the last century, but the underlying conditions being expressed remain tragically unchanged. Biltmore draws over one million visitors to Asheville every year and The Biltmore Company remains one of the largest employers in the region, making George W. Vanderbilt’s home a major economic engine for Western North Carolina. It not only produces revenue to maintain the private property, but also benefits the entire region, as guests spend money outside 2 of the estate in and around Asheville and other outlying communities. Therefore, it is important to more fully understand how the factors that draw these visitors came into existence. One of the less prominent members of the expansive Vanderbilt brood, with no real involvement in the family’s many successful business ventures, George W. Vanderbilt is remembered primarily because of the house he built. Instead of being drawn to Biltmore because of its owner in the way that visitors are drawn to Mount Vernon because of Washington or to Graceland because of Elvis, people are drawn to Biltmore because of the house and the owner is remembered for building it. Biltmore is George Vanderbilt’s legacy. Without having built Biltmore, George W. Vanderbilt would likely be remembered as a mere footnote—the youngest son of his generation, who played no part in the expansion of the family’s wealth. Vanderbilt hired the two most prominent men in their fields to create Biltmore: Richard Morris Hunt as architect, and Frederick Law Olmsted as landscape architect. Both were nearing the ends of their careers as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The Biltmore commission was the largest domestic commission either had taken on,