Michael Middleton Dwyer

Michael M. Dwyer
Garden Pavilion on the Hudson River
Nationality American
Alma mater Columbia College
University of Pennsylvania
Occupation Architect

Michael M. Dwyer is an architect practicing in New York City known for renovating historic structures and designing new ones in traditional vocabularies, also known as New Classical Architecture.

Education and career

Michael Dwyer graduated from Columbia College and received a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

He was associated from 1981–1996 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he was a member of the project team that designed the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987.[1] He helped design the Dana Discovery Center in New York City's Central Park, completed in 1993 as part of the Central Park Conservancy's rehabilitation of the Harlem Meer. In an interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture in December 1993, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" reinforced the park's "romantic landscape design."[2] In 1992–1993, he was part of the team of architects that restored Bonnie Dune, the Southampton residence of Ambassador Carl Spielvogel and his wife, the preservationist Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a project executed in collaboration with the interior designer Jed Johnson.[3]

During his time at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's pre-war, traditional style of architecture. In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of the then-emerging New Classical school of architects, the reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht and an $8.95 million town house on the Upper East Side and is renovating Rudolph Nureyev's former apartment in the Dakota."[4]

In 1996, having established his own firm, Dwyer was engaged as architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York City's Riverside Park, designed by the landscape architects Bruce Kelly and David Varnell, with a statue sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by Dwyer, including a summary of Roosevelt's achievements, and a quotation from her 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights.[5] In 1997, he restored the exterior of the George F. Baker House, a designated New York City landmark, and from 1998–2008, he was the architect for the restoration of the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.

Beyond these institutional projects, Dwyer completed residential projects for eminent New Yorkers, including Eddie Lampert, Scott Bessent, Arthur Altschul, Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. The financier Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, his Hudson River Valley villa.[6] The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's design for an elegant new house built in Southampton for the real-estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, comparable in scale and detail to the pre-war houses of architects like David Adler and John Russell Pope.[7]

In addition to his architectural work, Dwyer wrote two volumes of architectural history: Great Houses of the Hudson River (published in 2001) and Carolands (published in 2006).

Architectural works

  • 35 Meter Cruising Yacht (completed 1995).[8]
  • Eleanor Roosevelt Monument, Riverside Park, New York City (dedicated 1996).[9]
  • George F. Baker Jr. House, 75 East 93rd St., New York (restoration completed 1997).
  • Edgewater, Gate House and Poolhouse, Barrytown, New York (completed 1997).[10]
  • Gin Lane Residence, Longview, Southampton, NY (completed 2001).[11]
  • Mead Point Residence, Greenwich, CT (completed 2001).[12]
  • Edward S. Lampert Residence, Greenwich, CT (completed 2001).
  • Toylsome Place Residence, Stone Cottage, Southampton, NY (completed 2004).
  • Cosmopolitan Club, New York City (restoration completed 1998–2008).
  • Jefferys Lane Residence, Sommariva, East Hampton, NY (completed 2009).
  • Mary Ann Tighe Residence, Hollyhock, Southampton, NY (completed 2015).[13]
  • Meadowlark Lane Residence, Bridgehampton, NY (completed 2017).

Written Works

See Also

References

  1. ↑ Joseph Giovannini, "Young Voices Soar at the New St. Thomas Choir School," The New York Times, September 17, 1987.
  2. ↑ Philip Arcidi, "Learning by the Rules," Progressive Architecture, December 1, 1993.
  3. ↑ Jay Johnson, Jed Johnson: Opulent Restraint (Rizzoli, 2005).
  4. ↑ Patricia Leigh Brown, "Architecture's Young Old Fogies," The New York Times, February 9, 1995.
  5. ↑ Jean Parker Phifer, Public Art New York (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).
  6. ↑ Richard H. Jenrette, Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston, SC: Wyrick & Co., 2000).
  7. ↑ Dan Shaw, "Top Tier Design Team Breathes Elegance into a Southampton Estate," Architectural Digest, July 2018.
  8. ↑ Editors of The Classicist, with an introduction by Robert A.M. Stern, A Decade of Art & Architecture 1992-2002 (New York, NY: Institute of Classical Architecture, 2002).
  9. ↑ Jean Parker Phifer, Public Art New York (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).
  10. ↑ Richard H. Jenrette, Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston, SC: Wyrick & Co., 2000).
  11. ↑ Elizabeth Pochoda. "Taking the Long View." House & Garden (August 2001).
  12. ↑ Laura Beach. "Sojourn on the Sound." Antiques & Fine Art (Summer 2006).
  13. ↑ Dan Shaw, "Top Tier Design Team Breathes Elegance into a Southampton Estate," Architectural Digest, July 2018.
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