Alexander Jackson Davis

Alexander Jackson Davis (A.J. Davis) (New York City July 24, 1803 – January 14, 1892) was the most successful and influential American architect of his generation.

He studied at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Drawing Association, and from the Antique casts of the National Academy of Design. Dropping out of school he became a respectable lithographer and from 1826 worked as a draftsman for Josiah R. Brady, a New York architect who was an early exponent of the Gothic revival: Brady's Gothic 1824 St Luke's Episcopal Church is the oldest surviving structure in Rochester, New York [1].

Davis made a first independent career as an architectural illustrator in the 1820s, but his friends, especially painter John Trumbull, convinced him to turn his hand to designing buildings. Picturesque siting, massing and contrasts remained essential to his work, even when he was building in a Classical style. In 1826, Davis went to work in the office of Ithiel Town and Martin E. Thompson, the most prestigious architectural firm of the Greek Revival; in the office Davis had access to the best architectural library in the country, in a congenial atmosphere where he gained a thorough grounding.

From 1829, in partnership with Town, Davis formed the first recognizably modern architectural office and designed many late classical buildings, including some of public prominence. In Washington, Davis designed the Executive Department offices and the first Patent Office building (1834), and the Custom House of New York City (1833 – 42, illustration,above right).

A series of consultations over state capitols followed, none apparently built entirely as Davis planned: the Indiana State House, Indianapolis (1831 – 35) elicited calls for his advice and designs in building other state capitols in the 1830s: North Carolina's (1833 – 40, with local architect David Paton), the Illinois State Capitol, often attributed entirely to the Springfield, Illinois architect John Rague, who was at work on the Iowa State Capitol at the same time, and in 1839 the committee responsible for commissioning a design for the Ohio Statehouse asked his advice. The resulting capitol in Columbus, Ohio, often attributed to the Hudson River Valley painter Henry Cole consulting with Davis and Ithiel Town, [2], has a stark Greek Doric colonnade across a recessed entrance, flanked by recessed window bays that continue the rhythm of the central portico, all under a unique drum capped by a low saucer dome. With Town's partner James Dakin he designed the noble colossal Corinthian order of "Colonnade Row" on New York's Lafayette Street, the very first apartments designed for the prosperous American middle class (1833, half still standing). He continued in partnership with Town until shortly before Town's death in 1844.

In 1831 he was elected an associate member of the National Academy. Davis was one of three architects who established the American Institute of Architects in May, 1837; in his retirement years he resigned, because he believed the A.I.A. had strayed from its original purpose.

From 1835, Davis began work on his own on Rural Residences, his only publication, the first pattern book for picturesque residences in a domesticated Gothic Revival taste, which could be executed in carpentry, and also containing the first of the "Tuscan" villas, flat-roofed with wide overhanging eaves and picturesque corner towers. Unfortunately the Panic of 1837 cut short his plans for a series of like volumes, but Davis soon formed a partnership with Andrew Jackson Downing, illustrating his widely-read books.

The 1840s and 1850s were Davis' two most fruitful decades as a designer of country houses. His villa "Lyndhurst" at Tarrytown, New York, though it has been altered, is his single most famous house. Many of his villas were built in the scenic Hudson River Valley— where his style informed the vernacular Hudson River Bracketed that gave Edith Wharton a title for a novel [3]— but Davis sent plans and specifications to clients as far afield as Indiana, with the understanding that construction would be undertaken by local builders. The village of Skaneateles, NY has at least two buildings designed by Davis. This practice put Davis's personal stamp on the practical builders' vernacular throughout the Eastern United States as far south as North Carolina, where he designed Blandwood, the 1846 home of Governor John Motley Morehead that stands as America's earliest Tuscan Villa. Innovative interior features, including his designs for mantels and sideboards, were also widely imitated in the trade. Other influential interior details include pocket shutters at windows, bay windows, and mirrored surfaces to reflect natural light.

In the late 1850s, Davis worked with the entrepreneur Llewellyn S. Haskell to create Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, a garden suburb that was one of the first planned residential communities in the United States.

Davis designed buildings for the University of Michigan in 1838, and in the 1840s he designed buildings for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

At Virginia Military Institute, Jackson's designs from 1848 through the 1850s created the first entirely Gothic revival college campus, built in brick and stuccoed to imitate stone [4]. Davis's plan for the Barracks quadrangle was interrupted by the Civil War; it was sympathetically completed to designs of Bertram Goodhue in the early 20th century [5].

With the onset of Civil War in 1861, patronage in house building dried up, and after the war, new styles unsympathetic to Davis's nature, were in vogue. He built little in the last thirty years of his life, but spent his easy retirement in West Orange drawing plans for grandiose schemes that he never expected to build, and selecting and ordering his designs and papers, by which he determined to be remembered. They are shared by four New York institutions: the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A further collection of Davis material has been assembled at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum library [6].

Contemporary interest in Davis was spurred by a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1992.

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