Cass Gilbert practiced architecture in New York from 1899 to 1934, the year of his death. One tends to think of Gilbert as coming a generation later than Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White because his major works began to appear much later than theirs and because his career lasted, unlike theirs, well into the twentieth century. Gilbert also once worked as an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office. In fact, McKim was Gilbert’s senior by only twelve years, White by only six. Though Gilbert began his own practice, in St. Paul, Minnesota, as early as 1885, it was not until ten years later, when he won the competition for the design of the Minnesota State Capitol, that he joined the list of American architects to be reckoned with. That was two years after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a watershed event in the history of American architecture and urbanism, the dawn of the City Beautiful period to which Gilbert would contribute so much. McKim and White, who as young men were deeply infatuated with John Ruskin, had been influenced by Russell Sturgis and worked for Henry Hobson Richardson. Their careers marked a fascinating (and well-documented) progression from early dabblings in the Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival, through their epochal essays in the “Shingle Style” to their final embrace of an urban classicism. Gilbert, however, seemed to emerge fully formed in the mid-1890s as a brilliant and driven exponent of City Beautiful precepts.

Gilbert was