NON-FICTION

STANFORD WHITE’S NEW YORK by David Garrard Lowe (Doubleday: $45; 352 pp.). Architecture is a social art, and one of the major social roles architects have been called upon to play throughout history is the creation of settings for the rich and powerful that enhance their enormous self-importance. In turn-of-the-century New York, a city newly rich and powerful, architect Stanford White, above all others, gave the robber barons, wheat kings and stock-market princelings a gloss of grandeur. In a vital sense, White invented Manhattan as a sophisticated metropolis, and the firm of McKim, Mead and White he helped found provided the pompous Beaux-Arts mannerism that became its claim to culture.

Through the mid-1880s to his murder in 1906 by the jealous husband of a moppet he seduced, White designed a host of mansions and clubs for the likes of the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Pulitzers, and J. P. Morgan. Among his public commissions were the original Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.

“Stanford White’s New York” is a balanced if somewhat unglamourously illustrated account of the architectural golden boy and his gilded era of high, raw capitalism. It follows the career of a playboy designer--a prototypical “starchitect” of the stripe found today between the perfume ads in the pages of “Vanity Fair.” Featured in novels like E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” and the movie that followed, White became a celebrity in death as in life. “Stanny” White’s talents were as gloriously vulgar as his clientele, and superbly suited to his native town. As a provider of cachet for the nouveau riche, he was no match in grace for, say, England’s John Nash or, in expressive restraint, for our own Greene and Greene.

Perhaps White’s most truly splendid design was the Gould Library on Fordham Heights in the Bronx (above). The coffered dome, copied from a classical model as were most of White’s buildings and interiors, creates a complex geometry that lifts the eye to a blaze of light. The Gould reveals that White, if he had not been so set on pleasing the vulgar, might have been capable of considerable refinement.