Books about antiques.

David Adler, architect

David Adler (1882-1949) took on some two hundred architectural commissions over four decades. Most of them were private houses for the very rich in fifteen states and British Columbia. A goodly number were built around Chicago, to which Adler moved from his native Milwaukee. He designed in a fashion that was "totally at odds with the canonical Chicago tradition of innovative commercial buildings of Louis Sullivan and the domestic Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers."

Adler's houses borrowed shamelessly from houses elsewhere, both here and abroad, and from innumerable architectural styles of the past. What made his houses pleasing when built and treasured today was his sense of style. He copied nothing literally, and he paid attention to every detail of the site, plan, interior, and furnishings. As Richard Guy Wilson has written in his essay in this book: David Adler accomplished the remarkable feat of putting new life into the traditional styles and illuminating how they could be brought up to date. His genius lay in the mastery of so many styles or languages and in the way he contributed to the fundamental American architectural tradition of eclecticism, borrowing from many sources."

David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style accompanies an exhibition on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until May 18. The book focuses on eighteen of Adler's commissions, each of which has an essay to itself illustrated with black-and-white and excellent color photographs, the latter taken specially for the book by Bob Harr of the Chicago photographic studio Hedrich Blessing.

One of Adler's grandest commissions was the house he designed for Mr. and Mrs. Richard T. Crane Jr. on a hilltop in Ipswich, Massachusetts, overlooking an extensive marsh, a perfect beach, and Ipswich Bay. A huge house in the manner of Sir Christopher Wren, it is as incongruous in its setting as the Italian suburban villa with an arcaded open courtyard that Adler designed for a couple in Milwaukee. The Crane house draws directly on five seventeenth-century English houses, yet because of Crane's fear of fire, it is built as solidly as a factory, framed in steel with load-hearing bricks and poured concrete floors. Inside, according to the essayist Susan Hill Dolan, "We see such elements as Georgian woodwork, Gothic vaulting, Greek Revival lighting fixtures, Italian Renaissance-style murals, Baroque carving, and an Art Deco feel to the state-of-the-art Crane bathrooms, all integrated with elegance and taste." Interior woodwork from two English houses, including an overmantel carved by Grinling Gibbons, was parce led out in various rooms. From W. and J. Sloane in New York City came n number of wood-paneled rooms and a staircase from a 1732 London town house, then known as the "Hogarth House." The staircase, unfortunately was too small for the Crane house, so a reproduction was ...