Michael Dwyer is an American
architect known for designing new buildings in traditional vocabularies. He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and the author of Carolands (2006).
Architectural practice
1981–1996
Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the architecture firm
Buttrick White & Burtis, where he worked on several notable projects, among them the
Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in
Midtown Manhattan,[1][2] described by architecture critic
Paul Goldberger "as among the city's best examples of contextual architecture."[3] Another was the
Dana Discovery Center, a venue for environmental education, the centerpiece of the
Central Park Conservancy's 1990–1993 restoration of Harlem Meer in
Central Park's northeast corner.[4][5] In an 1993 interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design."[6][4]
While at
Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate for New York's prewar, classical style of architecture. In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of New York's nascent classical revival, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side,"[7] a house whose new facade architect
Robert Stern characterized as "...scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of
Ange-Jacques Gabriel."[8]
1996–present
After establishing his own firm in 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the
Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's
Riverside Park, supplementing
Penelope Jencks' statue of Roosevelt with granite medallions set in the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from
Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her).[9][10] In 1997 he restored the exterior of the
Francis F. Palmer House, a designated New York City landmark. From 1998 to 2007 he was the consulting architect to the
Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.
The financier and preservationist
Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at
Edgewater, Jenrette's Hudson River Valley villa. Jenrette described them in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:
In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property. This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house. Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver. Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.
Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool. The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa. From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank.[11]
The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's largest project, a new house in
Southampton, New York for real estate executive
Mary Ann Tighe, a collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect
David Adler and interior designer
Frances Elkins.[12][13]
Representative projects
35 Meter Cruising Yacht (interior architecture; completed 1994).[14]
Nureyev Apartment;
The Dakota, New York City (interior architecture; completed 1995).[7]
Carl A. Pearson (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Up in Central Park on the Shore of Harlem Meer," Architectural Record (March 1990).[23]
Mark Alden Branch (author); Michael Dwyer (illustrator). "Flirting with Folly in Central Park," Progressive Architecture (August 1991): 23.[5]
Michael Dwyer (contributing illustrator). "A View of the Dana Discovery Center, Central Park, New York," Architecture in Perspective No. 8 (American Society of Architectural Illustrators, 1994): 10.
Michael Dwyer. "Buildings in Public Parks," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1995): 26, 28, 30;
ISSN0898-0284
Michael Dwyer. "Building with Stone," Clem Labine's Traditional Building (March/April 1996): 25–26;
ISSN0898-0284.
Michael Dwyer. "The Arts and Crafts in Architecture Today," Classicist No. 3 (1996–97): 90–96;
ISBN1-56000-936-5.
^Editors of The Classicist, with an introduction by
Robert A.M. Stern, A Decade of Art & Architecture 1992–2002 (New York: Institute of Classical Architecture, 2002).
^Phifer, Jean (2009).
Public Art New York. New York: W.W. Norton. p. 148. Retrieved July 18, 2022.
^Records of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
^Richard H. Jenrette, Adventures with Old Houses (Charleston, SC: Wyrick & Co., 2000).
^NYC Department of Buildings, Letter of Completion #101756823, March 3, 1999.
^Elizabeth Pochoda. "Taking the Long View." House & Garden (August 2001).
^Laura Beach, "Sojourn on the Sound." Antiques & Fine Art (Summer 2006).
^NYC Department of Buildings, Letter of Completion #104423722, October 25, 2006.
^Kathryn Brenzel, "Inside the World of Luxury Renovations," The Real Deal (February 16, 2016).