This introduction to the special collection begins with a historiographical overview of the American Renaissance. Here we will see how both popular perception and academic study of the subject have been affected by wider forces, including the advent of modernism, the emergence of the preservation movement and the increased attention given to social inequalities in public discourse today. This is the context in which the articles in the collection are situated and introduced. The final section considers aspects of the subject requiring further work, in particular the American Renaissance as a transnational phenomenon linked to the notion of the ‘Angloworld’.

This article considers the origins, both scholarly and personal, of The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition (1979) and the accompanying book catalogue, setting them in the context of architectural and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how the exhibition came about, what it was trying to achieve and how it was received, both at the time and subsequently. It shows that the exhibition was not conceived as an attack on modernism as such or as a work of architectural conservatism. Rather, it was an attempt to rescue from obscurity an entire chapter of American architectural history that had been excluded by the modernising narratives of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Vincent Scully and others, and to reassess what this architecture might contribute to the present.

The identification of the American elite with the Renaissance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as seen in the extended Capitol Building and National Mall in Washington DC, can be traced back to architectural, historiographical and cultural trends taking place in Britain. The writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds framed the debate in the United States. At first Ruskin’s antipathy towards the Renaissance was exacerbated by the Nativist Party’s opposition to Catholic immigration, but then the writings of Pater and, particularly, Symonds achieved what Wallace K. Ferguson described as ‘the thorough naturalization of Renaissancism in the English-speaking world’. Symonds’s Hegelian interpretation of the historical era as a ‘spirit of self-conscious freedom’ enabled Americans from the 1870s onwards to post-rationalise the Renaissance as a national style. Symonds dethroned the Ruskinian cult of the Gothic and celebrated Renaissance classicism and secular individualism. His image of Italian despots as ‘self-made men of commerce’ and an ‘aristocracy of genius and character’ appealed to US capitalists, while his admiration for the sumptuous palaces built by these Renaissance ‘men of power’ reinforced the evolutionary theories of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’ became the creed of American plutocrats as they built their own palatial houses. Finally, his frequent references to the discovery of America by Columbus came to legitimise the image of the US as the heir of Renaissance culture, as proclaimed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Study and travel in Europe provided a foundation for the establishment of artists and architects in the United States, including landscape architects and urban planners. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Charles A. Platt (1859–1933) and Charles Eliot (1861–97), men from privileged backgrounds in New York and Boston respectively, spent years in Europe seeking training and direct knowledge of historic patterns in garden, park and city making. Both shared their observations in influential articles for professional and popular journals and in publications that discussed what they had observed abroad and showed how it could be applied to American needs. Separate publications about their work and ideas further reinforced their influence. Platt, originally trained as an etcher and painter, approached first landscape design and then architecture from the perspective of an artist. He became one of the earliest and most influential figures in the formal garden revival in the United States, especially in landscapes for country houses, for which he also became one of the country’s most admired designers. In contrast, Eliot studied European patterns as a landscape architect who was also interested in both land preservation and regional planning. He led in establishing the Trustees of Public Reservations (1891), America’s first private-sector state-wide landscape trust, and the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission (1893), the country’s earliest regional landscape-planning state agency. The two men and their work represent contrasting methods and objectives, yet their interlocking careers sketch a broader panorama of the European precedents for American conditions at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond.

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, New York was seized by a passion for things French in interior decoration. The influx of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from London and Paris exerted a powerful influence over the imaginations of a new millionaire class, while the emergence of the professional dealer-decorator established channels for the incorporation of these materials into the luxury residence. While these interiors were developed in collaboration with leading US architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, they also posed a subtle challenge to the discourse of intellectualism developed on architects’ behalf. Governed by issues of taste and commerce as well as by artistic judgement, these French interiors presented a compelling vision of aristocratic stature that was at once in keeping, and in conflict, with the aspirations of an American Renaissance. This article considers the role of eighteenth-century French-style interiors in the articulation of a ‘civilised’ architectural tradition in the United States during the so-called Gilded Age. Focusing on the private mansion, it reconsiders the notion of the American Renaissance as a principally academic movement by calling attention to the ways in which it also responded to the requirements of the elite class as well as the commercial marketplace.

In a second career begun in his retirement, Henry Morrison Flagler (1830–1913), the cofounder of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest citizens in the United States, embarked on the development of the tropical wilderness of Florida. Starting in St Augustine, he built a network of luxury hotels and railroads that became the infrastructure for modern Florida. Creating a counterpart to the premier summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, Flagler transformed Palm Beach, an undeveloped barrier island, into a winter playground for the new American aristocracy, starting with the Georgian-style Royal Poinciana Hotel. It was Whitehall, however, the mansion built for Flagler in 1900–02 as a wedding gift to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, that became the resort community’s monumental showplace. Designed by the New York firm of Carrère & Hastings in the Renaissance-derived classicism of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the stately white palace fronting Lake Worth embodied Flagler’s cultural aspirations as a patron of the arts. As the first major client of Carrère & Hastings, Flagler was critical in launching the career of one of the most prominent architectural firms of the Gilded Age. This article examines Whitehall in the context of Flagler’s business practices and personal goals, consistent with Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’. Architectural opulence not only boosted Flagler’s mercantile purposes, but also reflected a belief, nurtured by his relationship with Carrère & Hastings and other close associates, about the importance of classical architecture and the arts in the development of society.

Wealth from western investments lit up the Gilded Age. East and West, it financed the mansions, balls and philanthropy that were integral to upper-class culture. Historians of capitalism have argued that a national upper class coalesced during the late nineteenth century and that the development of a common culture was essential to its formation. Much of this work has focused on the Northeast. How did this play out in the Trans-Mississippi West? This article explores the roles that architects and the buildings they designed played in the intertwined processes of class formation, capitalist expansion and the advancement of white settler colonialism in the American West. It begins in the early 1880s, when Henry Villard (1835–1900), president of the Northern Pacific Railway, launched an ambitious plan to complete the transcontinental railroad and enlisted the architects McKim, Mead & White and their assistant, Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), to design buildings of all kinds along the line — an unprecedented move for a new western railroad. It then follows Gilbert back to St Paul to examine two major projects, one for local clients and one for Villard’s colleague, the eastern capitalist William Endicott, Jr (1826–1914). As agents for eastern capitalists and their counterparts in the West, the architects and the buildings they designed activated in the West an elite aesthetic and professional culture initially generated in the Northeast. Operating across local, regional and national scales, they contributed to the expansion of capitalist markets, the formation of a national upper class and, more broadly, the processes of settler colonialism in a rapidly changing region.

Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainland US to the Philippines. In that colonial setting, Burnham was able to realise his vision far more easily, as neither he nor the officials executing his plans were ultimately accountable to Filipinos. Forced labour, confiscated land, repurposed public money, unchecked political power and wartime social disruption all aided US architectural imperialism. Rather than regretting this, Burnham and his associates celebrated the opportunities that their undemocratic setting provided. This article treats not only Burnham but also William E. Parsons (1872–1939) and Cameron Forbes (1870–1959), who extrapolated and enforced Burnham’s plans, and Juan Arellano (1888–1960), the Filipino architect who, to his later regret, helped remake Manila in the colonisers’ image.