Death of Gilbert

Death, as it must to all men, came last week to Cass Gilbert, 74, architect, in Brockenhurst, England. Had not a sudden heart attack laid him low in a bedroom of pleasant, rambling Balmer Lawn Hotel, he, his wife and daughter would have left in two days for Southampton and the U. S. Behind him Cass Gilbert left many a great building to keep his memory alive through many a long year.

Born in Zanesville, Ohio, he was educated in public schools, took a degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a few years in Europe he started working in Manhattan under the late, lush Stanford White in his famed firm, McKim, Mead & White. His first job was a pedestal for a St. Gaudens statue. A year later he opened his own office in St. Paul.

For Minnesota he designed a $4,500,000 classical Capitol of Georgia marble and granite, a 142-ft. rotunda. His Municipal Building in Waterbury. Conn, was pure colonial in brick and white marble. Detroit's white marble Public Library was Italian Renaissance. The Union Central Life Insurance Building in Cincinnati was a towering office building. The $10,000,000 West Virginia State Capitol in Charleston was Classic. In 1899 he won a competition with a French Renaissance rendering for a U. S. Customs House in Manhattan, moved to Manhattan shortly thereafter.

In 1913 Cass Gilbert completed and President Wilson formally opened his most famed structure, the 792-ft. Woolworth Building, still sixth tallest in Manhattan. To critics who objected to the building's Gothic decorations and demanded a "new" style in ornaments, Cass Gilbert gave a reply which described his traditional, assured attitude toward architecture: "New schools of design come, with intervals of centuries between, by slow evolution, and can no more be created out of whole cloth than new social orders or systems of government. The problem of this great shaft cried aloud for some form of Gothic treatment and the soaring sense of uplift achieved more than justifies it." But that Cass Gilbert could also achieve complete simplicity in mass was proved by his enormous warehouse for the Army in Brooklyn.

Besides the Woolworth design, Mr. Gilbert's greatest-in-size was the huge George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River, for which he was consultant architect and which, against his wishes, was never encased in granite. Two Gilbert buildings were in construction at the moment of his death: the new $9,700,000 U. S. Supreme Court building in Washington (TIME, Oct. 24, 1932), a $10,700,000 Federal Court House for Manhattan.

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