Buttrick White & Burtis

Buttrick White & Burtis Architects was an architecture firm based in New York City, established in 1981 by the architects Harold Buttrick, Samuel G. White, and Theodore A. Burtis III. The firm remained active until 2002. Harold Buttrick left in 1998 to form Murphy Burnham & Buttrick. The architect Jean P. Phifer was a partner of the firm from 1989 until 1996, after which she served as president of the New York City Public Design Commission from 1998 to 2003. The architect Michael Dwyer was associated with the firm from 1981 to 1996. The architect and educator William W. Braham was associated with the firm from 1983 to 1989. In 2002, Buttrick White & Burtis merged with Platt Byard Dovell to become Platt Byard Dovell White.

Architectural practice

Buttrick White & Burtis's work was eclectic. Writing in 1985 in New York Magazine, the architectural historian Carter Wiseman contrasted the firm's conservative renovation work at the traditional, oak-paneled Harvard Club of New York with their more avant-garde designs for the stores of the then-hip Tower Records chain, adding that the chain's downtown venue was "the most successful such enterprise in America."
BWB was also known for artful renovations and additions to architectural landmarks, such as the Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, restored in 1990; Casa Italiana, Columbia University, completed in 1996; and the Brooklyn College library, completed in 2002.
The firm's largest project, a fifteen-story, postmodern building in Manhattan, built for the Saint Thomas Choir School, was begun in 1985, completed in 1987, and dedicated on January 14, 1988 by the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1990, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, described the school "as among the city's best examples of contextual architecture."
BWB occasionally designed new work in a traditional idiom; in a 1995 survey by The New York Times of the then-emerging New Classical school of architecture, the reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht and an $8.95 million town house on the Upper East Side and is renovating Rudolph Nureyev's former apartment in the Dakota."
The architects associated with Buttrick White & Burtis were prolific authors, most notably Samuel G. White, a great-grandson of the architect Stanford White, who between 1998 and 2008 co-authored a trilogy of the work of Stanford White's firm, McKim, Mead & White. In 2015, the trilogy's authors were given an Arthur Ross Award by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art.

Principal architectural works

Ships Chandlery, 170 John St., New York City.
Tower Records, Broadway at 4th St., New York City.
Tower Records, Broadway at West 66th St., New York City.
Tower Records, Washington DC.
Tower Records, Torrance, CA.
Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus, London, UK.
Saint Thomas Choir School, 202 West 58th St., New York City.
Grand Army Plaza, Manhattan, New York City.
Ballplayers House, Central Park, New York City.
Annex Building, Chapin School, New York City.
Classical Townhouse, 14 East 81st St., New York City.
Dana Discovery Center, Central Park, New York City.
William Sidney Mount House, Stony Brook, NY.
Edison Arms Apartments, 2828 Decatur Ave., Bronx, New York.
Bonnie Dune, Residence, Southampton, NY.
Otto H. Kahn House, Fifth Avenue at 91st St., New York City.
Casa Italiana, Columbia University, New York City.
Frick Art Research Library of the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street), Fifth Avenue, New York City.
Walsh Library, Fordham University, Bronx, NY.
Siegel Student Center, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY.
Middle School Building, Trinity School, New York City.
Second Street Child Care Center, 333 Second St., Brooklyn, New York.
Marymount School of New York, 2 East 82nd St., New York City.
Library, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY.

Written works

Among the written works of architects who at one time or another were associates or partners at Buttrick White & Burtis are the following:

William W. Braham. Modern Color/Modern Architecture: Amédée Ozenfant and the Genealogy of Color in Modern Architecture.
William W. Braham. Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory.
William W. Braham. Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style.
William W. Braham. Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future.
Michael Dwyer, ed., with preface by Mark Rockefeller. Great Houses of the Hudson River.
Michael Dwyer, with a foreword by Mario Buatta. Carolands.
Jean Parker Phifer. Public Art New York.
Samuel G. White. The Houses of McKim, Mead & White.
Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks.
Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. Stanford White Architect.
Samuel G. White. Nice House.
Samuel G. White. Stanford White in Detail.