Wilson Eyre


Wilson Eyre Jr. was an American architect, teacher and writer who practiced in the Philadelphia area. He is known for his deliberately informal and welcoming country houses, and for being an innovator in the Shingle Style.

Early life and education

Eyre was born in Florence, Italy, the son of Americans living abroad. He was educated in Europe, Newport, Rhode Island, and Canada, and he studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Career

In 1877, he joined the offices of James Peacock Sims in Philadelphia, and took over the firm following Sims's death in 1882.
In 1911, he entered into partnership with John Gilbert McIlvaine, and opened a second office in New York City. The firm, Eyre & McIlvaine. continued until 1939.
For his most important early houses, "Anglecot" and "Farwood", he used a simple plan: a line of asymmetrical public rooms stretching along a single axis, extending even outside to a piazza. Like many Shingle Style architects, he employed the open living hall as an organizing element: all of the main first floor rooms connecting to the hall, often through large openings. He used staircases to extend the space of the hall to the second floor.
According to architectural-historian Vincent Scully, "This sense of extended horizontal plane and intensified positive scale evident in Eyre's work becomes later a basic component in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright| Wright..." Eyre collaborated with artists such as Alexander Stirling Calder and Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Eyre emerged as a leader in the international country life movement, lecturing in England, and corresponding with British and German architects. He was one of the first U.S. architects to be featured in the Arts & Crafts magazine International Studio, and he was published by Hermann Muthesius, the chronicler of the so-called "English" house of the turn of the century.
Prior to Frank Lloyd Wright's rise to prominence, Eyre was arguably the best-known domestic architect in the U.S. among foreign designers. His post-1890 country houses, such as "Allgates" are among the most accomplished American essays in the restrained stucco cottage idiom popularized by C.F.A. Voysey and Ernest Newton in England.
He was one of the founders and editors of House & Garden magazine. He designed many distinctive gardens with his residences, and wrote extensively of the need for interaction between rooms and outdoor spaces. Later house plans often featured loggias, terraces and porches connected to each major room on the ground floor to maximize the experience of the garden from inside the house.
Eyre was also renowned for his distinctive artistic drawings, often in watercolor. He used charcoal, pencil and ink with equal facility, and drew bird's eye perspectives with amazing speed. His extant drawings are now housed in the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1893.
In August 1914, he was stranded in Europe along with thousands of Americans attempting to escape World War I. Eyre returned to the United States in late September and shared a cabin with Augustus P. Gardner, a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
In 1917, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and was one of the founders of the T Square Club of Philadelphia in 1883. In 1910, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate academician.

Personal life

Eyre was one of the few Philadelphia architects who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, which likely diminished his influence in later years.

Death

He died in Philadelphia and is interred at The Woodlands Cemetery.

Selected works

Philadelphia area

Residences

Other buildings

Other regions

Residences

Other buildings