Meg says she loves it because it has it all, from classic Georgian to beaux art to brutalist.
THE block of 84th Street from Fifth Avenue to Madison has an impressive array of early-20th-century architecture, from Beaux-Arts to Art Deco.
Once upon a time, architecture's ultimate laurels were probably the Prix de Rome, which in the nineteenth century sent youngish graduates of Paris's École des Beaux-Arts to Italy for a few years of sketching Roman ruins.
The book, "Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York,'' written by Jewel Stern and John A. Stuart and published by W. W. Norton, is a model study of one of New York's most important commercial designers.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, wealthy Cubans looked to Europe and the United States for design inspiration, importing the Tiffany Studios, Lalique and Maison Jansen, among others, to provide sumptuous decoration in the latest styles, from Beaux-Arts to French Fifties.
Yet Satie was continually frustrated in his attempts to be accepted as an artist in high society France – his failure to establish himself at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, to which Debussy had won a scholarship, only compounded his resentment.
("The fashion people I know, they don't want to come to this neighborhood. They all assume I live in some chic apartment in the Marais. Ah non!") We crossed over a ring road and under the Seine, the buildings growing plainer and sootier with each expanding circle, from Beaux-Arts to brutalist.
That distinction would enable him while still a student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts to obtain a position as assistant to Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, an architect and a cultural theorist, respectively, whose experimental architecture firm deeply influenced his outlook.
"You see everything from Mission style to shingle style to Beaux Arts style to Tudor style.
The mansion was designed by the architectural firm of Hornblower and Marshall in an early eclectic beaux arts style to serve as the home of New York merchant George S. Fraser.
By the 1970s all fields of design seemed to be dominated by these theories, but, although submerged, traditional Beaux Arts design continued to surface regularly in strange new combinations with modern forms.
