"You touched upon it at the Alpine meeting, but why was William Flynn (Irish Catholic?) able to penetrate, make money from (I assume), and be viewed as the leading architect with the WASP society of his time ? Sounds like a chapter."
MikeS:
Ahhh, but that's the question, isn't it? All we know at this point is that's the way it apparently was much more than one would think or believe. By that I only mean that his super powerful clients seemed to treat him like one of their own to an inordinate extent--which is very unusual for some of those people. They took him into their lives in some interesting ways, it looks like.
We think it might have just been simply his personality but that persona is so elusive to track this many years later. He left so little trace of his personality which has always been reputed to be very dynamic, maybe sometimes maniacally daredevilish but grounded in the effective work-a-day world which was quite unlike some of his Philly contemporaries.
We think he was just this little fireplug Irish guy who called a spade a spade maybe at times with equal degrees of ire or mirth and everyone sort of took to him--all the way from his most menial employees to both Rockefeller and Geist--particularly Geist who may have been one of the most demanding and eccentric human beings I've ever heard of.
I'm really getting a sense, though, that Flynn may have been the one natural link between the golden age of architecture and the modern age of architecture. He was definitely trying to get away from some of the "old" and innovate in what some then, like Tillinghast, called "modern" and even "scientific" ways in the burgeoning and uniquely American style of architecture.
He cut his teeth in the early days of the Golden age but we're seeing many things from him that are nuancy and even a number of things as time went by that many strict purists on here wouldn't like or really agree with in architecture.
But the latter is really interesting Wayne and me because it's the real evolution, we think, and, the truth about how things really were evolving. It's interesting.
Rick Goodale made a really good observation on the match play vs medal play thread between NGLA and next door Shinnecock. Maybe only 22-24 year apart but huge differences in what they represent in super good architecture but of their particular times. They're very different and the reasons why are sort of what it's all about in the evolution of American architecture, to me, at this point!
However, you said he might have been the leading architect with that WASP world. I don't really see that at all yet. He certainly was one of less than even a handful of them but certainly Ross was ahead of him by far in reputation. Raynor may have been too, but in 1926 Raynor was gone. Mackenzie was certainly dominate in some circles but unbelievably peripatetic!
Just a very interesting time in architecture and the more we look at it the more interesting it seems to get. The most important thing about it all, in my mind now, is just not to look at that time through the eyes that we see things in our own era. We shouldn't look at that era through the prism of our own times at all. But for better or worse Flynn may have been moving towards the modern era faster than we think!