Elm Court, the garden elevation
The most elaborate of the half dozen structures designed by Chicago’s talented practitioner Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926) for men associated with the B. F. Goodrich Tire and Rubber Company, Elm Court was built for Arthur H. Marks (1874-1939) in 1910. Replete with no fewer than six fountains, the house might have easily been called Fountain Court instead of having been named after American elms, which have mostly vanished. If Elm Court formed the template for Shaw’s highly similar Clayton Mark House, built at Lake Forest, Illinois in 1913, it, in turn, contains a host of features definitive of Shaw’s highly personalized almost idiosyncratic rendition of Italian Renaissance-inspired architecture. Sharing with Wright and Sullivan a predilection for highly horizontal earth-bound structures, despite its massive size and two-and-a-half stories, Elm Court has a long and low profile that’s been emphasized and underscored in a number of ways. Most noteworthy is the façade’s lengthy continuous shed dormer above a deeply overhanging overscaled cornice. The limestone sillcourse on which the second story windows rest is given a prominence through its bold projection above a series of rectangular tablets which correspond to French doors on the first story. Shaw’s recurrent entrance loggia with Tuscan columns set in antis creates a welcoming void at the center of the building’s rectangular block.
Eagle emblazoned entry gates at Elm Court
Elm Court, the entrance loggia
Elm Court, a fountain pool
So too do projecting wings on the garden front, containing the living room on one side, the dining room on the other, along with matching porches, all connected along a central gallery. These wings embrace a balustraded terrace centered on a lily pool and a figurative fountain. Gigantic Byzantine columns that emphasize the stair to a larger lower terrace are echoed by a pair of flagpoles that flank the stair to a lower garden. This descended toward a decorative lake and the originally undeveloped farmland and forest of west Akron.
Elm Court, garden evevation across the lake
Elm Court, a garden path
Elm Court, the grass terrace
Elm Court, the upper terrace pool, featuring a figure by Willard Padock
Elm Court, view to the horizon
Elm Court, the terace flagstafs
A drinking nymph by Willard Padock
After selling Elm Court, Arthur Marks transfered the Padock fountain to his estate in rural New York
Outfitted with heroically proportioned stone mantelpieces, the living and dining rooms were juxtaposed to provide an unmistakable counterpoint. Where the dining room boasted a beamed plaster ceiling with festooned friezes, antique verede marble columns and walnut paneling, the living room, hung with silk damask and Flemish tapestries, had a more elaborate polychrome beamed ceiling with touches of gilt. Just as the principal bedrooms correspond to these rooms below, a pair of sleeping porches so characteristic of this period corresponded to the porches adjacent to them.
Elm Court, the drawingroom
Elm Court, the dining room
Elm Court, the dining room mantelpiece
Elm Court, the breakfast porch
Indicative of Shaw’s preoccupation with making every part of his design as beautiful as possible, the garage court, entered through an elaborate wrought iron archway carried on graceful urn-capped piers, featured a herringbone-patterned brick pavement, distinctive vine-covered trellage and a charming wall fountain. In a farm group at the edge of the property, Mr. Marks. Like his neighbor, Harvey Firestone, kept a herd ofmilch cows. While an unassuming log cabin in the wooded westernmost reaches of the property probably served to remind this self-made man, famous for having invented the alkali process for reclaiming scrap rubber, of his modest roots in Lynn, Massachusetts. Married three times, Mr. Marks died in Palm Beach in 1939. Related to his marital discord surely must have been the fact that he lived for so short a time in his beautiful Akron home. It was sold in 1923 to the Sisters of St. Dominick, who operate it is Our Lady of the Elms, a fashionable convent school.
Elm Court, the garage court
Elm Court, dairy and cow
Elm Court, the log cabin
Dear Mr. Michael Henry Adams, I am an architect and PhD candidate doing research on the architectural past of Harlem (with specific attention to the first half of the 20th century). I have written you a letter explaining my research to the email that appears next to the youtube account but it does not seem to work. I have added you in twitter (@disquietingoose), so maybe we can contact through there? Thank you very much for your attention and congratulations on your wonderful work.
Posted by: Disquietingoose | 07/15/2014 at 05:51 AM