Michael Dwyer is an American architect practicing in New York City known for renovating historic structures and designing new ones in traditional vocabularies, and considered to be an advocate of classical architecture. He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River, and the author of Carolands.
Education and career
Michael Dwyer received a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He was associated from 1981–96 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he was a member of the project team that designed the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987. He helped design the Dana Discovery Center in New York City's Central Park, completed in 1993 as part of the Central Park Conservancy's rehabilitation of the Harlem Meer. In an interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture in December 1993, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" reinforced the park's "romantic landscape design." In 1992–93, he was part of the team of architects that restored Bonnie Dune, the Southampton residence of Ambassador Carl Spielvogel and his wife, the preservationist Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a project executed in collaboration with the interior designer Jed Johnson. During his time at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate of New York's prewar, classical style of architecture. In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of New York's then-emerging neoclassical 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." In 1996, after establishing his own firm, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York City's Riverside Park, designed by the landscape architects Kelly/Varnell, with a statue sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by Dwyer, including a quotation from Roosevelt's 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights. In 1997, he restored the exterior of the George F. Baker House, a designated New York City landmark, and from 1998–2008, he was the architect for the restoration of the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women. In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer designed for the upper strata of New York's private sector, completing residential projects for clients such as Eddie Lampert, Scott Bessent, Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. The financier Dick Jenrette, who called Dwyer his "favorite young neoclassical architect," commissioned him to build a pair of classical pavilions at Edgewater, Jenrette's Hudson River Valley villa. The July 2018 issue of featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's design for a new house in Southampton for the real-estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, comparable in scale and detail to the pre-war houses of architects such as David Adler and John Russell Pope.
