Peter Pennoyer


Peter Morgan Pennoyer FAIA is an award-winning architect and principal of Peter Pennoyer Architects in New York City. Pennoyer, his four partners and his fifty associates have an international practice in traditional and classical architecture, or New Classical Architecture. Many of the firm's institutional and commercial projects involve historic buildings, and the has stated that the firm's strength is in "deftly fusing history and creative invention into timeless contemporary designs."
The firm's projects have been featured frequently in newspapers, books, and periodicals, including The New York Times, Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal, Elle Decor, and House & Garden.
In October 2010, the Vendome Press published Peter Pennoyer Architects: Apartments, Townhouses, Country Houses, which features twenty of the firm's projects. In 2016, the Vendome Press published A House in the Country, which chronicles the process used by Pennoyer and his wife, Katie Ridder, in designing their own dream house and garden in Millbrook, NY.

Early life

Pennoyer was born on February 19, 1957 in New York City. He is the son of Victoria Pennoyer and Robert Morgan Pennoyer, a retired partner with Patterson Belknap who served as the former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Assistant to the General Counsel and as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Among his siblings are Russell Pennoyer, Christina Lee Pennoyer, the wife of R. Scott Greathead, and Dr. Tracy Pennoyer, who married John Winthrop Auchincloss II, a son of Louis Auchincloss and descendant of Emily Thorn Vanderbilt through his mother Adele Burden Auchincloss.
Through his paternal grandparents, Frances Pennoyer, and Paul Geddes Pennoyer, a prominent lawyer, he is a great-grandson of J.P. Morgan Jr. and a great-great grandson of J.P. Morgan. His maternal grandfather, James R. Parsons of Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, was a partner in Chubb & Son, and his great-grandfather was Hendon Chubb, a founding partner of Chubb & Son.
Pennoyer is a graduate of St. Bernard's School in New York City and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia College in 1981 and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 1984.

Career

While in graduate school from 1981 to 1983, Pennoyer worked as a designer in the Manhattan office of his Columbia professor, Robert A. M. Stern. He established his own practice in 1984, where he was a principal in the firm Pennoyer Turino Architects P. C. until 1990, after which he formed Peter Pennoyer Architects in New York City. One of his earliest projects was a Catskills retreat for author, and his sister's father-in-law, Louis Auchincloss.
Pennoyer is a trustee of The Morgan Library & Museum, and president of the Whiting Foundation which sponsors the Whiting Awards. He is Chairman of the Fellowship Committee for the Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation, a National Peer Reviewer of the U.S. General Services Administration, Washington D.C., and a lifetime member of the Society of Architectural Historians. He was chairman of the board of The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art from 2009-2013.
Since 2011, Pennoyer has been an adjunct professor in the Department of Art History: Department of Urban Design and Architecture Studies at New York University.

Published works

Pennoyer and historian Anne Walker co-authored five monographs of American architectural history: The Architecture of Delano & Aldrich; The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore; The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury; New York Transformed: The Architecture of Cross & Cross; and Harrie T. Lindeberg and the American Country House. He and Walker also wrote the introduction to a reprint of Frank M. Snyder’s Building Details.

Recognition

In 2012, the firm won the Stanford White Award, in the new construction category, for its design of a house in Dutchess County, New York.
In 2017, the College of Charleston awarded Peter Pennoyer its Albert Simons Medal of Excellence. In 2017, the firm Peter Pennoyer Architects won the Arthur Ross Award for architecture, and the Bulfinch Award to Preserve and Advance the Classical Tradition in New England, for its design of a new classical house in Massachusetts. In 2016, the firm won the Stanford White Award for Excellence in Classical & Traditional Design, for its design of a new apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and for a new house in Maine.
Peter Pennoyer Architects is regularly included in Architectural Digest's AD100 List, a list of current outstanding talent in architecture and interior design. The firm is included in New York Spaces Top 50 Designers List, and in Ocean Home magazine's Top 50 Coastal Architects list.
Pennoyer was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2014, and to the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen in 2016.

Representative Projects

Peter Pennoyer Architect's projects include the following:
In 1988, Pennoyer was married to Katherine Lee "Katie" Ridder, an interior designer at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York. Katie is the daughter of Constance Ridder, a lawyer, and Paul Anthony Ridder, a director of Knight Ridder, and the granddaughter of Bernard Ridder, the former chairman of Knight Ridder. They have three children: Jane, Anthony, and Virginia, and reside in Bronxville, New York in a 1920s house designed by Charles Lewis Bowman, a former McKim, Mead & White draftsman.