Detlef Lienau - Life and Career

Life and Career

Lienau was born in an area of Denmark that later became part of Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1848 and on May 11, 1853, he married Catherine Van Giesen Booraem. It was his first marriage and her second. Lienau and Catherine had five children: Jacob August Lienau (1854-1906), Detlef Lienau II, Catherine Cornelia Lienau, Lucy Lienau, and Louise Lienau. All but the eldest son, J. August, died young. His great-great-great-granddaughter is Jane Lienau, a prestigious teacher of classics at Brunswick High School while his great-great-great-grandson, Mark Lienau, is a professional raft guide who teaches high school physics in his spare time. J. August followed in his father’s footsteps and became an architect, designing mostly residential structures after taking over his father’s practice in 1887. He later formed a partnership with Thomas Nash, which lasted through the late 1920s.

After Catherine's death in 1861, Lienau married Harriet Jane Wreaks in 1866 and they had two children: Eleanor F. and Jacob Henry. In 1935, J. Henry donated about 800 of his father’s professional drawings, photographs and other original documents to the Avery Library of Architecture and Fine Arts at Columbia University.

Lienau was one of a relatively small group of trained architects, of whom the majority were fairly recent arrivals from Great Britain and the continent. All brought with them to the New World the traditions of the Old, but Lienau differed from his colleagues in one important respect: Molded by his early Danish and North German environment, and by years of study in various German art centers and in Paris, Lienau had a point of view more international than theirs—a rarity in an age of ardent nationalism. Thus, a fusion of traditions enabled him to adapt quickly to life in America and to deal successfully with the demands of an increasingly eclectic age. Another point that should be stressed, since it has long been ignored: It was Lienau, not Richard Morris Hunt, who was the first to bring to the United States a mind and a hand that was shaped, through contact with Henri Labrouste, by the French Beaux-Arts tradition.

Lienau’s career provides a dramatic illustration of the contributions made by the professionally trained European architect to American architecture. His chief importance to American architecture of the period from 1850 to the mid-’80s lies not in his use of the Second Empire mode per se, nor in his general eclecticism, but in the classical orientation of his entire practice. His work represents a continuing current of conservatism in American architecture, which for a time was submerged beneath the more dominant picturesque modes of the period, the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire—the latter quite as anti-classical in its later style phase as the former. He served as a bridge between the classical traditions of design of the second quarter of the 19th century and their re-emergence in the 1880s of the movement led in New York by the firm of McKim, Mead & White.

Among the architects Lienau is said to have influenced are Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and Paul Johannes Pelz, both of whom worked in Lienau's office-workshop. According to Hardenbergh, Lienau never had more than six men in his office, so he could really devote some time to them. Thus, through the work of his many pupils, Lienau's influence continued down through the early years of the 20th century.

From simple cottages to great mansions, Lienau used many modes to express his own ideas and the wishes of his clients in what he considered to be their most appropriate form. The Chalet and Stick Style of the early cottages, the Italian Villa, the monumental French Renaissance tradition (all reflections of the picturesque High Victorian Gothic of the late ’60s and early ’70s), and finally echoes of the Queen Anne and of the Colonial Revival—all found expression in Lienau’s work.

Lienau died in New York City. His drawings and papers are held in the Department of Drawings & Archives at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City.