Editing Cass Gilbert (section)

== Historical impact ==
[[File:View of Woolworth Building fixed crop.jpg|thumb|200px|Gilbert's [[Woolworth Building]] in New York City was the world's tallest building when completed in 1913.]]
Gilbert was a skyscraper pioneer; when designing the [[Woolworth Building]] he moved into unproven ground — though he certainly was aware of the ground-breaking work done by Chicago architects on skyscrapers and once discussed merging firms with the legendary [[Daniel Burnham]] — and his technique of cladding a steel frame became the model for decades.<ref name=Christen_2001 /> Modernists embraced his work: artist [[John Marin]] painted it several times; even [[Frank Lloyd Wright]] praised the lines of the building, though he decried the ornamentation.

Gilbert was one of the first celebrity architects in America, designing skyscrapers in New York City and [[Cincinnati]], campus buildings at [[Oberlin College]] and the [[University of Texas at Austin]], state capitols in Minnesota and West Virginia, the support towers of the [[George Washington Bridge]], railroad stations (including the [[New Haven Union Station]], 1920),<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Great American Railroad Stations|last=Potter|first=Janet Greenstein|publisher=John Wiley & Sons, Inc.|year=1996|isbn=978-0471143895|location=New York|pages=70, 380}}</ref> and the [[United States Supreme Court building]] in Washington, D.C. His reputation declined among some professionals during the age of [[Modernism]], but he was on the design committee that guided and eventually approved the modernist design of Manhattan's groundbreaking [[Rockefeller Center]]. Gilbert's body of work as a whole is more eclectic than many critics admit. In particular, his Union Station in New Haven lacks the embellishments common of the Beaux-Arts period and contains the simple lines common in Modernism.

Gilbert wrote to a colleague, "I sometimes wish I had never built the Woolworth Building because I fear it may be regarded as my only work and you and I both know that whatever it may be in dimension and in certain lines it is after all only a skyscraper."<ref>Letter to [[Ralph Adams Cram]], 1920 quoted in Goldberger, Paul (2001) Cass Gilbert, "Remembering the turn-of-the-century urban visionary", Architectural Digest, February issue, pp. 106–102</ref>

Gilbert's two buildings on the University of Texas at Austin campus, [[Sutton Hall (University of Texas at Austin)|Sutton Hall]] (1918) and [[Battle Hall]] (1911), are recognized by architectural historians as among the finest works of architecture in the state.{{citation needed|date=March 2018}} Designed in a Spanish-Mediterranean revival style, the two buildings became the stylistic basis for the later expansion of the university in the 1920s and 1930s and helped popularize the style throughout Texas.