Michael Dwyer (architect)

Michael Dwyer is an American architect known for designing new buildings in traditional vocabularies.

Michael Dwyer was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he worked on several notable projects, among them the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, described by architecture critic Paul Goldberger "as among the city's best examples of contextual architecture."

Another was the Dana Discovery Center, a venue for environmental education, the centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy's 1990–1993 restoration of Harlem Meer in Central Park's northeast corner.

In an 1993 interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design."

While at Buttrick White & Burtis, Dwyer was an advocate for New York's prewar, classical style of architecture.

In a 1995 survey by The New York Times of the nascent classical revival, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown noted that, "Michael Dwyer...an architect at Buttrick White & Burtis...has recently completed a classical-style yacht" and a "town house on the Upper East Side," a house whose new facade architect Robert Stern characterized as "...scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel."

After establishing his own firm in 1996, Dwyer was the architect for the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park, supplementing Penelope Jencks' statue of Roosevelt with granite medallions set in the surrounding bluestone paving (one inscribed with a quotation from a 1958 speech of Roosevelt's; the other with a quotation from Adlai Stevenson's 1962 eulogy for her).

In 1997, he restored the exterior of the Francis F. Palmer House, a designated New York City landmark.

From 1998 to 2007, he was the consulting architect to the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.

In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer designed residential projects for New York's private sector, including apartments on Manhattan's east side (960 Fifth Avenue and 720 Park Avenue); its west side (The Dakota and The San Remo); and houses in diverse locations such as East Hampton, Greenwich, and Nantucket.

The financier and preservationist 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.

Jenrette described them in his memoir, Adventures with Old Houses:

In recent years, I've begun making more of my own architectural imprint on the Edgewater property.

This past year I added a small neo-classical guest house, built on a point of land across the lagoon to the north of Edgewater—far enough away not to compete with the main house.

Designed by Michael Dwyer of New York, the guest house is a small Grecian temple with four columns of the Doric order framing a large porch looking downriver.

Viewed from the front porch of Edgewater across the lagoon, the new structure serves as an architectural folly extending the sweep of the landscape to the north.

Michael Dwyer also relocated the swimming pool and added a charming pool house, again in classical style with four Doric columns along the side of the pool.

The effect is quite Roman—rather like a small corner of Hadrian's Villa.

From guest house to pool house and back to the main house provides a scenic one-mile roundabout walk, mostly along the winding riverbank.

He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001) and the author of Carolands (2006).

The July 2018 issue of Architectural Digest featured Hollyhock, Dwyer's largest project, a new house in Southampton, New York for real estate executive Mary Ann Tighe, a collaboration with interior designer Bunny Williams, reminiscent of the prewar houses of architect David Adler and interior designer Frances Elkins.