Michael Middleton Dwyer

In addition to institutional projects, Dwyer designed residential projects for the upper strata of New York's private sector. 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 Architectural Digest 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 prewar houses of architects such as David Adler and John Russell Pope.

Michael Dwyer is an American architect, considered to be an advocate of classical architecture, and known for designing new buildings in traditional vocabularies. He was the editor of Great Houses of the Hudson River (2001), and the author of Carolands (2006).

After establishing his own firm in 1996, 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 and inscriptions designed by Dwyer. In 1997, he restored the exterior of the Francis F. Palmer House at 75 East 93rd Street, a designated New York City landmark. From 1998 to 2008, he was the architect for the restoration of the Cosmopolitan Club, a private social club for women.

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," a house characterized by the architect Robert Stern as "...scholarly...reflecting the elegant manner of Ange-Jacques Gabriel."

He was associated from 1981 to 1996 with the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis, where he helped design the Saint Thomas Choir School, a fifteen-story boarding school in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1987. He was a member of the team that prepared designs for the Central Park Conservancy's rehabilitation of the Harlem Meer in New York City's Central Park, in particular the design of the Dana Discovery Center, completed in 1993. In an interview with the magazine Progressive Architecture in December 1993, Dwyer noted that the building's "picturesque character" was intended to reinforce the park's "romantic landscape design." From 1992 to 1993, 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.