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Frank Furness
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Frank Heyling Furness (1839–1912) was an acclaimed American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his eclectic, muscular, often idiosyncratically-scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. Furness was also a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during the Civil War.
Toward the end of his life his bold assertive style fell out of fashion, and many of his significant works were demolished in the 20th century.
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Encyclopedia
Frank Heyling Furness (1839–1912) was an acclaimed American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his eclectic, muscular, often idiosyncratically-scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. Furness was also a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during the Civil War.
Toward the end of his life his bold assertive style fell out of fashion, and many of his significant works were demolished in the 20th century. Among his most important surviving buildings are the University of Pennsylvania Library (now the Fisher Fine Arts Library) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, both in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Biography
Furness was born in Philadelphia on November 12, 1839. His father, William Henry Furness, was a prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist, and his brother, Horace Howard Furness, became America's outstanding Shakespeare scholar. Frank, however, did not attend a university and apparently did not travel to Europe. He began his architectural training in the office of John Fraser, Philadelphia, in the 1850s. He attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts-inspired atelier of Richard Morris Hunt in New York from 1859 to 1861, and again in 1865, following his military service. Furness considered himself Hunt's apprentice and was influenced by Hunt's dynamic personality and accomplished, elegant buildings. He was also influenced by the architectural concepts of the French engineer Viollet-le-Duc and the British critic John Ruskin.
Furness's first commission, Germantown Unitarian Church (1866-67, demolished ca. 1928), was a solo effort, but in 1867 he formed a partnership with Fraser, his former teacher, and George Hewitt, who had worked in the office of John Notman. The trio lasted less than 5 years, and its major commissions were Rodef Shalom Synagogue (1868-69, demolished) and the Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion (1870-75, demolished). Following Fraser's move to Washington, DC, to become supervising architect for the U.S. Treasury Department, the two younger men formed a partnership in 1871, and soon won the design competition for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1871-76). Louis Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman for Furness & Hewitt (June - November 1873), and his later use of organic decorative motifs can be traced, at least in part, to Furness. By the beginning of 1876, Furness had broken with Hewitt, and the firm carried only his name. Hewitt and his brother William formed their own firm, G.W. & W.D. Hewitt, and became Furness's biggest competitor. In 1881, Furness promoted his chief draftsman, Allen Evans, to partner (Furness & Evans), and, in 1886, did the same for four other long-time employees. The firm continued under the name Furness, Evans & Company as late as 1932, two decades after its founder's death.
Over the course of a 45-year career, Furness designed more than 600 buildings, including banks, office buildings, churches, and synagogues. As chief architect of the Reading Railroad, he designed about 130 stations and industrial buildings. For the Pennsylvania Railroad, he designed the great Broad Street Station (demolished 1953) at Broad and Market Streets in Philadelphia, and, for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the ingenious 24th Street Station (demolished 1963) alongside the Chestnut Street Bridge. He was one of the most highly-paid architects of his era, and a founder of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. His residential buildings included numerous mansions in Philadelphia and its suburbs (especially the Main Line), as well as commissioned houses at the New Jersey seashore, Newport, Rhode Island, Bar Harbor, Maine, Washington, D.C., New York state, and Chicago, Illinois.
Furness designed custom interiors and furniture in collaboration with Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst. Examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the High Museum in Altanta, Georgia. Mark-Lee Kirk's set designs for the 1942 Orson Welles film, The Magnificent Ambersons, seem to be based on Furness's ornate Neo-Grec interiors of the 1870s. A fictional desk designed by Furness is featured in the John Bellairs novel The Mansion in the Mist.
Furness broke from dogmatic adherence to European trends, and juxtaposed styles and elements in a forceful manner. His strong architectural will is seen in the unorthodox way he combined materials: stone, iron, glass, terra cotta, and brick. And his straightforward use of these materials, often in innovative or technologically advanced ways, reflected Philadelphia's industrial-realist culture of the post–Civil War period.
Furness's independence and modernist Victorian-Gothic style inspired later 20th century architects Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. Their living in Philadelphia often brought them inside Furness's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—built for the 1876 Centennial—and his University of Pennsylvania Library.
Furness married Fanny Fassit in 1866, and they had 4 children: Radclyffe, Theodore, James, and Annis Lee. Furness died on June 27, 1912, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Military service
During the Civil War, Furness served as Captain and commander of Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry ("Rush's Lancers"), receiving the Medal of Honor for his gallantry at the Battle of Trevilian Station, Virginia, on June 12, 1864—the only American architect to receive this honor. Twenty-five years after fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg, he designed the monument to his regiment on South Cavalry Field:
"In design it is a simple granite block, as massive as a dolmen, but surrounded by a corona of bronze lances that are models of the original lances. ... [T]hey are depicted in a resting position, as if waiting to be seized at any instant and brought into battle. The sense of suspended action before the moment of the battle is all the more potent because it is rendered in stone and metal, making it perpetual. Of the hundreds of monuments at Gettysburg, Furness's is among the most haunting."
Medal of Honor citation
Rank and organization: Captain, Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry. Place and date: At Trevilian Station, Va., June 12, 1864. Entered service at: Philadelphia, Pa. Birth:------. Date of issue: October 20, 1899.
Citation:
- Voluntarily carried a box of ammunition across an open space swept by the enemy's fire to the relief of an outpost whose ammunition had become almost exhausted, but which was thus enabled to hold its important position.
Rediscovery
Following decades of neglect, during which many of Furness's most important buildings were demolished, there was a revival of interest in his work in the mid-twentieth century. The critic Lewis Mumford, tracing the creative forces that had influenced Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote in The Brown Decades (1931): "Frank Furness was the designer of a bold, unabashed, ugly, and yet somehow healthily pregnant architecture."
The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, in his comprehensive survey Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (revised 1963), saw beauty in that ugliness:
"[O]f the highest quality, is the intensely personal work of Frank Furness (1839-1912) in Philadelphia. His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Broad Street was erected in 1872-76 in preparation for the Centennial Exposition. The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigor in the detailing that would be notable anywhere, and the galleries are top-lit with exceptional efficiency. Still more original and impressive were his banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period. The most extraordinary of these, and Furness's masterpiece, was the Provident Institution in Walnut [sic Chestnut] Street, built as late as 1879. This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation.
No small part of Furness's historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis Sullivan picked this office - then known as Furness & Hewitt - to work in for a short period after he left Ware's School in Boston. As Sullivan's Autobiography of an Idea testifies, the vitality and originality of Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris."
Architect and critic Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) wrote, not unadmiringly, of the National Bank of the Republic (later the Philadelphia Clearing House):
"The city street facade can provide a type of juxtaposed contradiction that is essentially two-dimensional. Frank Furness' Clearing House, now demolished like many of his best works in Philadelphia, contained an array of violent pressures within a rigid frame. The half-segmental arch, blocked by the submerged tower which, in turn, bisects the facade into a near duality, and the violent adjacencies of rectangles, squares, lunettes, and diagonals of contrasting sizes, compose a building seemingly held up by the buildings next door: it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street."
On the occasion of its centennial in 1969, the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects memorialized Furness as its great architect of the past:
"For designing original and bold buildings free of the prevalent Victorian academicism and imitation, buildings of such vigor that the flood of classical traditionalism could not overwhelm them, or him, or his clients ...
For shaping iron and concrete with a sensitive understanding of their particular characteristics that was unique for his time ...
For his significance as innovator-architect along with his contemporaries John Root, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright ...
For his masterworks, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Provident Trust Company, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station, and the University of Pennsylvania Library (now renamed the Furness Building) ...
For his outstanding abilities as draftsman, teacher and inventor ...
For being a founder of the Philadelphia Chapter and of the John Stewardson Memorial Scholarship in Architecture ...
And above all, for creating architecture of imagination, decisive self-reliance, courage, and often great beauty, an architecture which to our eyes and spirits still expresses the unusual personal character, spirit and courage for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on a Civil War battlefield."
In 1973, the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted the first retrospective of Furness's work, curated by James F. O'Gorman, George E. Thomas and Hyman Myers. Thomas, Jeffrey A. Cohen and Michael J. Lewis authored Frank Furness: The Complete Works (1991, revised 1996), with an introduction by Robert Venturi. Lewis wrote the first biography: Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (2001).
Selected architectural works
Philadelphia buildings
- Northern Savings Fund Society Building, 1871-72.
- Thomas Hockley house, 1875.
- Gatehouses, Philadelphia Zoological Gardens, 1875-76.
- Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1876.
- Centennial National Bank, 1876 (now Paul Peck Alumni Center, Drexel University).
- Kensington National Bank, 1877.
- Knowlton (William H. Rhawn mansion), 1881.
- Undine Barge Club, 1882-83.
- First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, 1885.
- University of Pennsylvania Library, 1891 (now the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library).
- Mortuary Chapel, Mount Sinai Cemetery (Frankford), 1891-92.
- Horace Jayne house, 1895.
- Girard Trust Company Building, 1907 (now the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia).
Demolished Philadelphia buildings
- Germantown Unitarian Church, 1866-67
- Rodef Shalom Synagogue, 1868-69.
- Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion, 1870-75.
- Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company, 1875.
- Church of the Redeemer for Seamen and their Families, 1878.
- Provident Life & Trust Company, 1879.
- Library Company of Philadelphia Building, 1879-80.
- Reliance Insurance Company Building, 1881-82.
- National Bank of the Republic (later Philadelphia Clearing House), 1883.
- 24th Street Station (Philadelphia), Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 1886-88.
- Broad Street Station (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania Railroad, 1892-93.
- Arcade Building and pedestrian bridge to Broad Street Station, 1901-02.
Buildings elsewhere
- Lindenshade (Horace Howard Furness mansion), Wallingford, PA, 1873 (demolished 1940).
- Fairholme (Fairman Rogers mansion) Carriage House, Newport, Rhode Island, 1874-1875 (now Jean and David W. Wallace Hall, Salve Regina University).
- Emlen Physick Estate, Cape May, New Jersey, 1879.
- Dolobran (Clement Griscom mansion), Haverford, Pennsylvania, 1881.
- St. Michael's Protestant Episcopal Church, Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, 1886.
- Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry (Rush's Lancers) Monument, Gettysburg Battlefield, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1888.
- Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades, Elwyn, Pennsylvania, 1889-90.
- Baldwin School (built as the Bryn Mawr Hotel), Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1890.
- Church of Our Father, Hull's Cove, Mount Desert Island, Maine, 1890-91.
- Recitation Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, 1891.
- New Castle Public Library, New Castle, Delaware, 1892 (now Old Library Museum, New Castle Historical Society).
- Merion Cricket Club, Haverford, Pennsylvania (Allen Evans, Furness's partner, is credited with the design), 1896-97.
- , Wyncote, Pennsylvania, 1897.
- Haverford School, Haverford, Pennsylvania, 1902.
Reputed to be the largest grouping of Furness-designed railroad buildings.
See also
External links
- at Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
- at Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
- Retrieved on 2008-07-02
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