Frank Furness

Abstract

Frank Furness (12 November 1839–27 June 1912) took an original course that accelerated the transformation of American architecture from an art rooted in the past to one that responded to the rapidly changing materials, technologies, and circumstances of the Industrial Age. After study in New York in the atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, Furness served as an officer in the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, winning the Medal of Honor in the largest cavalry battle of the Civil War at Trevilian Station, Virginia, in 1864. Furness entered practice when a new generation, arising from the city’s industrial culture, had taken control of Philadelphia’s economy and institutions. Its leaders, many from the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, proposed to hold an international exhibition in Philadelphia, ostensibly to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, but with the larger goal of representing to the nation and the world the extraordinary innovations in modern design initiated in Philadelphia. When the Centennial Exhibition opened in May 1876, Furness had already completed half a dozen banks in the downtown area, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and two religious buildings in the institutional center as well as numerous houses scattered across the elite residential district, a bank, and various pavilions at the fair. Those buildings introduced him to Centennial Exhibition visitors from both the United States and abroad. During more than forty years of practice, Furness and his various offices (Fraser, Furness & Hewitt; Furness & Hewitt, Frank Furness; Furness & Evans; Furness, Evans & Co.) produced designs for nearly 800 projects, the vast majority of which were built. Some 200 were commissioned by the nation’s largest railroads, including the Philadelphia and Reading, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. By the end of the century, Furness found himself largely excluded from the professional narrative as architects working from historical models found his ahistorical work inscrutable. Furness introduced the literature of family friends, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the young architects working in his office, including Louis Sullivan (b. 1856–d. 1924), William L. Price (b. 1861–d. 1916), and George Howe (b. 1886–d. 1955). George Howe, who, like Sullivan and Price, shared the experience of the Furness office, laid out an American genealogy for modern architecture in his essay “What Is This Modern Architecture Trying to Express?” (1930) that included “Wright, Sullivan, and Price.” These architects and their students, from Irving Gill to Louis Kahn, carried on the discipline found in Furness’s architecture into our own time.