Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge

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Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge was a notable architecture firm based in Boston, Massachusetts between 1886 and 1915.

The firm grew out of Henry Hobson Richardson's architectural practice. After Richardson's death at age 47 in 1886, a trio consisting of George Foster Shepley, Charles Hercules Rutan, and Charles Allerton Coolidge inherited the firm and completed nearly all of its more than two dozen pending projects, including the John J. Glessner House in Chicago. Two of the principals were educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Shepley (class of 1882) and Coolidge (class of 1883). Shepley married Richardson's daughter; and Coolidge later married Shepley's sister.

In 1888 the firm was commissioned by Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford to join landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in planning the campus for Stanford University. A year later, the firm built the 14-story Ames Building in Boston, at that time the world's tallest building. In 1892 it won the Chicago Public Library competition (now the Chicago Cultural Center), which led to the Art Institute of Chicago commission in the following year. The firm opened its Chicago branch office in 1893, in which many architects later in the Prairie School received their early professional training.

During the same period, the firm designed the Montreal Board of Trade Building (1892), South Station (Boston) in 1898, Chicago's Corn Exchange Bank Building (1908), more than a dozen buildings for the University of Chicago (1900-1915), and a new campus for the Harvard Medical School (1906).