Frank Furness
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Frank Heyling Furness (November 12, 1839 - June 27, 1912) was a noted American architect.
Furness was born in Philadelphia. His father, William Furness, was a prominent Unitarian minister, and his brother, Horace Furness, was an outstanding Shakespeare scholar; Furness, however, did not attend a university and apparently did not travel to Europe. He is remembered for his eclectic, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings and for his influence on Louis Sullivan and the acclaimed 20th theater designer William Harold Lee. Although much of Furness' architectural designs were uniquely his own creation, Gothic Revival was a prevailing theme throughout.
Furness began his architectural training in the office of John Fraser, Philadelphia, in the 1850s. He participated in the Beaux-Arts-inspired atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, New York, from 1859 to 1861 and again in 1865. During the Civil War he served as Captain and commander of Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry ("Rush's Lancers"), receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Battle of Trevilian Station, Virginia, on June 12, 1864—the only American architect to receive this honor.
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 Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin. Louis Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman in Furness’s office, and his use of decorative organic motifs can be traced, at least in part, to Furness.
During his career, Furness designed over four hundred buildings including banks, churches, synagogues, railway stations for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads, and numerous stone mansions in Philadelphia and along Philadelphia's Main Line, as well as a handful of commissioned houses at the New Jersey seashore, Washington, D.C., New York state, and Chicago, Illinois.
Furness died on June 27, 1912, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Following decades of neglect, in which many of his most important buildings were destroyed, there was a revival of interest in Furness’s work in mid-twentieth century. Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture wrote, not unadmiringly, of the Philadelphia Clearing House: “... it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street.”
A fictional desk built by Furness was featured in the John Bellairs novel The Mansion in the Mist.
Some buildings by Furness, all located in Philadelphia:
- Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company, 1875 (demolished)
- Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1876
- Provident Life & Trust Co., 1879 (demolished)
- National Bank of the Republic (later Philadelphia Clearing House), 1883 (demolished)
- Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Building (formerly University of Pennsylvania Library), 1890
- Knowlton Mansion, 1880
Buildings by Furness, not in Philadelphia:
- All Hallows Church, 1897, Wyncote, Pennsylvania
- New Castle Library Society building, 1892, New Castle, Delaware
Three adjacent buildings in Wilmington, Delaware are reputed to be the largest grouping of Furness-designed railroad buildings:
- Pennsylvania Railroad French Street Station (now Amtrak), 1908
- Pennsylvania Building, 1905
- Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Water Street Station, ca. 1887
- The Emlyn Physick Estate, 1879, Cape May, New Jersey.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Lewis, Michael J., Frank Furness : Architecture and the Violent Mind, 2001.
- O’Gorman, James F., The Architecture of Frank Furness; Philadelphia Museum of Art; 1973.
- Venturi, Robert, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture; The Museum of Modern Art; 1966.
