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Article

Abele, Julian  

Sandra L. Tatman

(Francis)

(b Philadelphia, PA, April 29, 1881; d Philadelphia, PA, April 23, 1950).

African American architect. Born and educated in Philadelphia, Abele was the chief designer in the firm of Horace Trumbauer. Unknown for most of his life, Julian Abele has become renowned as a pioneer African American architect.

Abele attended the Institute for Colored Youth and Brown Preparatory School before enrolling at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, where in 1898 he earned his Certificate in Architectural Drawing and the Frederick Graff Prize for work in Architectural Design, Evening Class Students. Abele then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. Again he distinguished himself in the architectural program, and at his 1902 graduation he was awarded the prestigious Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize. Abele’s work was also exhibited in the Toronto Architectural Club (1901), the T-Square Club Annual Exhibition (1901–2), and the Pittsburgh Architectural Club annual exhibition of 1903.

As an undergraduate Abele worked for Louis C. Hickman (...

Article

Bauer (Wurster), Catherine  

Kristin E. Larsen

(b Elizabeth, NJ, May 11, 1905; d Seadrift, CA, Nov 21, 1964).

American writer and educator. She was an advocate for modern housing design and early federal housing programs. Born into an affluent family, Bauer briefly sought college training in architecture but attained the majority of her architecture and housing policy skills in the field. During a trip to Europe in 1926, Bauer discovered a passion for modern architecture. Writing an article that gained the attention of urban critic Lewis Mumford, she embarked on a subsequent visit in 1930 with letters of introduction to some of the most renowned European architects of the day, including Ernst May and Walter Gropius. She not only learned about housing design to maximize light and air and to utilize the site to advantage, but also investigated the benefits of large-scale development techniques and government support for housing. As a key contributor to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1933 exhibit on International Design, Bauer argued for greater recognition of housing as a centerpiece of the new modern aesthetic. In her groundbreaking book ...

Article

Beeby, Thomas  

A. Krista Sykes

(b Oak Park, IL, Oct 12, 1941).

American architect and teacher. Born in Oak Park, IL (home of numerous early works by Frank Lloyd Wright), Beeby moved with his family to Philadelphia before they relocated to England, where he completed high school. Beeby returned to the USA to attend Cornell University, earning a Bachelor of Architecture in 1964. The following year he received his Master’s of Architecture from Yale University and took a position in the Chicago office of C. F. Murphy, leaving in 1971 to join James Wright Hammond (a former partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) in creating Hammond Beeby & Associates, which would eventually become the modern-day firm of Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge. In 1973 Beeby began teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, serving as an associate professor from 1978 through 1980, when he assumed the directorship of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He left this post to become dean of the Yale University School of Architecture from ...

Article

Bottomley, William Lawrence  

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling

(b Richmond, VA, Feb 24, 1883; d Glen Head, Long Island, NY, Feb 1, 1951).

American architect, preservationist, author, and editor. His wealthy patrician family provided the opportunity for a fine education and connections to future clients. In 1906 he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia University. His education continued in Rome at the American Academy through receipt of the McKim Fellowship in Architecture in 1907. In 1908 he passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and remained in Paris until 1909.

Best known for his residential work, Bottomley combined his extensive knowledge of architectural history with his own observations to produce personal interpretations of past styles. Of his approximately 186 commissions, 90 were located in New York and 51 in Virginia. His most recognized residential commissions are found on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. Produced during the 1920s and 1930s, these residences, like many of his other projects, have exteriors inspired by nearby 18th-century James River Georgian mansions. Their interiors deviate from the Georgian models with creatively arranged plans that display a particular delight in the use of curving stairs within a variety of different shaped foyers....

Article

Brown, A(rthur) Page  

Leslie Freudenheim

(b Ellisburg, NY, 1859; d Burlingame, CA, Jan 21, 1896).

American architect. Despite his tragically brief career and six Neo-classical buildings, A. Page Brown will be remembered for his Ferry Building, the centerpiece of San Francisco’s waterfront; that city’s Swedenborgian Church with its Mission-style chairs, both icons of the American Arts and Crafts Movement; and his Mission-style California building for the 1893 Chicago Exposition, a structure that helped establish Mission and Mediterranean styles as appropriate for both domestic and commercial designs throughout the Southwest.

After briefly attending Cornell University, Brown spent three years with the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. By December 1884, after two years studying European architecture, he opened his own New York practice. Commissions in San Francisco from the Crocker family in 1889 led him to open a West Coast office. He supervised the completion of the first Grace Cathedral (1890, replaced), designed the city’s second skyscraper and, in February 1892, his Mission Revival style design won the competition for the California State Building for the ...

Article

Brown, Arthur, Jr.  

Jeffrey Tilman

(b Oakland, CA, May 21, 1874; d Burlingame, CA, July 7, 1957).

American architect. Brown was the West Coast’s preeminent practitioner of classical architecture in the first decades of the 20th century. Renown for his buildings for the San Francisco Civic Center, his City Hall for Pasadena, CA, and for the Labor-ICC block of the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC, Brown also contributed many significant buildings for the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley and participated in the design of three World’s Fairs.

In 1896 Brown earned a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California, where he took classes in architecture from Bernard Maybeck. That same year Brown went on to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had unprecedented success for an American. After his return to San Francisco in 1904, Brown teamed up with John Bakewell to form Bakewell & Brown, where he served as the firm’s design partner. The young architects were well positioned after the earthquake and fire of ...

Article

Day, Frank Miles  

Sandra L. Tatman

(b Philadelphia, PA, April 5, 1861; d Philadelphia, PA, June 15, 1918).

American architect. One of a group of popular Philadelphia architects working at the turn of the century, Day distinguished himself as an architect applying an Arts and Crafts style and other English-derived styles to both residences and public buildings.

Day graduated from the Towne School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1883 and then undertook study in England at the South Kensington School of Art, the Royal Academy in London, the atelier of Walter Millard and the office of Basil Champneys. He returned to Philadelphia in 1886 and gained further experience working for architects George T. Pearson and Addison Hutton before establishing his own office in 1887. In 1893 his brother Henry Kent Day joined him, forming Frank Miles Day & Brother. In 1911 Charles Z. Klauder joined the firm and the name of the office became Day Brothers & Klauder. H. Kent Day retired soon after and the firm name was revised to Day & Klauder and the practice continued under the name until ...

Article

Dixon, C. Murray  

Jean-François Lejeune

(b Live Oak, FL, Feb 16, 1901; d Long Island, 1949).

American architect. Dixon studied at Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta (1918–20) and joined the firm of New York architects Schultze & Weaver in 1923, where he learned the practice of hotel architecture as “total design,” worked on projects such as the Roney Plaza Hotel on Miami Beach, and was introduced to the discipline of the Art Deco language by Lloyd Morgan. Returning to Florida in 1929, Dixon worked for George Fink, Phineas Paist, and Harold D. Steward before opening his office and building his first apartment-hotel (the Ester) on Miami Beach in 1933. Until 1942 Dixon was the foremost architectural innovator in Miami Beach where, along with colleagues such as Henry Hohauser, Albert Anis, and Roy France, he adapted the architectural innovations coming from Europe and New York to the middle-class programs of the southern resort; employing inexpensive construction techniques, Dixon created a its unique “vernacular modern” architectural fabric. Until Igor Polevitzky in the 1950s, Dixon was the most published Florida architect in such periodicals as ...

Article

Eberson, John  

Jason Tippeconnic Fox

(b Cernauti, Bukovina [now in Ukraine], Jan 2, 1875; d Stamford, CT, March 5, 1954).

American architect of Austro-Hungarian birth. Eberson is noted as an influential specialist in Cinema design, especially “atmospheric” cinemas. He was educated in Dresden and at the College of Technology in Vienna, where he studied electrical engineering. Eberson immigrated to the United States in 1901 and transitioned to architectural design through work with the St. Louis-based Johnston Realty and Construction Company. This led to the establishment of Eberson’s eponymous architectural firm, although sources differ in regard to the precise date and initial location. The main office relocated from Hamilton, OH to Chicago in 1910 and to New York in 1926. In 1928, his son Drew Eberson (1904–89) became a full partner in the firm, which was renamed John and Drew Eberson, Architects.

Eberson’s early theaters such as the Palace (1914) in Minneapolis were predominantly conventional classically inspired designs. However, in 1923 he set himself apart with the completion of his first fully realized “atmospheric” movie palace, the Majestic in Houston. Atmospheric theaters gave audiences the illusion of sitting in a courtyard beneath the twinkling stars and rolling clouds of the night sky. The electronic nocturnal effects were enhanced by sidewalls resembling the picturesque facades of adjoining buildings, lush foliage, stuffed birds, bubbling fountains and statuary. While the open sky effect was not without precedent, Eberson employed it as part of a larger theme, typically Italian or Spanish, which shaped the design of the entire theater....

Article

Ford, O’Neil  

Mark Alan Hewitt

(b Pink Hill, TX, Dec 3, 1905; d San Antonio, TX, July 20, 1982).

American architect. Born in the tiny town of Pink Hill, TX, Ford was a self-taught architect who came to embody the freewheeling spirit of the Lone Star state. He was fortunate to attend two schools with strong arts and crafts educational programs: Jefferson Elementary School in Denton and North Texas State Teachers’ College in Sherman. Because of his father’s early death and the need to support his family, he worked in a brick factory to earn enough money for four semesters at the college, but could not finish a degree there, leaving in 1925. While continuing at the factory he managed to finish an architectural course through the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, PA.

Ford went to work in 1926 for the pioneering regionalist architect David R. Williams in Dallas. There he developed a keen appreciation for both modern art and vernacular architecture. When Williams left Texas in 1932 to head the National Youth Administration (NYA; a New Deal office in Washington, DC), Ford opened his own architectural office in Dallas. He was able to design a few modest houses before the Depression shut down the building industry in the mid-1930s. His first large independent work, the Frank Murchison residence in Dallas, was not completed until ...

Article

Franzen, Ulrich  

Christian F. Otto

(b Düsseldorf, 1921; d Santa Fe, NM, Oct 6, 2012).

American architect of German birth. Franzen was a major figure of the first postwar generation of American architects, among them Paul Rudolph, Harry Cobb, John M(aclane) Johansen, and Philip Johnson. Franzen immigrated with his family to the United States in 1936. His architectural training and experience was shaped by modernists: Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Franzen received his MArch in 1948), I. M. Pei (Franzen worked for Pei from 1950–55), and Mies van der Rohe (especially his Chicago architecture). He founded his own firm, Ulrich Franzen and Associates, in 1955.

Franzen has characterized his work as “collage architecture”: designs that combine diverse forms and qualities. He felt that the first condition of building was “the simultaneous solution of opposites” (as Alvar Aalto defined architecture). From the work of Mies van der Rohe he learned the discipline of precise detail and exacting proportion. Louis Kahn’s architecture offered the concept of served and servant spaces. Similarly, Franzen’s buildings explore open, continuous space, a plenitude of natural light, transparencies between interior and exterior, articulated structure and minimal, undecorated form. But Franzen also expanded the modernist palate to include traditional as well as industrial materials, and in place of unitary form, he promoted an architecture enriched by “acknowledging the antagonism between form and purpose and ambiguities of reality.”...

Article

Greenberg, Allan  

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling

(b Johannesburg, Sept 7, 1938).

American architect, teacher, historian, and writer of South African birth. Greenberg’s quiet, gentlemanly demeanor reflected the time-honored traditional and classical architecture he created over four decades. His stylistic choices are rooted in research and aesthetics. His fascination with 18th- and 19th-century American architecture is related to its genesis in the American Revolution and the commitment of those architects to expressing American democratic ideals in architectural form.

Greenberg graduated from King Edward VII School, a private preparatory school in Johannesburg, in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1961. Unlike American architecture schools of the period, his training was classically based and included drawing the historic models of Classical and Gothic architecture from memory. During his apprenticeship, he worked with Jørn Utzon in Hellebæk, Denmark, in 1962 during the design phase of the Sydney Opera House. In 1963, he continued his apprenticeship working with both ...

Article

Griffin, Marion (Lucy) Mahony [née Mahony]  

Paul Kruty

(b Chicago, IL, Feb 14, 1871; d Chicago, IL, Aug 10, 1961).

American architect, draftsman and painter. Mahony, a pioneer among women architects, was most importantly one of the 20th century’s greatest architectural renderers, establishing the presentation style for which the work of the Prairie school architects is known and giving visual expression to the revolutionary designs of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin (see Griffin family).

Mahony, who grew up in Chicago and suburban Winnetka, IL, showed a precocious facility for drawing. She studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which in 1894 she became the second woman to graduate. Her thesis project, “The House and Studio of a Painter,” provided one prototype for the studio Wright built four years later adjacent to his suburban Oak Park home. In Chicago, Mahony drafted for her cousin Dwight H. Perkins before beginning work in 1895 for Wright, then in his third year of independent practice. In 1898 she passed the Illinois architects’ licensing examination, the nation’s first such law, and became the first licensed woman architect in the country....

Article

Hayden (Bennett), Sophia  

Margaret Moore Booker

(Gregoria)

(b Santiago, Chile, Oct 17, 1868; d Winthrop, MA, Feb 3, 1953).

American architect. Hayden was the first woman to graduate with a four-year degree in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. Her most notable design was her first and last project: the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. A controversial structure (as many women objected to having their work placed in a separate location), the building brought Hayden, a reserved young woman, sudden, albeit brief, national fame.

Raised in Jamaica Plains, MA, Hayden was admitted to MIT in 1886 and graduated with honors in 1890. She taught mechanical drawing at the Eliot School in Jamaica Plains and in 1891 entered the national competition for the Woman’s Building. Hayden’s design—a grand two-story Italian Renaissance-style structure with center and end pavilions, multiple arches, columned terraces, and other classical features—was based on her MIT thesis and reflected her Beaux-Arts training. After she won the coveted first prize, some doubted she had executed the work herself (plagiarism was an accusation faced by many women artists in that era). In response, ...

Article

HOK  

Deborah A. Middleton

[Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum]

American architecture, engineering and interior design firm. Through the acquisition of other leading firms HOK expanded worldwide and in the early 21st century was recognized as the largest architectural firm in the world since 1998, with revenues of over $1 billion annually.

The firm was founded by George Hellmuth (b St. Louis, MO; 5 Oct 1907; d St. Louis, MO; 5 Nov 1999), Gyo Obata (b San Francisco, CA, 28 Feb 1923) and George Kassabaum (b Fort Scott, KS, 1921; d 1982), all graduates of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St Louis, who established their design practice in St Louis, MO, in 1955 with an initial design focus on educational buildings. The master plan and design for the new Edwardsville campus of the University of Southern Illinois became the firm’s first big commission in 1961. HOK’s first corporate building was IBM’s Laboratory at Los Gatos, CA, designed by Obata. Their design objective is to create functional spaces and to enhance the quality of life for those who work and live in them. HOK’s early focus on architectural programming research was a key determinant informing a spatial planning approach to architecture, which, combined with the optimization of the design production process, was instrumental in the firm’s rapid expansion. In ...

Article

Holl, Steven  

Sean Keller

(b Bremerton, WA, Dec 9, 1947).

American architect. Holl studied architecture at the University of Washington, followed by studies in Rome and at the Architectural Association in London. In 1976 he established the firm Steven Holl Architects in New York. Holl is the author of numerous books, including Anchoring (1989), Intertwining (1996), Parallax (2000), and five volumes of the Pamphlet Architecture series (1977, 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1991). His work has received many awards and has been exhibited throughout the world. In 1981 he became a professor at Columbia University.

Informed by a self-professed interest in phenomenology, Holl approached architecture as material poetics, using geometry, materiality, colour, light, volume, and programme to create an architectural experience that exceeds or escapes strictly rational, economic, or technical definition. His architectural language is indebted to modernists such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, as well as to later figures such as ...

Article

Hornbostel, Henry  

Mark Alan Hewitt

(b Brooklyn, New York, Aug 15, 1867; d Pittsburgh, PA, Dec 13, 1961).

American architect and campus planner. The son of Edward Hornbostel, a stockbroker, and Johanna Cassebeer, Hornbostel was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He trained in architecture at Columbia University (BA 1891) and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris (1893–7). Hornbostel distinguished himself as a superb draftsman and renderer, earning in Paris the name, “l’homme perspectif.” His first job following college, with the New York firm of Wood and Palmer, led to a partnership in 1900. He remained with the firm of Palmer & Hornbostel for the remainder of his career.

Hornbostel first earned distinction for his work with the Board of Estimate and Apportionment in New York City, assisting engineers in the design of bridges. Between 1903 and 1917 he was responsible for the architecture of the Queensborough, Manhattan, Pelham Park and Hell Gate bridges—spans for both automobiles and trains. His masterpiece, the Penn Central Hell Gate viaduct (...

Article

Howard, John Galen  

Sally B. Woodbridge

(b Chelmsford, MA, May 8, 1864; d San Francisco, CA, July 18, 1931).

American architect. Howard received his architectural training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the offices of H(enry) H(obson) Richardson and McKim, Mead & White. He also attended the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although he began his practice in New York, most of his career was spent in California where, in 1901, he was appointed Supervising Architect of the architectural plan for the University of California in Berkeley, the result of the 1898–9 International Competition for such a plan. Although the design submitted by Howard’s New York firm was awarded fourth place, political complications following the competition removed the first three winners from consideration and resulted in Howard’s appointment.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of Senator George Hearst whose fortune came from mining in the western United States and Mexico, funded the competition. She also paid for the Hearst Memorial Mining College building, designed by Howard, which honored her late husband. Completed in ...

Article

Isham, Norman  

Ronald J. Onorato

(Morrison)

(b Hartford, CT, Nov 12, 1864; d Wickford, RI, Jan 1, 1943).

American architect, preservationist, and author. Isham was one of the earliest American architects to specialize in the restoration of colonial American structures. He worked on a large number of 17th- and 18th-century structures in New England, wrote several major works on American architecture, conducted archaeological site work, and also designed new, mostly residential buildings.

Most of his private and professional life was spent in Rhode Island with its large number of existing colonial buildings. The state’s extensive collection of early structures influenced his career, as did other Rhode Island architects who helped generate the Colonial Revival style nationally such as Edmund R. Willson (1856–1906), of the prominent Providence firm of Stone, Carpenter & Willson, with whom Isham trained in the late 1880s. About the same time, he received Bachelor and Master degrees from Brown University, and he married Elizabeth Barbour Ormsbee in 1895.

It is impossible to study colonial American architecture without encountering buildings that Isham restored. While some of his preservation methods and decisions have been superceded by more modern approaches and technologies, he notably produced scores of carefully measured drawings, which are still used by preservationists and historians today. His projects included such significant 17th- and 18th-century structures as Newport’s Colony House, Trinity Church, Redwood Library, and Wanton-Lyman-Allen house (all restored in the 1920s), the Stephen Hopkins House and University Hall at Brown University in Providence, Bishop Berkeley’s Whitehall in Middletown, the Eleazar Arnold House in Lincoln, and the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace in North Kingstown, all Rhode Island. His bibliography encompasses surveys of early Rhode Island and Connecticut homes, scholarly studies on specific buildings, such as the First Baptist Meeting House, Providence, and St Paul’s in Wickford and papers on individual architects such as John Holden Greene....

Article

Jones, E. Fay  

Ethel Goodstein-Murphree

(b Pine Bluff, AR, Jan 31, 1931; d Fayetteville, AR, Aug 30, 2004).

American architect and educator. In 1990, the American Institute of Architects awarded its highest honor, the Gold Medal, to Jones (see AIA Gold Medal). By then, Jones had earned acclaim for his Thorncrown Chapel, (Eureka Springs, AR, 1978–80), described by Robert Ivy, in the biography, Fay Jones, as “among the 20th century’s great works of art.” The chapel appeared relatively late in a career that truly began in 1953 when he spent a summer at Taliesin East. There, in close contact with Wright, Frank Lloyd (Lincoln), Jones assimilated his mentor’s precepts of Organic architecture. Through the course of a nearly half-century long career, he elaborated these precepts in more than 200 projects, including 135 houses and 15 chapels. Among his clients were Wal-Mart store’s originator Sam Walton, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and Domino Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. While a member of the University of Arkansas faculty of law, President Bill Clinton lived in a house of Jones’s design, the Adrian Fletcher House; when Hillary Rodham moved to Fayetteville to join her future husband, she resided in another, the Robert Leflar House. Observers of Jones’s work note that he created an “Ozark Style,” but with buildings throughout Arkansas as well as in Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky and California to his credit, it is limiting to tie the architecture of Fay Jones to a small corner of his home state. Nevertheless, working from his studio in Fayetteville, Jones filtered the organic tradition of Wright through a lens of Ozark light, landscapes and native materials, creating works of architecture that unified humanity, built form and nature....