Frank Furness encyclopedia topics

Biography

Furness was born in Philadelphia on November 12, 1839. His father, William Furness, was a prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist, 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 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.

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 broke from dogmatic adherence to European trends. While McKim, Meade & White were pushing a more neoclassical Beaux-Arts style of architecture, Furness juxtaposed styles and elements in a forceful manner. Girard Bank is an exception, and is more representative of McKim, Meade & White's public and commercial buildings (that they finished it explains this). Furness's strong architectural will is also seen in the way he combined materials: stone, iron, terra cotta, and brick. These materials reflected the industrial-realist culture of Philadelphia, as opposed to New York the financial center or Boston the idealist town on a hill. Furness's independence and modernist Victorian-Gothic take inspired later 20th century architects Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. Their lives in Philadelphia often brought them inside Furness's Pennsylvania Academy of the Find Arts—built for the American Centennial—and his Fisher Library.

Furness died on June 27, 1912, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Medal of Honor citation

Rank and organization: Captain, Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry. Place and date: At Trevilian Station, Va., 12 June 1864. Entered service at: Philadelphia, Pa. Birth:------. Date of issue: 20 October 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.

Architectural works

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 the 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 located in Philadelphia:

Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company, 1875 (demolished).
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1876.
Centennial National Bank, 1876 (now the Paul Peck Center of Drexel University)
Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion, 1875, demolished.
Provident Life & Trust Co., 1879 (demolished).
National Bank of the Republic (later Philadelphia Clearing House), 1883 (demolished).
First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, 1885.
Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Building (formerly University of Pennsylvania Library), 1890.
Knowlton Mansion, 1881.
Girard Bank headquarters (now the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia).

Buildings by Furness not in Philadelphia:

All Hallows Church, 1897, Wyncote, Pennsylvania.
The Emlen Physick Estate, 1879, Cape May, New Jersey.
Fairholme Carriage House (now Jean and David W. Wallace Hall), 1874-1875, Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island.
New Castle Library Society building, 1892, New Castle, Delaware.
The Baldwin School (built as a hotel), 1890, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

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.

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.
Thayer, Preston, The Railroad Designs of Frank Furness: Architecture and Corporate Imagery in the Late Nineteenth Century, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Ph.D. dissertation), 1993.
Venturi, Robert, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture; The Museum of Modern Art; 1966.