Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural
historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose
importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated.
To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining
or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic
buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the
University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional
mannerist creating an eccentric personal style that had little resonance
and modest influence on the future of architecture. By placing Furness
in the industrial culture that supported his work, George Thomas finds a
cutting-edge revolutionary who launched the beginnings of modern design,
played a key part in its evolution, and whose strategies continue to
affect the built world.
In his sweeping reassessment of Furness as an architect of the machine
age, Thomas grounds him in Philadelphia, a city led by engineers,
industrialists, and businessmen who commissioned the buildings that
extended modern design to Chicago, Glasgow, and Berlin. Thomas examines
the multiple facets of Victorian Philadelphia's modernity, looking to
its eager embrace of innovations in engineering, transportation,
technology, and building, and argues that Furness, working for a
particular cohort of clients, played a central role in shaping this
context. His analyses of the innovative planning, formal, and structural
qualities of Furness's major buildings identifies their designs as
initiators of a narrative that leads to such more obviously modern
figures as Louis Sullivan, William Price, Frank Lloyd Wright and
eventually, the architects of the Bauhaus.
Misunderstood and reviled in the traditional architectural centers of
New York and Boston, Furness's projects, commissioned by the progressive
industrialists of the new machine age, intentionally broke with the
historical styles of the past to work in a modern way--from utilizing
principles based on logistical planning to incorporating the new
materials of the industrial age. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes
more than eighty black-and-white and thirty color photographs that
highlight the richness of his work and the originality of his design
spanning more than forty years.
