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.
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