TY - JOUR
AU - Blaszczyk, Regina, Lee
AB - Architectural history and design history, like other disciplines, are constrained by their canons. Conventional histories of modernist architectural aesthetics often acknowledge the role of the Chicago school in the creation of the skyscraper before looking to Europe and celebrating Bauhaus modernism. This approach is insensitive to the wide variety of regional design cultures that characterized industrial America and that had a lasting influence on the built environment. George E. Thomas's book provides an important corrective to these distortions. Thomas uses the conventional vehicle of architectural history—the biography of a well-known architect—to tell the story of nineteenth-century Philadelphia as the real cauldron of modern design. His multilayered cultural biography of the architect Frank Furness—best remembered for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (opened in 1876)—not only gives due credence to Philadelphia as the industrial powerhouse of Victorian America but also demonstrates how Furness collaborated with the city's manufacturing elites to build an urban environment that celebrated the second industrial revolution. Unlike the tradition-bound and fashion-conscious ruling classes of Boston and New York City, Furness's patrons were self-made men who looked to the future, engineers and managers at innovative firms such as the Pennsylvania Railroad. From the U.S. Centennial Exhibition of 1876 until his death in 1912, Furness catered to their needs by designing office buildings, libraries, museums, banks, railroad stations, townhouses, and suburban mansions that were a tribute to the machine age. Over a long career that produced more than six hundred buildings, Furness adapted the materials and motifs common in Philadelphia's factories to new uses in private and public spaces. Turning a cheek on pale neoclassicism, he created iron stair railings that looked like pistons; decorated rooftops with steel girders; eschewed hand-chiseled marble for molded terra cotta; and made common red brick his favorite cladding. To the twenty-first-century eye, a Furness building looks to be some variety of the Gothic Revival, but Thomas helps us see the colorful structure as Victorian Philadelphians would have. He draws parallels between the tripartite blocky facade of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a row of blast furnaces, such as those at the Midvale Steel Company where Frederick Winslow Taylor later pioneered scientific management, and the turreted tower of the University of Pennsylvania Library and the tall staircase towers on the city's great factories. His comparison of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Trinity Church in Boston is particularly astute, demonstrating how the Furness design looked to the future while Henry Hobson Richardson wallowed in historicism. He also reminds us that several important actors in the modernist canon—including Louis Sullivan of Chicago—trained with Furness and later applied his industrial aesthetic to their own designs. The best historians dig through the archives to write new stories that challenge established wisdom. Thomas effectively demonstrates the influence of American industrial culture on functional aesthetics. His rich cultural biography of a little-understood American architect is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the real roots of modernism in nineteenth-century Philadelphia's industrial economy. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz253
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/frank-furness-architecture-in-the-age-of-the-great-machines-zHJl3bAJQy
SP - 208
VL - 106
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -