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12-2013 Review: Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873; Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth- Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library--From Gentleman's Library to Machine for Learning; Frank Furness: Working on Railroads; Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness' Factory for Art; Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness Robert Wojitowicz Old Dominion University, [email protected]

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Repository Citation Wojitowicz, Robert, "Review: Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873; Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library--From Gentleman's Library to Machine for Learning; Frank Furness: Working on Railroads; Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness' Factory for Art; Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness" (2013). Art Faculty Publications. 3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/art_pubs/3 Original Publication Citation Wojtowicz, R. (2013). Review: Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873; Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library--From Gentleman's Library to Machine for Learning; Frank Furness: Working on Railroads; Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness' Factory for Art; Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 72(4), 606-609. doi:10.1525/ jsah.2013.72.4.606 admirably composed. The accompanying that was rescuing the country from eco- Frank Furness: Making a Modern book identifies only Ezra Stoller, but pho- nomic calamity. Library—From Gentleman’s Library tographs constituted the principal elements The last point is made clearly by the to Machine for Learning of the show. Few films gave artistic credit exhibition’s linkage of the fairs to city Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archives, to their creators. The images often included planning. In New York City, the peripheral University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia dramatic tonal contrasts, night views, and benefits of the World of Tomorrow 5 October 2012–18 January 2013 unusual angles that emphasized stylistic included the elimination of the trash dumps innovations. Daylight images often glori- in Flushing Meadows in favor of fair- Frank Furness: Working on the fied the brilliant sunshine of semitropical grounds and the present park, the develop- Railroads cities, or the broad white planes of fair- ment of LaGuardia Airport and the Grand Library Company of Philadelphia, ground buildings, as if promising a sunny Central Parkway, the Bronx-Whitestone Philadelphia and optimistic, sanitary, wholesome future. Bridge, the Whitestone Expressway, the 17 September 2012–19 April 2013 Many pavilions were simply boxes of various IND subway system’s present E, F, M, and shapes, sometimes without windows. Plan- R lines, and the provision of a site for the Building a Masterpiece: Frank ners evidently valued the flexibility inher- 1964 World’s Fair. The other fairs had Furness’ Factory for Art ent in large undifferentiated spaces, and fewer far-reaching urban consequences, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine expected artificial means to control light- but San Francisco’s fairground develop- Arts, Philadelphia ing and the indoor climate. Images showed ment of Treasure Island, a landfill opera- 29 September 2012–30 December 2012 transportation devices, including train tion, allowed for its rapid naval military engines, airplanes, dirigibles, and exciting occupation during the Second World War. Face and Form: The Art and rides in purpose-made cars or automobiles The exhibition ended intelligently with Caricature of Frank Furness shown on real roads and imaginary freeways. a section devoted to the present state of Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Others showed assembly lines in model each fairground. Probably the visitors in 30 November 2012–19 January 2013 fairground factories, where industrialists New York most appreciated the presenta- displayed methods of production and the tion of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, To mark the centennial of Frank Furness’s reassuringly clean processing of canned an active recreational area serving a large death, a number of educational and cul- and packaged food. Purchasers in the 1930s population that includes ethnic groups tural institutions in and around Philadel- still had to be persuaded that factory-made barely represented in the city during the phia collaborated on Furness 2012, a series products were rational, sanitary, whole- 1930s. The park long retained a few struc- of exhibitions, a symposium, and a website some, and made by well-regulated white tures from 1939 and the fairgrounds pro- that sought to place the architect, and workers. Today, we notice the many indus- vided the layout for the 1964 fair, itself by extension the city, securely within the trial laborers who have been replaced almost a half century in the past. modernist narrative. A quirky individual, by machines and robots or by low-wage Furness (1839–1912) wrestled with nearly employees abroad. carol herselle krinsky every major building type of the late nine- The objects included a large robot, New York University teenth and early twentieth centuries. Banks, Elektro Motor-Man, an aluminum chair, railroad stations, libraries, educational and various domestic consumer products such Related Publication medical institutions, clubhouses, places of as dishwashers and nylon hosiery, and sev- Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, worship, urban townhouses, and country eral architectural models. For the Chicago eds., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s estates all bear his unmistakable stamp. Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale fair, Frank Lloyd Wright’s former sculptural Among his American contemporaries, only University Press, 2010), 224 pp., 30 color collaborator, Alfonso Iannelli, designed H. H. Richardson equaled Furness in both and 102 b/w illus. $45.00 (hardcover), a Sunbeam toaster and a coffeemaker. ISBN 9780300149579 range and creativity. Why is Furness not Museum visitors saw dramatic (although better appreciated outside his native Phila- not entirely explicit) photographs of the delphia? That is the question Furness 2012 Ford Motor Company’s Road of Tomorrow, Learning from Frank Furness: Louis attempted to answer, and, in large part, it General Motors’ Futurama, or less immense Sullivan in 1873 succeeded. pavilions sponsored by Wonder Bread at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Furness was born into a prominent the modest end and by governments at 6 October 2012–30 December 2012 and accomplished Philadelphia family in the grandiose end. Playful small pavilions 1839, just as the city was transforming and innovative small houses attracted a Furness in Space: The Architect and itself from a cultural capital into an indus- largely white public, if the photographs of Design Dialogues on the Late trial metro­polis. He exhibited a tempera- fairgoers are representative. Larger, often Nineteenth-Century Country House mental personality, even at a young age, and more formally planned pavilions were Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, he was slow in settling on a career path. A meant to impress people with the power, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania three-year placement in the Philadelphia authority, and strength of a government 14 October 2012–21 December 2012 office of the Scottish émigré architect John

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.150 on Tue, 15 Aug 2017 18:54:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Fraser eventually led to a longer and more Historians were slow to recognize Fur- tripartite Gothic reredos. Incised panels pivotal stay in the experimental New York ness’s original, if unconventional, contri- contain abstracted foliate patterns. Most atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, who had bution to American architecture. Were it amusing are the three voluptuous muses just returned to the United States from his not for Sullivan, who provided a vivid char- mounted on the back piece, the center one studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. acter study of his former employer in The holding aloft a clock and those flanking it, Meritorious service in the Union cavalry Autobiography of an Idea (1924), Furness gaslights. It is not difficult to imagine how during the Civil War interrupted Furness’s might have slipped into obscurity. A new Horace was inspired by these figures while studies permanently and marked his life appreciation for the architect began to take at work on his famed Variorum Shakespeare. indelibly. root with the rise of postmodernism, a On an adjacent wall were hung front and Not long after his discharge, Furness movement that, significantly, was led by side elevations of the desk in Frank Furness’s began working again with Hunt in New fellow Philadelphian and avowed Furness hand alongside ornamental drawings in York, this time as an assistant, but the lure admirer Robert Venturi. The Pennsylvania Sullivan’s hand, as well as a baluster from of his native city soon proved irresistible. Academy of the Fine Arts and the Univer- Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer Depart- By 1866 he had returned to Philadelphia sity of Pennsylvania Library—renamed ment Store in Chicago. The juxtaposition and formed Fraser, Furness & Hewitt, in the Fisher Fine Arts Library—were both essentially reinforced the organic connection partnership with his former employer and restored in time for their centennials. The between employer and one-time employee a former assistant to architect John Not- scholarly literature deepened substan- in terms of their approach to ornament, man. Dropping the older partner from the tially with the publication of James F. although, regrettably, not structure. Fortu- masthead, the firm of Furness & Hewitt O’Gorman’s The Architecture of Frank itously placed just beyond the cozy alcove went on to win the prestigious commis- ­Furness, a catalogue issued to coincide with containing the exhibition, Thomas Eak- sion for the Pennsylvania Academy of the a groundbreaking 1973 exhibition at the ins’s A May Morning in the Park (1879–80), Fine Arts (1871–76). Other commissions Philadelphia Museum of Art. With the with its subject of engineer Fairman soon followed. The firm expanded to appearance of George E. Thomas’s 1991 ­Rogers driving his four-in-hand coach, include several draftsmen, including a catalogue raisonné, Frank Furness: The reminded me of the interconnected social young Louis Sullivan, who joined in 1873 Complete Works, and Michael J. Lewis’s 2001 circles in which Furness lived and worked. before dec­amping for better opportunities biography, Frank Furness: Architecture and Rogers’s sister was married to Horace in Chicago in the aftermath of that year’s the Violent Mind, the architect’s reputation Howard Furness, and Rogers chaired the financial panic. has been firmly secured. building committee for the Pennsylvania Clients, many of whom were drawn The premise of Furness 2012 was not Academy of the Fine Arts. from Philadelphia’s industrial and com- to reproduce the scale and scope of the Many of the Furness 2012 exhibitions mercial elite, clamored for Furness’s idio- Philadelphia Museum of Art’s earlier exhi- viewed Furness through the lens of build- syncratic touch, which fit their modern bition but rather to consider different ing type. For example, Furness in Space: The aspirations while rendering stylistic cate- aspects of Furness’s life and work in venues Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late gories inadequate, even by the eclectic across the city, many of them enhanced by Nineteenth-Century Country House, a small standards of the day. One might character- being located in his buildings. Small to exhibition at Bryn Mawr College’s Canaday ize the Furnessian mode as an exaggerated medium in size, the exhibitions diverged Library, traced the morphology of Fur- version of Hunt’s Neo-Grec that was ini- somewhat in the quality of their installa- ness’s suburban houses, many of which were tially fired by the Victorian Gothic and tion, but of those that I visited, all provided in neighboring “Main Line” communities, later tempered by the Romanesque and differing—and welcome—perspectives on using detailed real estate maps, plans, and classical revivals. Furness broke with Hewitt the architect. photographs. I was left marveling at the in 1875, practicing solo until, in 1881, he The Philadelphia Museum of Art built tightness of Furness’s formal geometries, formed Furness & Evans, a new partner- its intimate exhibition, Learning from Frank his open floor plans, and his environmental ship with former draftsman Allen Evans Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873, around a sensitivities. It is especially noteworthy that would be expanded and renamed Fur- desk and bookcase originally designed by that undergraduate students at the college ness, Evans & Company five years later. Furness in 1870–71 and executed by cabinet­ were responsible for the bulk of the research To this phase belongs Furness’s late tri- maker Daniel Pabst for the Philadelphia exhibited here. umph, the University of Pennsylvania townhouse of Furness’s older brother, Nearby, the Kroiz Gallery of the Library (1888–90). Although in his later Horace Howard Furness, the noted Shake- ­University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural years Furness adopted a tamer, more clas- spearean scholar. Once part of a compre- Archives mounted Frank Furness: Making a sicizing design approach in response to hensive, Moorish-inspired library interior, Modern Library—From Gentleman’s Library the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the desk in particular is a tour de force to Machine for Learning, a modest exhibition he received fewer and fewer commissions of architectural cabinetry. The base and of drawings and photographs of Furness’s even as he suffered a number of devastating desktop are treated as a quasi altar, with an libraries, ranging from the tiny octagonal professional setbacks before his death oversized keyhole arch framing the knee- municipal building for New Castle, Dela- in 1912. hole, and the back piece conceived as a ware, to the hulking Fisher Fine Arts Library

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.150 on Tue, 15 Aug 2017 18:54:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms of which the Kroiz Gallery is a part. The elevation drawing of the main façade. Often professional associates, assorted animals, standout from this exhibition, curiously, reproduced, but seldom explained, the and not least, himself (Figure 1). The was not a historical document. Rather, it divided rendering shows the building as architect treated figures like architectural was a seductive late twentieth-century executed in its full polychrome glory on elevations and faces like geometric patterns, watercolor rendering of the library’s apse the left and an alternate grisaille scheme, and these anthropomorphic connections and tower by former University of Penn- thankfully not executed, on the right. to his buildings were reinforced by care- sylvania Fine Arts Dean Lee Copeland, an An unsuccessful competition drawing by fully selected illustrations (Figure 2). Some eloquent reminder of how this building has Henry Sims, depicting a quasi-ecclesiastical key artifacts, most notably ceramic tiles profoundly inspired generations of faculty, domed design, underscored how modern from the demolition sites of both the Prov- students, and alumni. Furness & Hewitt’s building truly is. ident Life and Trust Company and the The Library Company of Philadelphia, The one exhibition that best summa- Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Com- once housed in a building by Furness that rized the breadth of Furness’s achievement pany vividly conveyed the color and rich- was demolished in 1940, chose to highlight was paradoxically the most intensely per- ness of Furness’s ornament. That the late Furness’s work for the city’s major railroads. sonal: Face and Form: The Art and Carica- Penelope Batcheler, an architectural his­ Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads ture of Frank Furness at the Athenaeum of torian with the National Park Service, sal- chronicled Furness’s relationship, first, with Philadelphia. The Athenaeum’s claims on vaged these items lent their inclusion an the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Furness are less tenuous than they might added poignancy. The exhibition’s didactic Company, for which he designed a slew of initially seem. Its building was designed by text panels were especially noteworthy for modest but innovative passenger stations Notman, Hewitt’s former employer, and their concise explanation of the theoretical for a variety of cities, towns, and suburbs in it is located just across Washington Square and biographical underpinnings of Furness’s southeastern Pennsylvania in the early to from the site of Horace Howard Furness’s designs. mid-1880s; second, with the Baltimore demolished townhouse. Based largely on The image of Furness as a provincial and Ohio Railroad, for which he designed Furness’s sketchbooks, which remain in American architect has persisted in academic major stations in Wilmington, Delaware, his descendants’ possession, the exhibition and professional circles largely because his and downtown Philadelphia in the mid- to revealed the architect to be both an exqui- output was confined, with rare exceptions, late 1880s; and third, with the Pennsylvania site draftsman and wicked caricaturist in to the Delaware Valley. Yet few would level Railroad, for which he designed a major the manner of Honoré Daumier. No one the same charge against Antonio Gaudí addition to the Wilson Brothers’ Broad was spared Furness’s pen: family members and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, more cel- Street Station in the early 1890s. The (Horace, who was mostly deaf, appears with ebrated and equally idiosyncratic Euro- Library Company exhibition included a an oversized ear trumpet), friends, clients, pean architects who were as wedded to number of informative drawings and blue- prints, but it was the three-dimensional artifacts, including signs, emblems, and a mantel shelf from the ladies’ waiting room of the Broad Street Station, that truly ener- gized it. Most astonishing was the presence of an intricately detailed N-scale model of Broad Street Station itself. Built by a dedicated hobbyist, the model conveys the power and scale of the multiblock station and adjoining shed in way that no drawing or photograph could ever match. Several blocks north, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts organized Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness’ Factory for Art, a small exhibition of Furness & Hewitt’s drawings for its own building, hung upstairs in the museum’s main “nave.” The title, while an obvious pun on Andy Warhol’s much later New York “Factory,” served to focus the viewers’ attention directly on the complexities of the building’s program, including its structural, mechanical, and Figure 1 Frank Furness, Self-Portrait with Caricatures, n.d. (Furness Sketchbook, private ventilating systems. Nevertheless, the exhibi- collection. From the exhibition Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness, the tion’s centerpiece remained the firm’s split Athenaeum of Philadelphia)

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.150 on Tue, 15 Aug 2017 18:54:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms their respective cities of Barcelona and Glasgow as Furness was to Philadelphia. On Saturday, 1 December 2012, the Ath- enaeum hosted a symposium, Frank Fur- ness: His City, His World, that sought to place Furness within a national and inter- national context. The symposium featured talks by Martin Bressani, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Michael J. Lewis, George E. Thomas, and Maria M. Thompson, several of whom were among the organizers of Furness 2012, as well as a plenary address the previous evening by Andrew Saint, all with an eye toward possible publication. Such a collec- tion would add enormously to an already rich literature on Furness and the city he filled with so many boisterous designs.

robert wojtowicz Old Dominion University

Related Website http://frankfurness.org

Figure 2 Frank Furness, Designs for Ornament, n.d. (Furness Sketchbook, private collection. From the exhibition Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia)

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