Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873
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Old Dominion University ODU Digital Commons Art Faculty Publications Art 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] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/art_pubs Part of the American Art and Architecture Commons 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 metro polis. 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 606 jsah / 72:4, December 2013 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.