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.

Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines (Haney Foundation Series)

Arts & Photography

Thomas, George E.

History & Criticism

University of Pennsylvania Press

Building America's First University tells the story of the University of Pennsylvania, a story that begins with Benjamin Franklin's transcendent notion that learning ought not to be restricted to a leading religion or class. Rather than looking back toward antiquarian knowledge, Franklin set his college's course toward the world of the present and the future by focusing on modern languages, the natural sciences, and contemporary literature. His goals were soon reflected in the addition of a course in medicine, the first in the New World, and, by the end of the century, a course in law. This broader definition of education was celebrated after the American Revolution when the College was renamed the University of Pennsylvania, the first American institution to carry that all-encompassing title. In the intervening centuries, Franklin's vision has become the model of American higher education.
Since its founding the University has adapted to reflect the values of the community that has supported it, charting a course between innovation and convention. These changes are evident in the architecture and character of the three campuses that have been its home. From Franklin's adaptation of a nonsectarian chapel as the institution's first quarters to Frank Furness's innovative University Library and Louis Kahn's momentous Richards Medical Research Laboratory, Penn's buildings can be seen as illuminating the evolving intentions of the University's leaders.
Written by architectural historians George E. Thomas and David B. Brownlee, Building America's First University uses the physical evidence of Penn's campuses and buildings to illustrate the development of this landmark institution in American education. Part 1 recounts the history of the University, with three of the five chapters devoted to the evolution of the current campus. The historical chapters weave together the often conflicting interests and goals of trustees, administrators, alumni, and students that have shaped the institution of today. Part 2 presents a gazetteer to the campus in its present form—two hundred and fifty years after Benjamin Franklin wrote his "Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pensilvania." Here the authors describe every significant building on campus, with at least one photograph of each. Coming at the end of forty years of massive growth, this is the first comprehensive architectural history of the University since the early twentieth century.

Building America's First University: An Historical and Architectural Guide to the University of Pennsylvania

History

Brownlee, David B.

Americas

Awarded a 2019 Book Award by the Victorian Society in America. 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 spannin.

This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series follows the Pennsylvania migration narrative in broad swathes: Philadelphia and its surrounding counties of the original Quaker settlement zone, the Piedmont and the German agricultural zone, the Scots-Irish frontier beyond the Blue Mountain, the coal country with its trade connections to New York City and its East European coal miners, and the Northern Tier claimed and settled by New Englanders.
 Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania uses the physical evidence of community plans, building typologies and structural systems, and landscape to gain an understanding of the five great migrations that settled William Penn’s Commonwealth. The first settlers were Swedes and Dutch who left traces and buildings near Philadelphia. They were followed by two groups seeking religious freedom―first the English, Welsh, and Scots-Irish members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and in the early eighteenth century German-speaking Protestants who brought their characteristic planning and building types to southeastern Pennsylvania. A fourth migration of New Englanders in the 1750s claimed the northern third of the state and brought characteristic New England town plans and buildings. The fifth migration of Eastern European Catholics and Jews at the end of the nineteenth century added their highly identifiable domed churches to the coal country. The hybrid vigor created by the interaction of these groups makes Pennsylvania unique among the American colonies and set the stage for the great industrial explosion that made the commonwealth a center of the American Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rising industrial culture found its aesthetic counterpart in the architecture of Frank Furness who turned the dross of industry into the gold of design; his values continued through his students William L. Price and George Howe and on into the late twentieth century in the careers of Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi.
In addition to Philadelphia, the book surveys the rival German-influenced small cities of the Piedmont, the brief but explosive flourishing of wealth in the twin coal country cities, and a host of secondary county towns and villages that carry on vernacular building traditions overlaid with metropolitan architecture serving regional and national clients. This volume, which includes a glossary, bibliography, and over 400 illustrations (photographs, maps, and drawings), is the counterpart to Buildings of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, which covers the western portion of the state.
A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania (Buildings of the United States)

Newman, Larry

Ricci, Patricia

Thomas, J. Bruce

Janosov, Robert

Webster, Richard J.

University of Virginia Press

Hardback book with dust jacket titled CAPE MAY, The Queen of the Seaside Resorts: Its History and Architecture by Thomas and Doebley. Published in 1976 by Art alliance Press. Bookseller since 1995 (LL-Base2-BS-10-bottom) rareviewbooks

Cape May, Queen of The Seaside Resorts: Its History and Architecture

Art Alliance Press

Drawing Toward Building: Philadelphia Architectural Graphics, 1732-1986

Drawing toward building: Philadelphia architectural graphics, 1732-1986

COHEN, Jeffrey A.

O’Gorman, James F.

Perkins, G. Holmes

Architecture

Published for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts by the University of Pennsylvania Press

From the Crystal Palace to the skyscraper and on to the functional aesthetic of the German Bauhaus, the development of modern architecture required less than seven decades. Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts warrants a central place in this narrative. Unlike the earlier buildings that made fragmentary and disconnected use of the latest industrial materials and systems, the Academy project combined the critical elements of modern logistical planning—steel and iron construction and modern plumbing, heating, and ventilation systems designed to serve a workplace and a school—with the architectural expression of the age. Moreover, rather than seeking to reify the past, architects Furness &amp; Hewitt had chosen the most dynamic of modern forces, the machine, as both inspiration and ornament. Instead of being based on the rearview mirror, the new Academy, opened in 1876, looked to the present and the future. This created a civic museum and school building whose expressive style referenced both its updated purpose and a novel attitude toward history. The Academy's machine for making art can rightly be termed the first modern building.

First Modern: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Hardback book with dust jacket titled CAPE MAY, The Queen of the Seaside Its History and Architecture by Thomas and Doebley. Published in 1976 by Art alliance Press. Bookseller since 1995 (LL-Base2-BS-10-bottom) rareviewbooks

Cape May, Queen of the Seaside Resorts: Its History and Architecture

Doebley, Carl E.

Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts

Frank Furness is unquestionably the most unique and prolific American architect of the 19th century. An apprentice in the atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, Furness in turn became a mentor for Louis Sullivan, who brought Furness's distinctive style to the Midwest. Furness permeated Philadelphia architecture, ultimately shaping the present "Philadelphia School" centered around Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. 
Frank Furness: The Complete Works is the only exhaustive monograph on Furness's work. More than 640 projects are presented through over 600 photographs and drawings.

Frank Furness: The Complete Works, Revised Edition

Princeton Architectural Press

Architect George Howe thought there were three pioneers of American architecture: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William L. Price. Although history has borne out Howe's observation on Sullivan and Wright, Will Price still awaits discovery. ?
Architect George Howe thought there were three pioneers of American architecture: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William L. Price. Although history has borne out Howe's observation on Sullivan and Wright, Will Price still awaits discovery. ?
Price, a disciple of Frank Furness who practiced in Philadelphia from 1833 to 1916, established the architectural character of the two of the nation's greatest resorts, Atlantic City and Miami, thus shaping the architecture of the Roaring Twenties. Although his biggest and best-known projects, the Art Deco Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City and the Chicago Freight Terminal, are both destroyed, his arts and crafts utopian community in Arden, Delaware survive to attest to the vigor of his ideas and the leadership he exerted.?
Price left a legacy of exquisite houses, railway stations, and commercial structures stretching from Atlantic City to Chicago and from Canada to Florida taht were widely emulated and reacall the best works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Greene &amp; Greene. In addition, Price was accomplished writer and furniture designer whose work was regularly featured in Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman.?
Price's role in shaping American architecture in uncovered in this lavishingly illustrated volume, which documents the architects complete works—including over 350 hotels, houses, and pieces of furniture—bringing to light this unknown American master.

William L. Price, Arts and Crafts to Modern Design

Comics & Graphic Novels

How To Create Comics & Manga

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