Frank Furness The Complete Works

This encyclopedic book is the first complete monograph of Furness's work. More than 670 projects are presented through 700 photographs and drawings.

A sweeping assessment of the entire career of Frank Furness that features more than one hundred illustrations, George E. Thomas's book argues that modern American architecture, in design and genealogy, is rooted in the industrial culture of Philadelphia and the office of Frank Furness.

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' energy, confidence, brashness, vulgarity, and full-throated love of life vibrate in his architecture.

Evolving Transcendentalism in Literature and Architecture: Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrates how American architects read literature and transformed abstract philosophy and literary form into physical substance. Furness, Sullivan, and Wright were inspired by such Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and attempted to embody the concepts of nature, American identity, and Universalism in their architecture. Notably, this book is the first attempt to concentrate on analyzing these architects’ works from the perspective of Transcendentalism. This is also the first time that reproductions of Wright’s copy of Leaves of Grass and several tape records of Wright’s Sunday morning talks, both held in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive, have been published. Importantly, these Transcendentalist architects’ philosophy has been influential in the development of contemporary environmental architects all over the world, including Paolo Soleri (an Italian-American) and Glenn Murcutt (an Australian), both of whom are discussed in the final chapter of this book.

"Price, a disciple of Frank Furness who practiced in Philadelphia from 1883 to 1916, established the character of two of the nation's greatest resorts, Atlantic City and Miami, thus shaping the architecture of the Roaring Twenties.

Louis Henry Sullivan traces his life and oeuvre. It addresses his most famous buildings - including the Auditorium Building in Chicago, the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, and the National Farmers Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota - and reveals many of his lesser-known projects to be underappreciated masterpieces. For the first time, Sullivan's work, which has often been misappropriated, is explored in its historical and theoretical context.

After the ferocious fighting at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in June 1864, Union Lt. Gen.øUlysses S. Grant ordered his cavalry, commanded by Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, to distract the Confederate forces opposing the Army of the Potomac. Glory Enough for All chronicles the battle that resulted when Confederate cavalry pursued and caught their Federal foes at Trevilian Station, Virginia, perhaps the only truly decisive cavalry battle of the American Civil War. ø Eric J. Wittenberg tells the stories of the men who fought there, including eight Medal of Honor winners and one Confederate whose death at Trevilian Station made him the third of three brothers to die in the service of Company A of the Fourth Virginia Cavalry. He also addresses the little-known but critical cavalry battle at Samaria (Saint Mary's) Church on June 24, 1864, where Union Brig. Gen. David N. Gregg's division was nearly destroyed. ø The only modern strategic analysis of the battle, Glory Enough for All challenges prevailing interpretations of General Sheridan and of the Union cavalry. Wittenberg shows that the outcome of Trevilian Station ultimately prolonged Grant's efforts to end the Civil War.