{"id":3113,"date":"2012-09-18T07:01:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T11:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=3113"},"modified":"2015-03-29T18:15:21","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T22:15:21","slug":"why-we-love-frank-furness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2012\/09\/why-we-love-frank-furness\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Love Frank Furness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Chestnut Street from Third, looking West, with Frank Furness’ National Bank of the Republic (right) and Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company (left). Both are demolished.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We didn\u2019t always. Love Frank Furness, that is.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe man came out of the [Civil War] a swearing, swaggering, bewhiskered figure of martial bearing, a bulldog personality ready to challenge the architectural status quo,\u201d James O\u2019Gorman tells us in a review<\/a> of Michael Lewis’ book, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind<\/em><\/a>. \u201cHe organized his office like a military unit. Having waged war, Furness would now \u2018wage architecture,\u2019 charging headlong at building programs, competitors, and critics alike. The impact of his war experiences coursed through his professional life.”<\/p>\n

“But there was more to his work than militaristic fury,\u201d O’Gorman assures us. For those same late-19th century decades when technology, industry and railroading dominated Philadelphia on its own terms, Furness\u2019 work connected truth and beauty. His buildings, according to George Thomas<\/a>, had \u201cthe raw impact of giant machines, even as they transcended their materials.\u201d All of his buildings, certainly his railroad stations, but also his libraries and schools, operated as grand mechanical-aesthetical projects. Furness\u2019 library at the University of Pennsylvania, Lewis tells us, \u201chas been called a collision between a cathedral and a railroad station;” his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts<\/a> “a laboratory for experimenting with new technology” with machine-like balusters<\/a>\u00a0working their eccentric charms.<\/p>\n

We are reminded that Furness’ clients were engineers in a world newly-refashioned by their innovations, folk who relished \u201cvisible iron trusses or riveted iron girders, the industrial repertoire.\u201d Furness gave them that, and more. He considered the interlocking elements of his buildings “legible pieces of machinery” and he moved them, as Lewis\u00a0put it, “from the train shed to the lobby and the salon.” But these buildings didn\u2019t feel<\/em> like machines. Exuberant expression was the heart and soul of Furness. As the 17-year old Louis Sullivan, a \u201cfather of modernism” put it after his first encounter with a Furness building: \u201cHere was something fresh and fair\u2026a human note, as though someone were talking.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Furness\u2019 individualistic work, his \u201coverscaled and willfully distorted details,\u201d his \u201cclashing colors,\u201d his decorative \u201cwry comments on mechanical details, exposed industrial materials, muscular massing, top-heavy loading, dizzying compositional juxtapositions” soon became too much\u00a0exuberance\u00a0for an age of rising restraint. Furness not only grew out of style<\/em>, he grew to be despised\u2014and demolished. \u201cHe\u00a0 was\u00a0 for\u00a0 all practical\u00a0 purposes consigned to\u00a0 the junk\u00a0 heap of history for\u00a0 the\u00a0 first\u00a0 half\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 twentieth century, wrote Ian Quimby<\/a>, because he embodied the worst of Victorian excess in the eyes of modernists.\u201d<\/p>\n

One early 20th-century critic wrote off Furness\u2019s buildings as \u201cthe low-water mark in American architecture.” Another damned his work as a corrupting influence, citing the Provident Life and Trust Building<\/a> for “meretricious ugliness.” Robert Venturi remembered \u201cloving to hate those squat columns as my father drove me past the Provident Life and Trust Company on Chestnut Street in the thirties\u201d\u2013not long before its demise. No matter that this building and the nearby National Bank of the Republic<\/a> were two of Philadelphia\u2019s most interesting, most compelling structures. Public opinion had swung against \u201cstrident individualism\u201d and the kind of \u201cdirectness of expression\u201d that would later come to define the best architecture of the late 20th century. No matter, as Lewis put it, that Furness \u201caspired to truth as much as beauty.\u201d \u00a0No matter that Venturi and others would soon find Furness\u2019 forms \u201ctense with a feeling of life and reality\u201d and develop an “absolute unrestrained adoration and respect for this work.” In mid-20th century Philadelphia, the days of buildings audacious enough to “echo mannerism and predict postmodernism”\u2014buildings that fit “somewhere between Michelangelo and Michael Graves”\u2014were numbered.<\/p>\n

But the days when Furness\u2019 ideas and the memory of his masterpieces, both extinguished and extant, mean something<\/em>\u00a0are not<\/em> numbered\u2014nor will they ever be again. We now know what Furness achieved. Like Walt Whitman, “he turned the process around.” Writes Lewis: he “looked for the poetry in the vital forces of the modern age, and sought the flower in the machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

A century later, Philadelphians find confidence in the truth and a healthy appetite for such poetry. Today we celebrate<\/a> the genius of Frank Furness.<\/p>\n

\n
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We didn\u2019t always. Love Frank Furness, that is. \u201cThe man came out of the [Civil War] a swearing, swaggering, bewhiskered figure of martial bearing, a bulldog personality ready to challenge the architectural status quo,\u201d James O\u2019Gorman tells us in a review of Michael Lewis’ book, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind. \u201cHe organized his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}