Shelf Life - Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind - Review

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by Michael Potemra

Frank Furness (1839-1912) might be called the grandfather of modern American architecture: He taught Louis Sullivan, who in turn taught Frank Lloyd Wright. In Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (Norton, 273 pp., $45), Michael J. Lewis has written a biography of this irascible character he calls "the architect of the most original buildings in Victorian America." Furness's buildings were dismissed as "grotesque and vulgar" in his time, and Lewis-an art historian and contributor to Commentary and The New Criterion-admits that the charge is just; but the buidings exhibit a boldness that still merits attention.

In his design for the University of Pennsylvania library (1888-90), he based the main reading room on the Gothic choir; the result, Lewis says, "has been called a collision between a cathedral and a train station-and this is not far off the mark." Lewis describes Furness's work as a poignant attempt to combine the Romantics' respect for the past with a sincere love of the Machine Age; this handsome volume is an important contribution to the history of American art.