page_title: Robert Seyfarth
section_title: The Chicago Architectural Club
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Seyfarth / Education and career / The Chicago Architectural Club
caption_attribution_description: English: an image from the catalog of the 16th annual exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club showing the entry for Robert Seyfarth, architect.
context_page_description: Robert Seyfarth was an American architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He spent the formative years of his professional career working for the noted Prairie School architect George Washington Maher. A member of the influential Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth was a product of the Chicago School of Architecture.
context_section_description: The education of an architect in the early years of the 20th century was quite different from what it is today, and the ambitious prospective architect could take many avenues to acquire it. In April 1905, for example, Seyfarth attended his first meeting as a member of the Chicago Architectural Club, which had been founded in 1885 as the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club by James H. Carpenter, a prominent Chicago draftsman, with the support of the magazine Inland Architect, whose first issue had been published in February 1883.  The club was formed in Chicago during a period when architecture there was in its ascendancy - after the Great Fire of 1871 a large population of some of the country's best architectural talent had come to rebuild a modern city using the most advanced and progressive techniques of the day.  Even so, the community was taxed trying to perform all of the work that was necessary to keep up with the task. Chicago was developing at a rate that astounded anyone who was paying attention to its growth, such that "one unfamiliar with the city would find ... fresh subject for astonishment, daily, in [its] ever-changing and ever-extending boundary lines." As the Chicago architect John Wellborn Root recalled years later: 
  "The conditions attending the development of architecture in the West have been, in almost every respect, without precedent. At no time in the history of the world has a community covering such vast and yet homogeneous territory developed with such amazing rapidity, and under conditions of civilization so far advanced. Few times in history have ever presented so impressive a sight as this resistless wave of progress, its farthermost verge crushing down primeval obstacles in nature and desperate resistance from the inhabitants; its deeper and calmer waters teeming with life and full of promise more significant than has ever yet been known."
  The club was an effort to help develop the talents of the city's many draftsmen so that they could become qualified architects themselves, at a time when a formal education for architects was generally unavailable and not required.  (The first architectural school in the United States was founded by architect William Robert Ware at MIT in 1868 with nine students, and even by 1896, the year after Seyfarth's graduation, there were only nine schools in the country with a combined student body of 273.)  Seyfarth joined during the time he worked for Maher, who over the years was an active member of the club as a speaker, writer, exhibitor and judge in its annual competitions.  Seyfarth is known to have entered his work at two of these exhibitions  - the first time in 1903 (before he became a member), when his submission was listed as a "Library", and again in 1905, where the subject of the entry was his own house in Blue Island. The preface to the catalogue of the 1905 exhibition was devoted to what the noted architect Elmer Grey (1872–1963) called "Inventive and Indigeonous Architecture", a phrase which perfectly reflected Seyfarth's design for this particular house and may have been one of the reasons why images of it were included.
  Because of his association with the Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth would have ample opportunity to become acquainted with the major players of Chicago's progressive architectural community, a large number of whom were active members. These were relationships that Maher would doubtless have encouraged. Notables among the list included Charles B. Atwood, Daniel Burnham, Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Howard Van Doren Shaw, William Le Baron Jenney and Frank Lloyd Wright. 
  
  The club's headquarters for many years was located in the former mansion of the piano manufacturer William W. Kimball at 1801 Prairie Ave. in Chicago.  It ceased to operate as an active organization in 1940 and was dissolved in 1967, but exists again today after it was re-formed in 1979.
caption: Page 12 from the catalog of the Sixteenth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club (1903), showing Seyfarth's entry for a "Library". Seyfarth would later become a member of The Illinois Society of Architects, who by 1918 and thru 1928[34] would sponsor the exhibition in conjunction with The Chicago Architectural Club and The Illinois Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, with the cooperation of the Art Institute of Chicago.[35]
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