page_title: Robert Seyfarth
section_title: Marketing
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Seyfarth / Marketing
caption_attribution_description: English: An advertisement of the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau (defunct)showing the Alexander Stewart house in Highland Park, Il. designed by Robert Seyfarth
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: During his career, Seyfarth's work appeared in magazines and journals and in the advertisements of various architectural supply firms. The extent to which this was done is not entirely known, but articles by Eleanor Jewett (1892–1968), art critic for the Chicago Tribune ("Cape Cod Architecture seen in B.L.T.'s Home" discussing the Taylor house at 92 Dell Place in Glencoe, Illinois) and Herbert Croly of the Architectural Record ("The Local Feeling in Western Country Houses", October, 1914, which discusses the Kozminski and McBride houses in Highland Park at 521 Sheridan Road and 2130 Linden, respectively) survive to give us some idea of how Seyfarth's work was received during the time he was practicing. (Croly would later go on to become the founding editor of The New Republic magazine.) Additionally, photographs of houses he designed appeared in The Western Architect magazine a number of times in the 1920s. Also surviving are copies of advertisements from the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau (see image, right), the California Redwood Association (again with the McBride House), the Pacific Lumber Company (featuring the Churchill house in Highland Park at 1375 Sheridan Road), The Creo-Dipt Company (see image, left), the White Pine Bureau, the American Face Brick Association and the Stewart Iron Works Company of Cincinnati (with a picture of the H. C. Dickinson house at 7150 S. Yale in Chicago). In 1908, his Prairie-style house for Dickinson was published in House Beautiful magazine. In 1918, the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau released a 32 page portfolio featuring houses built from Seyfarth's designs.  Included were photographs, floor plans, bills of material, an estimate of the costs, and a brief description of important features. Entitled The Home You Longed For, the booklet was announced in Building Age Magazine under the heading "New Catalogs of Interest to the Trade". Although generally unavailable today, it must have enjoyed a wide circulation in its time.  It was acquired the following year for the collection of the Carnegie library of Pittsburgh, and referred to that same year in an illustrated article that appeared in Printers' Ink Monthly  entitled "The Loose-Leaf Portfolio - an Aid to Reader Interest", where it was described as "...a very attractive loose-leaf portfolio" and as a successful example of its type of publication. 
  The last known example of Seyfarth's work to be published during his lifetime appeared in the September, 1948 edition of Good Housekeeping magazine.  The "Little Classic" was an expandable ranch that the magazine had commissioned which it noted featured "...a cornice [that] is pure sculpture - no jackscrews of mingled mouldings [to] confuse its clean profile."  The illustrated article also pointed out that "...the porch at the head of the garden is reached through paired French doors from both the living and dining rooms." - even in this late example of Seyfarth's work the abstracted design and covered exterior living space continued to be important elements of the composition.
  With a long history of having his work published, Seyfarth was following the example of George Washington Maher, who was widely published during his career. Articles by Maher and about him appeared regularly in publications that included Western Architect, Inland Architect, Architectural Record and Arts and Decoration.
caption: Although un-attributed in this ad for the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau, this is the Alexander Stewart in Highland Park, IL, which Seyfarth designed in 1913 (see gallery picture 10 below).
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