page_title: Robert Seyfarth
section_title: Salient features
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Seyfarth / Salient features
caption_attribution_description: English: Diagram showing the difference between the amount of sunlight admitted by a conventional dormer and an inverted dormer
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: Although considered a revivalist architect, Seyfarth's designs were not pedantic copies of existing work or even typical examples of the revival architecture that was popular at the time.  Despite the fact that his design aesthetic was more traditional than that of his previous employer, Seyfarth had absorbed many of Maher's (and the Prairie School's) ideas and incorporated them into his own architectural philosophy. His buildings provided their owners with architecture that offered the most up-to-date conveniences and floorplans that were considered modern - but that was carefully imbued with the warmth and character of earlier times. From his introduction to The Home You Longed For - 
  "These few old world standards, rightly employed, have become completely molded to fit our present conditions so that ... our modern examples are not imitations, but rather developments of early principals ... With such a rich inheritance handed down to us, why should not all our homes be of this sort, examples of these splendid former types which were fashioned on sound principles beyond reason for change of design and possessing an artistic grace from which future generations may gather lasting inspiration - made to live in and adorned to please - such should be the enduring qualities of the typical American home of today." 
   Here he reiterated the thoughts that the architect and writer John Wellborn Root had expressed in a paper he read to an audience at the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club in 1887 that later appeared in The Inland Architect (February, 1888, pp. 3–5): 
  "Now, in America, we are free of artistic traditions ... A new spirit of beauty is being developed and perfected, and even now its first achievements are beginning to delight us. This is not the old thing made over; it is new. It springs out of the past, but it is not tied to it; it studies the traditions, but it is not enslaved by them. It is doing original work, and it will do more."
   
  Seyfarth's adaptation of "old world standards" to suit modern taste was done in several ways.  First of all, Seyfarth flooded his interiors with natural light. What made this possible in the principal rooms of the first floor were the floor-length windows, which here and elsewhere were frequently wider than what might be acceptable to Palladio, but that were always in proportion to the building of which they were an element. On the upper floors where inverted dormers were used, sunlight is allowed to come directly into the room since the tunnel to the outdoors that is created by the ceiling of a convention dormer and half the area of the cheek walls is virtually eliminated (see image above - the angle of the sunlight as shown here is represented as it would be at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes in Chicago). Elsewhere, bays and banks of windows were frequently included to offer the same benefit.
  
  Another device that was sometimes used quite dramatically by Maher (see image, upper left) that is a signature feature of Seyfarth's work is the embellishment of the front door as the main decorative feature of the house, usually to the exclusion of everything else on the building. This allowed for the buildings' geometry and finish materials to speak for its architectural style, and act as a counterpoint to what was seen, especially then, as the fussiness of the architecture of the previous three quarters of a century. Here he was practicing what Root and Louis Sullivan had preached: 
  "The value of plain surfaces in every building is not to be overestimated. Strive for them, and when the fates 
  place at your disposal a good, generous sweep of masonry, accept it frankly and thank God."
  
  – From a paper read by Root before the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club, January 3, 1887 and later published in Inland Architect.
  and
  "...I take it as self-evident that a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion.  It is not evident to me that ornament can intrinsically heighten these elemental qualities.  Why, then, should we use ornament? 
caption: The diagram above illustrates the difference between the amount of sunlight that penetrates into an interior space when an inverted dormer (top) is used compared to the use of a traditional dormer.
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