Frank Furness Frank Heyling Furness ( November 12 , 1839 - June 27 , 1912 ) was an American architect of the Victorian era . He designed more than 600 buildings , most in the Philadelphia area , and is remembered for his eclectic , muscular , often idiosyncratically scaled buildings , and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan . Furness was also a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during the Civil War . Toward the end of his life , his bold style fell out of fashion , and many of his significant works were demolished in the 20th century . Among his most important surviving buildings are the University of Pennsylvania Library ( now the Fisher Fine Arts Library ) , the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts , and the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia , all in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . Biography . Furness was born in Philadelphia on November 12 , 1839 . His father , William Henry Furness , was a prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist , and his brother , Horace Howard Furness , became America ' s outstanding Shakespeare scholar . Frank , however , did not attend a university and apparently did not travel to Europe . He began his architectural training in the office of John Fraser , Philadelphia , in the 1850s . He attended the École des Beaux - Arts - inspired atelier of Richard Morris Hunt in New York from 1859 to 1861 , and again in 1865 , following his military service . Furness considered himself Hunt ' s apprentice and was influenced by Hunt ' s dynamic personality and accomplished , elegant buildings . He was also influenced by the architectural concepts of the French engineer Viollet - le - Duc and the British critic John Ruskin . Furness ' s first commission , Germantown Unitarian Church ( 1866 – 67 , demolished ca . 1928 ) , was a solo effort , but in 1867 , he formed a partnership with Fraser , his former teacher , and George Hewitt , who had worked in the office of John Notman . The trio lasted less than five years , and its major commissions were Rodef Shalom Synagogue ( 1868 – 69 , demolished ) and the Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion ( 1870 – 75 , demolished ) . Following Fraser ' s move to Washington , D . C . , to become supervising architect for the U . S . Treasury Department , the two younger men formed a partnership in 1871 , and soon won the design competition for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts ( 1871 – 76 ) . Louis Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman for Furness & Hewitt ( June - November 1873 ) , and his later use of organic decorative motifs can be traced , at least in part , to Furness . By the beginning of 1876 , Furness had broken with Hewitt , and the firm carried only his name . Hewitt and his brother William formed their own firm , G . W . & W . D . Hewitt , and became Furness ' s biggest competitor . In 1881 , Furness promoted his chief draftsman , Allen Evans , to partner ( Furness & Evans ) , and , in 1886 , did the same for four other long - time employees . The firm continued under the name Furness , Evans & Company as late as 1932 , two decades after its founder ' s death . Over his 45 - year career , Furness designed more than 600 buildings , including banks , office buildings , churches , and synagogues . As chief architect of the Reading Railroad , he designed about 130 stations and industrial buildings . For the Pennsylvania Railroad , he designed the great Broad Street Station ( demolished 1953 ) at Broad and Market Streets in Philadelphia , and , for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad , the ingenious 24th Street Station ( demolished 1963 ) alongside the Chestnut Street Bridge . He was one of the most highly paid architects of his era , and a founder of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects . His residential buildings included numerous mansions in Philadelphia and its suburbs ( especially the Main Line ) , as well as commissioned houses at the New Jersey seashore , Newport , Rhode Island , Bar Harbor , Maine , Washington , D . C . , New York state , and Chicago , Illinois . Furness broke from dogmatic adherence to European trends , and juxtaposed styles and elements in a forceful manner . His strong architectural will is seen in the unorthodox way he combined materials : stone , iron , glass , terra cotta , and brick . And his straightforward use of these materials , often in innovative or technologically - advanced ways , reflected Philadelphia ' s industrial - realist culture of the post – Civil War period . Furness married Fanny Fassit in 1866 , and they had four children : Radclyffe , Theodore , James , and Annis Lee . He died on June 27 , 1912 , at " Idlewild , " his summer house outside Media , and is buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia . Military service . During the Civil War , Furness served as Captain and commander of Company F , 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry ( " Rush ' s Lancers " ) . He received the Medal of Honor for his gallantry at the Battle of Trevilian Station . Medal of Honor citation . Rank and organization : Captain , Company F , 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry . Place and date : At Trevilian Station , Virginia , June 12 , 1864 . Entered service at : Philadelphia , Pa . Birth : - - - - - - . Date of issue : October 20 , 1899 . Citation : " Voluntarily carried a box of ammunition across an open space swept by the enemy ' s fire to the relief of an outpost whose ammunition had become almost exhausted , but which was thus enabled to hold its important position . " Gettysburg monument . Twenty - five years after fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg , he designed the monument to his regiment on South Cavalry Field : " " In design it is a simple granite block , as massive as a dolmen , but surrounded by a corona of bronze lances that are models of the original lances . . . . " [ T ] " hey are depicted in a resting position , as if waiting to be seized at any instant and brought into battle . The sense of suspended action before the moment of the battle is all the more potent because it is rendered in stone and metal , making it perpetual . Of the hundreds of monuments at Gettysburg , Furness ' s is among the most haunting . " " Rediscovery . Following decades of neglect , during which many of Furness ' s most important buildings were demolished , there was a revival of interest in his work in the mid - 20th century . The critic Lewis Mumford , tracing the creative forces that had influenced Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright , wrote in " The Brown Decades " ( 1931 ) : " Frank Furness was the designer of a bold , unabashed , ugly , and yet somehow healthily pregnant architecture . " The architectural historian Henry - Russell Hitchcock , in his comprehensive survey " Architecture : Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries " ( revised 1963 ) , saw beauty in that ugliness : " [ O ] " f the highest quality , is the intensely personal work of Frank Furness ( 1839 - 1912 ) in Philadelphia . His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Broad Street was erected in 1872 - 76 in preparation for the Centennial Exposition . The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigor in the detailing that would be notable anywhere , and the galleries are top - lit with exceptional efficiency . Still more original and impressive were his banks , even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period . The most extraordinary of these , and Furness ' s masterpiece , was the Provident Institution in Walnut " [ sic " Chestnut " ] " Street , built as late as 1879 . This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago , but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation . " " No small part of Furness ' s historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis Sullivan picked this office - then known as Furness & Hewitt - to work in for a short period after he left Ware ' s School in Boston . As Sullivan ' s " Autobiography of an Idea " testifies , the vitality and originality of Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , or later at the Ecole des Beaux - Arts in Paris . " " Architect and critic Robert Venturi in " Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture " ( 1966 ) wrote , not unadmiringly , of the National Bank of the Republic ( later the Philadelphia Clearing House ) : " " The city street facade can provide a type of juxtaposed contradiction that is essentially two - dimensional . Frank Furness ' Clearing House , now demolished like many of his best works in Philadelphia , contained an array of violent pressures within a rigid frame . The half - segmental arch , blocked by the submerged tower which , in turn , bisects the facade into a near duality , and the violent adjacencies of rectangles , squares , lunettes , and diagonals of contrasting sizes , compose a building seemingly held up by the buildings next door : it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street . " " On the occasion of its centennial in 1969 , the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects memorialized Furness as its great architect of the past : " " For designing original and bold buildings free of the prevalent Victorian academicism and imitation , buildings of such vigor that the flood of classical traditionalism could not overwhelm them , or him , or his clients . . . " " For shaping iron and concrete with a sensitive understanding of their particular characteristics that was unique for his time . . . " " For his significance as innovator - architect along with his contemporaries John Root , Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright . . . " " For his masterworks , the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts , the Provident Trust Company , the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station , and the University of Pennsylvania Library ( now renamed the Furness Building ) . . . " " For his outstanding abilities as draftsman , teacher and inventor . . . " " For being a founder of the Philadelphia Chapter and of the John Stewardson Memorial Scholarship in Architecture . . . " " And above all , for creating architecture of imagination , decisive self - reliance , courage , and often great beauty , an architecture which to our eyes and spirits still expresses the unusual personal character , spirit and courage for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on a Civil War battlefield . " " Legacy . Furness designed custom interiors and furniture in collaboration with Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst . Examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Philadelphia Museum of Art , and the High Museum in Atlanta , Georgia . Mark - Lee Kirk ' s set designs for the 1942 Orson Welles film " The Magnificent Ambersons " seem to be based on Furness ' s ornate Neo - Grec interiors of the 1870s . A fictional desk designed by Furness is featured in the John Bellairs novel " The Mansion in the Mist " . Furness ' s independence and modernist Victorian - Gothic style inspired 20th - century architects Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi . Living in Philadelphia and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania , they often visited Furness ' s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — built for the 1876 Centennial — and his University of Pennsylvania Library . In 1973 , the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted the first retrospective of Furness ' s work , curated by James F . O ' Gorman , George E . Thomas and Hyman Myers . Thomas , Jeffrey A . Cohen and Michael J . Lewis authored " Frank Furness : The Complete Works " ( 1991 , revised 1996 ) , with an introduction by Robert Venturi . Lewis wrote the first biography : " Frank Furness : Architecture and the Violent Mind " ( 2001 ) . The 2012 centennary of Furness ' s death was observed with exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts , the University of Pennsylvania , Drexel University , the Library Company of Philadelphia , the Athenaeum of Philadelphia , the Delaware Historical Society , the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia , and elsewhere . On September 14 , a Pennsylvania state historical marker was dedicated in front of Furness ' s boyhood home at 1426 Pine Street , Philadelphia ( now Peirce College Alumni Hall ) . Opposite the marker is Furness ' s 1874 - 75 dormitory addition to the Pennsylvania Institute for the Deaf and Dumb , now the Furness Residence Hall of the University of the Arts . Selected architectural works . Three adjacent buildings in Wilmington , Delaware . Reputed to be the largest grouping of Furness - designed railroad buildings .