Frank Furness: The Medal of Honor Winner Who Made Buildings Out of His Head
Louis Sullivan, who would go on to mentor Frank Lloyd Wright and coin the phrase "form follows function," spent five months in 1873 as a young draftsman in Frank Furness's Philadelphia office. He never forgot it. He described his boss as a man whose "face was snarled and homely as an English bulldog's," framed by a magnificent red beard, and credited him with shaping his own architectural imagination more than MIT or the École des Beaux-Arts ever had. Furness, by his own account, designed buildings without relying on historical precedent at all — he "made buildings out of his head." Nine years before Sullivan arrived in his office, Furness had won the Medal of Honor for carrying a box of ammunition across open ground under Confederate fire. Both facts describe the same temperament.
A Minister's Son Who Skipped College
Frank Heyling Furness was born November 12, 1839, in Philadelphia, the son of the prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness; his brother Horace Howard Furness became America's leading Shakespeare scholar. Unlike most architects of his class and era, Furness never attended university and never made the customary European study tour. He began architectural training in the 1850s under John Fraser in Philadelphia, then studied from 1859 to 1861, and again after the war in 1865, in the New York atelier of Richard Morris Hunt — an office modeled on the École des Beaux-Arts, and steeped in the ideas of the French structural theorist Viollet-le-Duc and the British critic John Ruskin. Furness considered Hunt his true mentor.
The Medal of Honor
The Civil War interrupted his training entirely. Furness served as captain of Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry — known as Rush's Lancers — from 1861 to 1864. At the Battle of Trevilian Station on June 12, 1864, with an outpost's ammunition nearly exhausted, he carried a box of ammunition across open ground swept by enemy fire to resupply it, an act of "extraordinary heroism" for which he received the Medal of Honor. A quarter-century later he designed his own regiment's monument at Gettysburg — a granite block ringed by bronze lances frozen in the moment just before a cavalry charge.
Building a Career and Breaking Partnerships
Furness's first solo commission was the Germantown Unitarian Church in 1866-67, since demolished. He partnered briefly with his old teacher Fraser and George Hewitt starting in 1867; that arrangement dissolved within five years, and Furness and Hewitt formed a new partnership in 1871, immediately winning the competition to design the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Furness split from Hewitt in 1876 — Hewitt and his brother then became Furness's chief competitors — and reorganized his own firm around loyal, long-serving draftsmen, promoting Allen Evans to partner in 1881 and four more employees in 1886. The firm, continuing as Furness, Evans & Company, survived him by two decades.
An Architecture of Industry
Over a 45-year career Furness designed more than 600 buildings and became one of the highest-paid architects of his era. His clients were disproportionately Philadelphia's engineers, industrialists, and railroads: he served as chief architect for the Reading Railroad, designing roughly 130 stations and industrial buildings, produced more than twenty structures for the Pennsylvania Railroad including the monumental Broad Street Station, and built forty stations for the Baltimore and Ohio. That industrial clientele shaped his architectural language directly — he combined stone, iron, glass, terra cotta, and brick in forceful, deliberately jarring juxtapositions rather than smoothing them into a single historical style, an approach the critic Lewis Mumford later summed up as "bold, unabashed, ugly, and yet somehow healthily pregnant architecture." His banking commissions carried the logic furthest: the Provident Life & Trust Company building of 1879, widely regarded as his masterpiece among banks, and the National Bank of the Republic contained what critics called "violent pressures within a rigid frame," walls of rectangles, squares, lunettes, and diagonals fighting for the same surface. He extended that same sensibility into custom furniture, working with Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst on interiors now held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, and London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Decline and Rediscovery
By the end of Furness's life his ornate, deliberately unresolved style had gone out of fashion, and twentieth-century urban renewal demolished many of his major buildings, including Broad Street Station. His reputation might have stayed buried had two University of Pennsylvania professors, Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi, not spent years walking past his surviving Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and his University of Pennsylvania Library, now the Fisher Fine Arts Library. Venturi's landmark 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture explicitly drew on Furness's willingness to let a building be visually unresolved and contradictory rather than harmonized into a single clean idea. A 1973 Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective began the scholarly reassessment in earnest.
Why Frank Is Called a Genius
Furness's case for genius rests on craft and material judgment rather than formal theory — the ability to look at iron, terra cotta, and stone as inherently expressive materials rather than as substitutes for classical ornament, and to combine them in compositions that read as deliberately unresolved rather than merely undisciplined. He arrived at this without a university education or the European tour that credentialed his peers, working the idea out instead across six hundred actual commissions for railroads, banks, and institutions whose industrial character he treated as a subject rather than an embarrassment. That Louis Sullivan, one of the most consequential architectural minds of the following generation, singled out five months in Furness's office as more formative than his formal schooling is a strong external marker that something unusual was being transmitted there — an architectural intelligence that worked through built example rather than doctrine.
The honest counter-case is that Furness left no manifesto and no coherent theoretical program the way Sullivan or Louis Kahn later did; Mumford's own praise concedes the buildings could be "ugly," and Furness's reputation collapsed so completely after his death that dozens of his major works were torn down before anyone thought to argue they mattered. His genius was recognized only in retrospect, largely because it lived in the specific handling of material and form on individual buildings rather than in a transferable idea — precisely the kind of intelligence that is hardest to defend against changing taste, and easiest to lose to the wrecking ball.
Legacy
Furness died June 27, 1912, at 72, at his summer house in Media, Pennsylvania, and was buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. The 2012 centenary of his death brought exhibitions across the city's cultural institutions and a state historical marker at his boyhood home. The Philadelphia AIA chapter has credited him with "architecture of imagination, decisive self-reliance, courage, and often great beauty" — a description that could double as an epitaph for the ammunition run at Trevilian Station.
Achievements
- Medal of Honor
