“Review of Frank Furness: Complete Works, by George Thomas, Michael J. Lewis, and Jeffrey A. Cohen”

AboutReviews George Thomas, Michael J. Lewis, and Jeffrey A. Cohen's catalogue raisonné of Frank Furness's architectural output, situating Furness within a lineage that runs from his teacher Richard Morris Hunt through Furness's own student Louis Sullivan to Sullivan's student Frank Lloyd Wright — a genealogy the reviewer attributes to David Van Zanten's 1978 essay on Second Empire architecture in Philadelphia. Surveys shifting critical assessments of Furness's idiosyncratic, "anticlassical" red-brick buildings, from contemporaries such as Montgomery Schuyler, Talbot Hamlin, and Fiske Kimball, who dismissed his work as ugly and undisciplined, to mid-twentieth-century reappraisals by William Campbell and Vincent Scully that recast Furness as a pioneering figure preparing the ground for Sullivan and Wright. The reviewer credits the volume's catalogue as an indispensable scholarly resource but criticizes its accompanying essays for lacking sustained critical interpretation, arguing that a definitive biography and analytical study of Furness's architecture remains to be written.

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