Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind.(Review)

The eminent Victorian Frank Furness (1839-1912) was the first great American architect after Thomas Jefferson and the first to design buildings that could, in any sense, be called original. Jefferson's Greek Revival buildings were academically correct, but Furness rejected eclecticism's almost obligatory requirement that historic form and ornament be copied and adapted literally. His best buildings are a synthesis of classical and Gothic architecture, with decorative elements adapted from many sources, and have little in common with the historically precise buildings of American Gothic Revivalists like Richard Upjohn, James Renwick, or Andrew Jackson Downing.

Furness's work was adapted to the challenges of the newly industrialized life of his time. He learned much from the writings and drawings of the French architect, scholar, and restorer Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), best-known for his restorations of Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Viollet-le-Duc presented Gothic construction as a rational system fully applicable to the new technology; his concepts guided Furness's own engineering advances and techniques. What most distinguished Furness's work from that of his contemporaries, however, was the boldness with which he distorted forms and mixed historical sources in ways that invested his buildings with personal emotion and conflict.

Furness's career lasted twenty-six years, but toward the end his commissions were fewer and not so important because Victorian Gothic architecture had gone out of style, replaced by the McKim, Mead & White version of classicism. Critical neglect lasted long after his death. When the architectural historians referred to Furness at all it was to note that in 1873 he had hired the sixteen-year-old Louis Sullivan, only to soon let him go because of the nationwide financial panic. In The Brown Decades (1935), a study of the arts of America in the last three decades of the nineteenth-century, Lewis Mumford gave Sullivan his due, but summed up Furness in a single sentence as "the designer of a bold, unabashed, ugly, and yet somehow healthily pregnant architecture." Champions of Furness's work began to appear by the 1960s. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), the architect Robert Venturi included two Furness buildings, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the demolished National Bank of the Republic among over two-hundred works of architecture that embody the qualities that the book's title affirms. Vincent Scully in American Architecture and Urbanism (1969) called Furness "a man of the 1870's, the strongest and bravest."

Michael J. Lewis in his brilliantly conceived and uncommonly well-written Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind(1) is the first architectural historian to bring meticulous research and broad cultural and psychological interpretation to the life of Furness. By weaving the history of the country itself into the life of the man and the making of buildings, he has created an absorbing portrait of the American Victorian world. Throughout his book, he tells how one after another of Furness's buildings came to be. He unsparingly reveals Furness's relentless, and sometimes ruthless, political and social maneuvering to get work and his dumping of two successive partners when they impeded his progress. He was as tough as his clients--the banking executives, railroad moguls, and industrialists who more often than not gave him his way.

Lewis suggests that Furness's mind was not only tough but also violent, and offers more than the troubled genius's brooding, conflicted, and domineering architecture as evidence. He reveals the teenage Frank as

 
   surly and truculent ... [traits that hinted] at more persistent and 
   pernicious discontents. Whether these signs are labeled as raving and 
   melancholy, in the words of his generation, or mania and depression in the 
   words of ours, virtually all intimate accounts of Frank draw attention to 
   the ferocity of his temper and to his self-destructive nature. 

From his youth to the age of forty, Furness suffered periodic bouts of mental illness involving loss of appetite, nervousness, and excessive agitation. By age fifty these problems were chronic. Ill or comparatively well, he also possessed an ungovernable temper that expressed an immense ego.