George Howe (architect)

Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (1930-32), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Howe & Lescaze, architects.

George Howe (1886–1955) was an American architect and educator, and an early convert to the International style. With William Lescaze, he designed Philadelphia's PSFS Building (1930–32).

Biography

He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1886 to James and Helen Howe. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Harvard in 1908, and graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1912. He worked for the Philadelphia firm of Furness, Evans & Co. from 1913 to 1916, and then joined the partnership of Walter Mellor & Arthur I. Meigs. He served in the military from 1917 to 1919, during World War I. Mellor, Meigs & Howe's commissions were mostly residential and minor commercial buildings, with Bryn Mawr College's Goodhart Hall (1926–29), a Neo-Gothic auditorium, being their largest commission of the 1920s.

He left in 1928, and in 1929 formed a partnership with William Lescaze, a younger Swiss architect who had studied at ETH Zurich, and had first hand knowledge of the European avant-garde. Their collaboration yielded the landmark PSFS Building in Philadelphia, one of the first International style skyscrapers built in the United States.

After leaving Howe & Lescaze in 1932, Howe designed several private residences in the Philadelphia area. Throughout the late 1930s, Howe collaborated with Louis Kahn at the Philadelphia Housing Authority; and again in 1940, along with Oscar Stonorov, on the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.

Howe was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1947 to 1949 and Chair of the Architectural Department at Yale from 1950 to 1954.

See also

• Glenays

Further reading

• http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/25206

References

• Curtis, William (1987). Modern Architecture Since 1900 (2nd Ed. ed.). Prentice-Hall. pp. 157–158. ISBN 013586694. 
• http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Howe_and_Lescaze.html
• http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/25206
• http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/21829
• http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/21630