George Howe

Howe, George (17 June 1886-17 Apr. 1955), architect, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of James H. Howe, a gentleman from a prestigious and wealthy New England family, and Helen Fisher Bradford of Philadelphia. After James H. Howe's death, Helen Howe took her son to live in France, where he soon became fluent in French, German, and Italian. An encounter with John Stewardson of the venerable Philadelphia firm of Cope & Stewardson confirmed the idea in both mother and son that architecture should be Howe's chosen career path. After a few years in a boarding school in Switzerland, Howe returned with his mother to the United States, where he was soon enrolled in the prestigious Groton School. From Groton Howe went on to Harvard University, receiving his B.A. with an honorable mention in fine arts in 1907 and almost immediately thereafter marrying Marie Jessup Patterson of Philadelphia. (The couple later had two daughters.) Like many young American architectural students, he then journeyed back to Paris, where he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Victor Laloux in 1908.

Graduating in 1912, Howe decided to return to Philadelphia to settle with his mother's family nearby. Almost immediately he entered the office of Furness, Evans & Co., and in 1913 he was offered a partnership in the firm. By 1914 Howe was occupied with the design of his own house, "High Hollow," in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. In 1916, however, Howe decided to change firms, transferring his loyalty to Walter Mellor and Arthur I. Meigs and the firm of Mellor & Meigs. These younger men had already achieved a reputation in what was being called the "Pennsylvania School" with their colonial, Cotswold, and Tudor revival residential designs. Just as Howe was ready to join this firm, however, World War I broke out; and he left the United States to serve in the reserve corps of the Pennsylvania Hospital Medical Unit. He did not return until 1919.

The years following Howe's return to Mellor, Meigs & Howe were ones of considerable industry as the firm's national reputation for tasteful residential design increased. During these boom years the firm was awarded gold medals both locally, from the Philadelphia Chapter of the Architectural Institute of America, and in the New York exhibitions of the Architectural League. Their designs for the Robert McCracken House in Germantown, as well as the larger Newbold Estate property in Laverock, Pennsylvania, received considerable attention from local and national architectural presses. By the mid-1920s the firm was also engaged in the design and construction of Goodhart Hall on the Bryn Mawr College campus. Howe, unfortunately, was not comfortable with the kind of design with which the firm was identified, although his own work for the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society branch offices, really the only commercial work that the firm sustained, also demonstrated considerable reliance upon his Beaux-Arts training. In 1928 Howe resigned from the firm, taking the prestigious and lucrative Philadelphia Savings Fund Society account with him.

In the years that followed Howe characterized the work of Mellor, Meigs & Howe and those of their architectural persuasion as "Wall Street Pastorale," a style that was irrelevant to the modern industrial and commercial world. He actively engaged in the argument then current between so-called modernists and traditionalists regarding the proper styles for modern architecture, and he was a catalyst in the acceptance in the United States of the form of modernism known as the International Style. By 1930 Howe and Swiss architect William Lescaze, with whom he had formed a partnership in 1929, were engaged in creating an office tower for the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, to stand at Twelfth and Market streets in Philadelphia. This building, with its first-floor retail space, second-floor banking offices, and speculative rental tower was at the center of controversy regarding the International Style, a descriptive term coined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in their landmark "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Lacking the traditional styles associated with bank buildings, the popular art deco and the modern classical designs of such Philadelphia architects as Paul P. Cret and John T. Windrim, the PSFS tower was constructed without visible references to past styles and the usual architectural ornament, prompting critic Douglas Haskell to label it "The Filing-Cabinet Building" in his 1932 article in Creative Art. Designs for this building appeared in the T-Square Club's Journal, as did an article by Howe titled "A Further Vague Pursuit of Truth in Architecture" (1 [Feb. 1931]: 13), and in 1931 the rendering and model for the PSFS Building were exhibited at the annual show of the Architectural League in New York. But by 1932, the year the building was completed, Howe & Lescaze had their three submissions, "A Skyscraper for New York," the Arthur Peck residence in Philadelphia, and a residence for William Burlee Curry in England, rejected by the Architectural League Exhibition Committee just at the time that their work was featured in Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's show of modernism at the Museum of Modern Art.

Back in Philadelphia, controversy regarding the PSFS Building did not cease, but Howe continued to prosper. In 1930 he had assumed the role of president of the T-Square Club, and by 1932 he was financially supporting the journal T-Square, now independent of the club but still under the editorial leadership of Max Levinson. In April 1932 the name of the journal would change again, becoming Shelter and actively pursuing the controversial subject of what should be called "modern" in American architecture. In 1935 Howe and William Lescaze formally dissolved their firm.

By 1940 Howe had become involved with the problems of public housing, associating on the design of housing developments with Louis Kahn and Oskar Stonorov, but in 1942 Howe's career took yet another turn. In February of that year he was appointed supervising architect of the Public Buildings Administration. During his years associated with the federal government he was accorded the honor of being made a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, perhaps the first American modernist to achieve this status. Howe, nonetheless, was unhappy in Washington, D.C., and in 1945 he resigned from his post. In his later years he concentrated on education, serving as resident architect at the American Academy in Rome from 1947 until 1950, the year in which he was appointed chair for the Department of Architecture at Yale University. During his tenure at Yale, Howe was instrumental in bringing the services of Louis Kahn to play in the design of Yale's Art Gallery and in inaugurating Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal. After his retirement from Yale in 1954 Howe returned to Philadelphia and to his practice with Robert Montgomery Brown, a younger architect with whom he had been associated since 1939. During the 1950s the designs for the WCAU television station on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia (1952) and for the Evening Bulletin Building at Thirtieth and Market streets (1954-1955) were completed. In his final years in Philadelphia Howe was engaged in the controversial battle for the design of Penn Center, the area around Philadelphia City Hall, a battle that he undertook alongside Edmund Bacon, then chair of the Philadelphia Planning Commission. Equally controversial was his involvement with plans for Independence Mall Historical Park. Voicing the unpopular and eventually unsuccessful view that the nineteenth-century buildings adjacent to the Independence Mall should be saved, in 1955 Howe spoke out against the imposition of a Colonial style on surrounding buildings. His voice was unheeded, and such landmarks as Frank Furness's Guarantee Trust and National Bank of the Republic were lost. When he died in Philadelphia, Howe was still involved in architectural education; he was engaged, along with G. Holmes Perkins, to establish an architectural school under the auspices of UNESCO in Turkey.

As a modern architect, architectural educator, and city planner, George Howe occupied a pivotal role in the acceptance of the International Style in the United States. He was a leader in his profession, lecturing and writing about the changing practice of architecture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, according to biographer Robert A. M. Stern, he was a member of that important group of architects who have become known as the Philadelphia School, a group beginning with Frank Furness and proceeding to Louis I. Kahn and eventually Robert Venturi.

Bibliography

Architectural records for Mellor, Meigs & Howe can be found at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives. Other records documenting the work of George Howe are in the Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University, and at Yale University. PSFS archives are now housed at Hagley-Eleutherian Mills. For a complete biographical treatment of Howe as well as a comprehensive approach to bibliography regarding Howe, the buildings that he designed, and the organizations in which he was a member, see Robert A. M. Stern, George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture (1975). For a more complete list of works to 1930, see S. L. Tatman and Roger W. Moss, Biographical Dictionary of Philadelphia Architects (1985).

Sandra Tatman

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