Nationality American Education Harvard College Role Architect | Name Henry Brunt Occupation Architect | |
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Born September 5, 1832 Boston, Massachusetts Buildings Memorial Hall (Harvard University)
Electricity Building, World's Columbian Exposition Died April 8, 1903, Milton, Massachusetts, United States Structures Memorial Hall, Cambridge Public Library, University of Kansas Spooner, St Stephen's Memorial | ||
Henry Van Brunt FAIA (September 5, 1832 – April 8, 1903) was a 19th-century American architect and architectural writer.
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Life and work
Born in Boston in 1832, Van Brunt attended Boston Latin School, and graduated from Harvard College in 1854. From 1854 to 1857, he apprenticed with architect George Snell, then worked with Richard Morris Hunt, in New York City.
During the Civil War, Van Brunt served as Secretary to the Admiral of the North Atlantic Squadron, United States Navy. He resigned on February 15, 1864.
In the 1860s Van Brunt and fellow Harvard graduate William Robert Ware established the architectural firm of Ware & Van Brunt. The firm produced designs for many buildings in the Boston area, including Harvard University's Memorial Hall, "said to be one of the greatest examples of Ruskinian Gothic architecture outside of England".
In 1869, he married Alice S. Osborn; together they had 6 children. In 1874 Van Brunt published a translation of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's Discourses on architecture, and he remained a prolific writer through his career.
His partnership with Ware dissolved in 1881. The same year, Van Brunt and former employee Frank M. Howe established the firm of Van Brunt & Howe, and about six years after took the dramatic step of moving his office from Boston to Kansas City, partly for multiple commissions for the Union Pacific Railroad for grand stations in western cities like Ogden, Utah (1889; burned down 1923), Denver, Colorado (1895; rebuilt 1912), and Omaha, Nebraska (1899; replaced 1931). Many Kansas City civic landmarks of the time were Van Brunt's designs. Stylistically, most of his later work is comfortably consistent with Richardsonian Romanesque; in at least one case, the Hoyt Library, he adapted and finished a rejected Richardson design.
In 1884 he was elected an officer of the American Institute of Architects. In 1899 he became President of the AIA for a one-year term.
Van Brunt returned to Massachusetts around 1902, and died in Milton, Massachusetts in 1903. His head stone in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, MA gives his date of death as April 7, 1903.