Frank Furness

Frank Furness (12 November 1839–27 June 1912) took an original course that accelerated the transformation of American architecture from an art rooted in the past to one that responded to the rapidly changing materials, technologies, and circumstances of the Industrial Age. After study in New York in the atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, Furness served as an officer in the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, winning the Medal of Honor in the largest cavalry battle of the Civil War at Trevilian Station, Virginia, in 1864. Furness entered practice when a new generation, arising from the city’s industrial culture, had taken control of Philadelphia’s economy and institutions. Its leaders, many from the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, proposed to hold an international exhibition in Philadelphia, ostensibly to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, but with the larger goal of representing to the nation and the world the extraordinary innovations in modern design initiated in Philadelphia. When the Centennial Exhibition opened in May 1876, Furness had already completed half a dozen banks in the downtown area, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and two religious buildings in the institutional center as well as numerous houses scattered across the elite residential district, a bank, and various pavilions at the fair. Those buildings introduced him to Centennial Exhibition visitors from both the United States and abroad. During more than forty years of practice, Furness and his various offices (Fraser, Furness & Hewitt; Furness & Hewitt, Frank Furness; Furness & Evans; Furness, Evans & Co.) produced designs for nearly 800 projects, the vast majority of which were built. Some 200 were commissioned by the nation’s largest railroads, including the Philadelphia and Reading, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. By the end of the century, Furness found himself largely excluded from the professional narrative as architects working from historical models found his ahistorical work inscrutable. Furness introduced the literature of family friends, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the young architects working in his office, including Louis Sullivan (b. 1856–d. 1924), William L. Price (b. 1861–d. 1916), and George Howe (b. 1886–d. 1955). George Howe, who, like Sullivan and Price, shared the experience of the Furness office, laid out an American genealogy for modern architecture in his essay “What Is This Modern Architecture Trying to Express?” (1930) that included “Wright, Sullivan, and Price.” These architects and their students, from Irving Gill to Louis Kahn, carried on the discipline found in Furness’s architecture into our own time.

Retranslating the Brazilian Imperial Project: O Novo Mundo’s Depictions of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

As the first world’s fair held in the Americas, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia allowed the hemisphere’s nations to stake disparate claims to modernity through unequal displays of natural resources, new technologies, and art. Existing scholarship on the Centennial Exhibition and its importance for Brazil touches only briefly on how representations of Brazil at the fair were communicated to the Brazilian public. This article claims that Brazil’s participation at the fair created translations of the nation for a foreign public that were retranslated for Brazilian readers through O Novo Mundo, a periodical published in New York from 1870 to 1879. By reading O Novo Mundo alongside archival documentation and histories of the Centennial Exhibition, I contend that the periodical recognized Brazil’s desire for modernity, critiqued how Brazilian officials wanted the nation to be seen, and questioned how models of progress from the United States would unfold in Brazil.

Patterns of the Fair: Demorest's monthly magazine, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and analysis of fashion advertising art

Fashion magazines contain hidden delights ripe for investigating. One can explore overt content and covert messages in fashion magazine advertising art by probing the periodical and its promotional images for historical or social clues and for the advertiser's manipulative methods. Art librarians can apply and encourage the use of analytical techniques in connection with fashion advertising art from any era or region of the world. The focus here is on a single firm, the Demorest Fashion and Sewing-Machine Company, best known for its paper sewing patterns, and how in a single volume of its monthly magazine it promoted the purchase of fashion goods in connection with a world's fair: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Comparing a 19th-century fashion engraving with a related photograph; and viewing a magazine advertisement as a set of repeating patterns according to a 21st-century process, fractal-concept analysis, together yield a trove of information and prompt further ideas for alternate and peripheral lines of inquiry.

Commemorative coins issued in 2016

The Czech National Bank issued six commemorative coins in 2016. They are represented by three silver 200-crown pieces celebrating the following anniversaries: the 125th anniversary of the General Land Centennial Exhibition, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Hradec Králové and the 450th birth anniversary of Jan Jessenius. Another issue is represented by one silver 500-crown piece celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak National Council. The first two gold commemorative 5000-crown pieces from the new cycle called ‘Castles’ were produced: the ‘Kost’ Castle and the ‘Bezděz’ Castle. The Castles gold coin cycle is the fourth five-year cycle of gold coins the CNB has issued since 2001. The first, “Ten Centuries of Architecture”, comprising ten 2000-crown coins, was issued between 2001 and 2005. It was followed by the “Industrial Heritage Sites” cycle in 2006–2010 (ten 2500-crown coins). In 2011–2015 ten 5000-crown coins were issued in the Bridges cycle.