Frank Furness (1839–1912) was one of Philadelphia’s most adventurous architects. A former Union Army captain in the Civil War, he brought a combative, vigorous sensibility to his buildings: bold massing, oversized arches, jagged silhouettes and idiosyncratic ornament. Over his career he produced roughly a thousand commissions—public buildings, banks, universities and private houses—many of which startled his contemporaries and later generations.
Furness’s work broke from the restrained, “polite” Victorian norms popular in the late nineteenth century. His facades are often asymmetrical, his arches and pediments exaggerated, and his surfaces studded with unexpected decorative motifs. Those choices made his buildings unmistakable: muscular, sometimes rough, but always expressive. The result can feel abrupt or even aggressive beside the era’s more conservative architecture, but it also gives his work an immediacy and energy that modern viewers find compelling.
After decades of relative neglect, Furness has been the subject of a steady reappraisal. Critics and historians now credit him with anticipating later movements that favored honesty of structure and expressive form. His influence shows up in later American architecture that embraces bold composition and individual expression. Conservators and city advocates have also worked to save and interpret his remaining buildings, arguing that they are central to Philadelphia’s architectural identity.
This renewed interest is the focus of a short CBS Sunday Morning tour: national correspondent Robert Costa walks Furness’s Philadelphia with Michael Lewis, the Wall Street Journal’s architecture critic. Lewis explains why Furness’s reputation is being reconsidered—how what once read as eccentricity now reads as courage and invention—and points to the places around the city where Furness’s spirit still endures.
Whether you come to his work as a historian, a preservationist, or a curious visitor, Furness rewards close looking. His buildings refuse to be merely pretty; they insist on being alive, and for many people today that quality is precisely what makes them worth remembering.