The architecture of Henry Hornbostel: Progressive and traditional design in the American Beaux-Arts movement

Brooklyn-born Henry Hornbostel studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1893 to 1897 and practiced in the United States between 1897 and 1939. He achieved his greatest professional successes in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when study at the Ecole Beaux-Arts in Paris (or at American schools that emulated its methods) was at peak popularity among American architects and when the Paris school seemed most to influence American architecture. The period is often known as the Beaux Arts era for buildings such as those in the Court of Honor at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893. These were monumental, authoritative structures unified by composed axial grouping, a common cornice line height and canonically neoclassical architectural styles.;Hornbostel, in comparison, saw Beaux Arts training not as a narrow set of historical forms to be applied to all building, but as a set of principles to be reworked to suit contemporary materials, conditions and building functions. He embraced bridges and skyscrapers---new, technological construction types that his more conservative colleagues sometimes refused even to acknowledge as architecture. His permutation of the Beaux Arts was formally progressive rather than anachronistic.;Some of the most influential architectural writers of later eras have predicated their histories on assertions that the central Chicago Exposition characterized the movement as a whole and that Beaux Arts architecture was intrinsically backward looking. In fact, the movement was characterized by a division between those who continued to look to historical models for inspiration and those who also emphasized the innovations of contemporary practice. Hornbostel, through a career that included many victories in design competitions, epitomized the latter group of Beaux Arts architects, but he defies the generalizations by which the movement was often later known.