"Red Leaf" (Henszey residence, Ardmore, PA, Furness and Evans, 1881), in Wells and Hope, A Survey of Philadelphia Suburban Homes, 1889. Image courtesy the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Special Collections is hosting three new exhibitions this fall: we’ll be posting on all three of them over the next two weeks. One show, “Furness in Space,” organized by Professor Jeffrey Cohen (Growth & Structure of Cities) and his students, is being installed in Canaday Library lobby this week.

Professor Cohen, who, along with scholars, architectural historians, and preservation activists, has pushed for the documentation and preservation of endangered and little-understood suburban Furness homes, recently summarized the approach he and his students took to the exhibition, which is on view through the end of the semester:

“In his designs for houses outside the city, Frank Furness (1839-1912) found himself in a venue and moment of almost untrammeled possibilities. Old architectural formulations projecting social prominence had been cast off by a heady new generation of architects who seized center stage in the decades after the Civil War, and they set about creating new ones. They were called upon by a host of new men of substantial means, many of them successful entrepreneurs who sought to celebrate their individuality and licensed their architects to devise forms of distinction for them. Few were as well suited to such a task as Frank Furness.

“This exhibition represents the work of students in classes in the Growth & Structure of Cities Department, along with several collaborators, who explored Furness’s country and suburban houses with a special eye to new architectural imageries and to patterns of spatial disposition in such works. It also seeks to situate his designs in dialogue with those of his contemporaries, helping us reimagine the contingency of this episode of architectural ferment in the 1870s and 1880s.”

Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the late 19th-century Country House
Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, 14 October – 21 December 2012