If self-conscious about his appearance, Furness sought to attract attention rather than deflect it. As soon as possible, he filled in the receding upper lip with his moustache—elaborated for a period into a flaring beard—which, even in that age of excessive facial plumage, was eye-catching. To complete the picture he typically placed the most turbulent of neckties underneath his jaw, echoing the moustache above. His dapper and flashy clothing drew notice—intentionally. Sullivan claimed 'he affected the English in fashion." Long after his death his assistants recalled that 'he always wore the loudest and biggest plaids that he could find. Even in the way he wore his hat, with a rakish tilt over the eye, he was different than the ordinary run of men." His body language was flamboyant as well. To the end, he strode through life with the crispness of a parade march and the cockiness of a man who had seen much close combat: 'To see him go down the street, with his shoulders squared, head erect, and with a free, swinging soldierly stride, and a devil-may-care attitude was to realize that 'here was a man' who neither gave nor asked for quarter.'

Furness had a curiosity about his own appearance that took the form of his endless caricatures of himself. He constantly redrew his face—striking it out along the bold lines, giving it snarls, squints, leers, and grimaces, often drawing himself in profile as if to caress the defiant jaw. He learned to look at others in the same way, finding the lines of eccentricity and exaggerating them, as all caricaturists do (Figure I-3). These facial caricatures seemed to leap into his architecture as well. At times they emerged on the page before him, peering back at him from the ornament he was drawing (Figure I-4). Even his buildings seemed to take on certain aspects of a human face, but here too it was a face in extremis, under tension. Not only are the parts themselves oversized, but they also seem violently impacted or convulsed, culminating in a bold projecting cornice—evoking a jutting jaw or brow, that shelf of bone that stabs into space and conveys character or force (Figure I-5).

Furness's physiognomic architecture is not merely the oddity of personal style, for it was in consonance with the demands of his age. He took the transactions of modern life and depicted them in epic terms of a Darwinian struggle for existence. His Provident Life and Trust Bank pushed its way into the street like a man reeling, a Gothic colossus in three shades of granite; from its brow a savage frieze flared out like a crown of thorns, as if in agony. And yet under these battlements took place the calm and orderly business of depositing checks and tallying the accounts of staid Quaker customers.

Such buildings were Gothic, at least in style. This was only his subject matter, however, and his buildings were no more Gothic than the jumbled elements of a dream are the accurate transcript of a day's happenings. Furness had no use for the fussy grammar of medieval archaeology; like Michelangelo, the first man to make architecture a vehicle of personal expression, he willfully distorted his forms to convey emotion and physical sensation, imparting to them something of the physical awareness of his own body—or so it can seem. Furness's friends had a simpler explanation: his buildings were 'merely the rebellion of a freedom-loving soul that refused to be bound by rules.'

This is the biography of that 'freedom-loving soul.' It seeks to recover Furness from historical neglect that began in his own lifetime. In the Edwardian world of taste and elegance in which he lived his final years, his works were denigrated as grotesque and vulgar. And indeed they were. For their blunt truthfulness, they were despised; for telling an impolite truth in a prim age, and for calling attention to some aspects of modern life that might be better off ignored.

Furness was a man of his age, immersed in its most powerful currents and forces. He drew spiritual force from the movements of abolition and transcendentalism, just as he drew physical force from Victorian industry, railroads, and capitalism. He took the intellectual energy of the first half of the century and married it with the physical energy of the second half. Out of these elements he created the most vital depiction of American life in terms of architecture. His achievement constitutes the architectural counterpart to Mark Twain's literature, Thomas Nast's caricature, and Thomas Eakins's paintings.

It remains a paradox that the most conservative of America's older cities, Philadelphia, should have produced its most eccentric architect. But the staid Quaker city seems to have acted as a kind of pressure cooker, in which Furness's creative forces built up until they exploded. The effects of that explosion, transmitted through his students—above all, Louis Sullivan and George Howe (and their students, in turn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn, respectively)—and passed on to American architecture in the twentieth century, form the subject of this book.