The Architect
The house was built in 1894 by Robert Sheppard, treasurer and business manager of Northwestern University, and designed by Henry Edwards Ficken (1844–1929) of New York.
Ficken was born in London and educated in Europe. He came to the United States in 1869 and began his career as an architectural renderer, and was the partner of Boston architect Charles G. Gambrill at the time of the latter's suicide in September 1880. Gambrill had been a partner of Henry Hobson Richardson from 1867-1878.
Ficken's career included several distinguished commissions, including ones for the New York Athletic Club and Yale University and, for the last thirteen years of his life he was the supervising architect and engineer for Woodlawn Cemetery on Long Island. Ficken is perhaps best known, however, as the architect for Pepperidge Hall (1896), a 120 room house built for Christopher Roberts II on 1,000 acres (400 ha) of property that was adjacent to Idle Hour, the 60 room Tudor mansion of William K. Vanderbilt that was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and located on 862 acres (349 ha) in Oakdale, New York.
Read more about this topic: Charles G. Dawes House
Famous quotes containing the word architect:
“It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I don’t know who could have lived with me. As an architect you’re absolutely devoured. A woman’s cast in a lot of roles and a man isn’t. I couldn’t be an architect and be a wife and mother.”
—Eleanore Kendall Pettersen (b. 1916)
“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)