Charles Follen McKim

Charles Follen McKim (1847 to 1909) was an American architect of the late nineteenth century and a leading exponent of Beaux-Arts architecture in the styles of the American Renaissance. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, to abolitionist parents, he attended Harvard, studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in 1870 joined the office of Henry Hobson Richardson. He then formed his own firm with William Rutherford Mead, joined in 1877 by Stanford White, which became the partnership McKim, Mead and White. After a decade known mainly for informal open-plan summer houses, the firm produced monumental work such as the Boston Public Library, the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, the University Club of New York, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the original Pennsylvania Station. With Richard Morris Hunt he helped found the American School of Architecture in Rome in 1894, later the American Academy in Rome. He became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1877 and received its Gold Medal posthumously in 1909, the year he died at St. James, New York.