William Le Baron Jenney - Further reading

Architect and engineer, born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, USA. He founded the Chicago school of architecture, pioneering the development of steel-frame construction in prototype skyscrapers such as the Home Insurance Building (1884–5). Among his trainees were Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham.

William Le Baron Jenney (25 September 1832—14 June 1907) was an American architect and engineer who became known as the Father of the American skyscraper . His father, William Proctor Jenney (1802-1881), was the owner of a shipping company, which allowed Jenney to travel as a young man . Jenney first began his formal education at the Lawrence Scientific school at Harvard in 1853, but transferred to L'École Centrale des Artes et Manufactures in Paris to get an education in engineering and architecture . After the war, in 1867, Jenney moved to Chicago, Illinois and began his own architectural office, which specialized in commercial buildings and urban planning. In later years future leaders of the Chicago School like Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Martin Roche, performed their architectural apprenticeships on Jenney's staff.

Jenney is most known for designing the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago. The building was the first fully metal-frame skyscraper, and is considered the first American skyscraper. It was built from 1884 to 1885, enlarged in 1891, and demolished in 1931 . In his designs, he used metal columns and beams, instead of stone and brick to support the building's upper levels. The steel needed to support the Home Insurance Building weighed only one-third as much as a ten-story building made of heavy masonry . Using this method, the weight of the building was reduced, thus allowing the possibility to construct even taller structures. He displayed his system in the Second Leiter Building, also built in Chicago between the years 1889 and 1891. After Jenney's death, his ashes were scattered over his wife's grave, just south of the Eternal Silence section of Uptown's Graceland Cemetery . Bowen House, Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois built in 1868 Ludington Building, Chicago built in 1891 Manhattan Building, Chicago built in 1891 Horticultural Building, for the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago built in 1893 New York Life Insurance Building, Chicago built in 1894

Further reading

Turak, Theodore (1986).