Interior of Furness’s Provident Life & Trust Company Banking House, Philadelphia, PA

If ever a man was a “rogue architect,” to use the amiable phrase of H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, surely it was Frank Furness (1839–1912), who gave us some of the brawniest and most aggressive buildings of the Victorian era. The roguishness is everywhere: in the muscularity of his brooding and belligerent banks; in his strangely agitated tombs; even in objects that are normally sedate, such as fireplaces and furniture. Is anything odder than his dining room table for Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., now in the High Museum in Atlanta? Its legs are shaped like fierce storks whose beaks skewer the helpless frogs that form their bases—Darwinian humor with a streak of cruelty.

Last fall, a series of exhibitions and lectures was held across Furness’s native Philadelphia to mark the centenary of his death. It was the final step in the rehabilitation of an architect who for much of the last century was a pariah and a laughingstock. Had he not earned a footnote in history as the beloved mentor of Louis Sullivan, who is celebrated internationally as the father of both the skyscraper and the doctrine “form follows function,” Furness might have been forgotten entirely. During the nadir of his critical oblivion, which coincided with the heyday of urban renewal, most of his commercial buildings were purged from the city, and to a general sigh of relief. But enough survived to launch a Furness revival in