Francis Hatch Kimball

B. 1845 Kennebunk, Maine
D. 1919 New York

American architect, Francis Kimball served in the Civil War and then began his study in the Boston architectural studio of Louis P. Rogers. He traveled in 1875 to London to study Gothic structures, then returned to Hartford to complete work on Trinity College. In 1879 Kimball opened his own office in New York and for the next 12 years began a series of revival designs, applying various period styles to churches, clubs and theaters. His work can be seen in the Catholic Apostolic Church (1895), in Manhattan, which is in the Romanesque Revival style with a large rose window, and the Montauk Club (1891), in Brooklyn, which suggests Venetian Gothic.

 

In 1892 Kimball joined the architect George K. Thompson under the firm name of Kimball and Thompson and began designing high-rise buildings. Their development of concrete caissons as foundations for these buildings revolutionized skyscraper construction.  Kimball was a prolific architect in the early high-rise history of New York City.  He was responsible for a series of significant commercial tall buildings, from the 9-story 1889 Corbin Building, a terracotta embossed eight story Renaissance revival, and the 1894 Manhattan Life Insurance Building (once the city’s tallest), to the massive, 1908 City Investing Company (over 30 stories) and the 1914 Adams Express Company Building. He also designed a range of ornate office buildings such as 111 and 115 Broadway, and 37 Wall Street, in NYC, in which he used a combination of styles from neo-Gothic and Renaissance to Beaux Arts. Kimball helped to define a distinctive “New York School” approach at the same time that Chicago architects such as Jenney, Sullivan, Root, and Burnham established what has been called the First Chicago School of commercial architecture.

 

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