William Strickland (architect)
William Strickland (born November 1788 in Navesink , New Jersey , † April 6, 1854 in Nashville , Tennessee ) was an American architect .
The carpenter's son John Strickland came to Philadelphia with his family in 1790. There he met the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe through his father in his youth , with whom he was apprenticed from 1803 to 1805. In 1807 he went to New York with his father and helped rebuild the Park Theater . The following year he returned to Philadelphia as a landscape painter. In an exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Columbia Society of Artists in 1811, he participated with a large oil painting of Christ Church in Philadelphia.
His first major contract as an architect was the construction of the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia in 1808. During the British-American War in 1812 he participated in the surveillance of the defenses of Philadelphia. In the following years he designed buildings in Philadelphia such as The Friends' Asylum for the Insane (1815–1817), the Temple of the New Jerusalem (1816), St. John's Episcopal Church (1817), the Medical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania ( 1818) and the Philadelphia Custom House (1818–1819).
In 1818 he won the competition for the construction of the Second Bank of the United States in front of his teacher Latrobe with a design based on the model of the Parthenon in Athens. From 1819 to 1824 he was also entrusted with supervising the construction of the building. In 1825 he traveled to Great Britain on behalf of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Internal Improvement to study road, rail and canal construction and coastal protection there. Until 1827 he worked as chief engineer of the Eastern Division of the Pennsylvania Mixed System of railroads and canals .
In 1826, Strickland's draft of the United States Naval Asylum was accepted, and he oversaw its construction until 1829. His next major commissions were the construction of the United States Mint (1829-1833) and the Merchants Exchange (1832-1834). After he had profited from Latrobe's departure to New York and the bankruptcy of John Haviland , competition from architects such as John Notman and his student Thomas Ustick Walter caused him increasing problems from the mid-1830s, which were exacerbated by the depression in the early 1840s.
Therefore he went to Nashville in 1845 and took over the construction of the Tennessee State Capitol there . In the eight years of his work in Tennessee, the Roman Catholic Cathedral in St. Mary's (1845–1847) and the First Presbyterian Church in Nashville (1848–1851) were also established.
Web links
- University of Pennsylvania - Penn biographies - William Strickland (1788-1854)
- Living Places - William Strickland, Architect (1788-1854)
- Philadelphia Architects an Buildings - Strickland, William (1788-1854)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Strickland, William |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 1788 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Navesink , New Jersey |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 6, 1854 |
| Place of death | Nashville , Tennessee |