William Le Baron Jenney

person · earth · Chicago, Illinois

American architect and engineer, trained partly in France at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, who served as a Union engineer in the American Civil War and afterwards practised in Chicago. His engineering training is the relevant biographical fact: the metal skeleton frame of the Home Insurance Building (1885) is an engineer's solution to a load problem rather than a stylistic move, and its consequences for architectural form were worked out afterwards by others. His office was a training ground for the architects usually grouped as the Chicago School - Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird and Martin Roche all passed through it - so his influence runs through people as much as through buildings. Whether he built the first true skyscraper is argued; that he made the frame a repeatable commercial proposition is not.