William Le Baron Jenney
William Le Baron Jenney ( born September 25, 1832 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, † June 14, 1907 in Los Angeles, California ) is an American architect and engineer, who is also regarded as the "father of the skyscraper ".
Life & Work
Jenney gained his education at Phillips Academy, after which he attended the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, to be trained as an engineer. Unsatisfied by the local Ausbildzungsstandards, he made his way to Europe, where he suspected the better schools, and received his degree in 1856 at the École Centrale Paris. After graduating, he took a job as an engineer at a Mexican Railway Company. In 1861 he returned to the United States to serve in the Civil War on the Union side as a military engineer. After the war, in 1867, Jenney moved to Chicago and opened his own office there. His first commissions included a number of designs of parks and boulevards in Chicago. 1878 Jenney designed the First Leiter Building. The building was an important milestone in the history of architecture. It was the first building, which combined all four elements of a modern skyscraper: a very large for that time amounting to seven storeys, a supporting steel skeleton, fire protection measures for the entire supporting structure by means of terracotta moldings and a powerful vertical transport infrastructure by the 1853 invented the elevator. Two years later, Jenney designed the 10-story Home Insurance Building, which was based on the same elements as the First Leiter Building and is now widely regarded as the first skyscraper. These and other similar buildings which he was to build in his further career yet brought Jenney 's reputation of being the " father of the skyscraper ".
In the late 1870s he taught architecture at the University of Michigan and trained numerous apprentices in his office. Among his pupils should be the largest of the emerging Chicago School include: William Holabird, Martin Roche, Daniel Burnham, John W. Root and last but not least the most famous of which Louis Sullivan.